Updates from January, 2016 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts

  • Roberto Galoppini 8:36 pm on January 20, 2016 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Source Never Dies 

    6360570507_8242f1eb25_mRecently a number of people from open source communities I work with or that I’m just aware of, happened to die. I’m thinking of Ian Lynch, of the Ingot fame, Ian Murdock Debian founder and John McCreesh, OpenOffice.org Marketing Project Lead.

    It has been sudden and sad, and my thoughts go to their families out there.

     

    Whatever they have been doing – either if it was an assessment model, a Linux distro entirely composed of free software or marketing the first and most used open source office suite – the results of what they did are here to stay.

    Thank you guys for all you have done, it will never die.

     
  • Roberto Galoppini 1:19 pm on April 1, 2014 Permalink | Reply  

    SourceForge’s Platform Becomes Apache Alluraâ„¢! 

    feather-small

    I am excited to share the news, Apache Allura just became an Apache Top-Level project! It has been both an honor and pleasure to work with the Apache community and a personal thrill to see my dream finally turning into reality.

    I still remember our first internal discussions about submitting Allura to the Apache Incubator, over two years ago. The great work we did to draft our proposal – thanks Rich Bowen – and the exceptional level of support from our former CEO, Jeff Drobick.

    I wish to thank again the whole SourceForge engineering team, without them it wouldn’t have been possible to graduate. I wish also to say thank to our General Manager Gaurav Kuchhal that made the graduation a goal for all of us, and last but not least all our great mentors, and among them in a special way Jim Jagielski and Rich Bowen.

    Read more at SourceForge and Apache blog.

     
    • Jeff Drobick 4:56 am on April 2, 2014 Permalink

      Roberto, big congratulations to you and the rest of the Apache Allura contributor team! I hope you all are well 😉 – Jeff

  • Roberto Galoppini 4:49 pm on November 20, 2012 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Forges Summit 2012: Presentations and Take-aways 

    OWFThe Open World Forum is the best place to meet and talk about the present and the future of open source forges, as seen back in 2010 at the first Open Forges Summit, and again in 2011 to talk about interoperability among forges.

    As Track Chair of the Open Forges Summit 2012 I’ve been in the position to invite few international speakers to bring their opinions and views, and we actually put together an amazing gathering of people sharing the same passion, read below to know more about it.

    (More …)

     
  • Roberto Galoppini 6:15 pm on November 2, 2011 Permalink | Reply  

    Improving your Project’s Visibility at SourceForge 

    Over the last months we’ve been analyzing SourceForge historical data, looking for trends and correlations. We’ve found factors that can help project administrators to get both more downloads and more visibility.

    1. Project Icons
    2. Screenshots
    3. Project Title, blurb, and full description fields
    4. Feature bullets
    5. Accurate project categorization
    6. More frequent releases, and flag latest release
    7. Rapid turnaround on tickets

    All things being equal, projects with these elements are more prone to capture people’s interest than projects without them.

    A user visits a Project Summary Page either because they know exactly what they are looking for – in which case you don’t need to provide them with nuts and bolts – or because they are looking for something, and they don’t know if your project solves their problems. In this latter case, you have just a few moments to make a good first impression. Here’s a few tips to help you do just that.

    1. “Put an alligator over the pocket” (W. Allen, With our Feathers – “The Scrolls” – 1975).When you put a logo on your project, people associate it with certain core values like trust, quality, reliability, experience, etc. If you don’t believe it, read Woody Allen’s “put an alligator” and learn how Lacoste eventually became famous!

    Read the full article at SourceForge blog.

     
  • Roberto Galoppini 2:59 pm on April 19, 2011 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , Tungsten Replicator   

    Open Source Community Awards, A Personal Perspective 

    I asked Giuseppe Maxia, formerly MySQL Community Team Lead and now Director of QA at Tungsten, to tell us more about his personal experience with community awards.

    Giuseppe, you have been awarded twice as community contributor, in 2006 and in 2011. What’s the difference and what did you learn from 2006? (More …)

     
  • Roberto Galoppini 8:29 pm on February 2, 2011 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Source Foundations: OuterCurve’s Model 

    Outercurve – the open source foundation previously known as CodePlex foundation (coverage) – just announced that the new project  Chemistry Add-In for Word has been added to Foundation’s Research Accelerators Gallery.

    Paula Hunter, Executive Director at the Outercurve Foundation, told me more about galleries and to who are they aimed.
    (More …)

     
  • Roberto Galoppini 6:16 pm on December 2, 2010 Permalink | Reply  

    Who Backs Linux, Some Numbers in Perspective 

    the Linux Foundation logo The Linux Foundation report about who writes Linux is always a worth reading, especially if you take a moment to look back at 2009 report and see how things are changed.

    It is interesting to compare relative increments to learn more about how changed the attitude of the usual suspects to Linux  and how newcomers are doing. (More …)

     
  • Roberto Galoppini 4:41 pm on November 19, 2010 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Source Communities: Control & Community Report (The 451 Group) 

    The 451 Group kindly provided me with a copy of their latest report “Control & Community“, enlisting facts, figures and findings around open source communities and how to interact with them.

    (More …)

     
  • Roberto Galoppini 9:05 pm on November 4, 2010 Permalink | Reply  

    The Unsaid Document Foundation (talkbacks) 

    Michael Meeks, famous hacker and LibreOffice advocate, replied to my earlier post giving his perspectives on many different subjects related to LibreOffice development.

    Having read his views with great attention – and keeping in mind his long coding experience with OpenOffice.org, as well as his ability to dig deep into complex subjects like copyright assignment – I want to take a chance to go deeper into some points.

    (More …)

     
    • A. Rebentisch 8:35 pm on November 5, 2010 Permalink

      Upstream compatibility is no issue when you are the font.

    • Roberto Galoppini 8:54 am on November 6, 2010 Permalink

      Only if this is the case, from now on.

  • Roberto Galoppini 12:20 pm on November 2, 2010 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: LibreOffice, , , , The Document Foundation   

    The Unsaid Document Foundation 

    The Document FoundationThe will be Document Foundation is out from a month, and it is now time to share some thoughts about past, present and future actions taken around subjects like copyright, the legal and governance structure and the code development process.

    (More …)

     
    • Simo 4:35 pm on November 6, 2010 Permalink

      Mettila così: openoffice non stava andando da nessuna parte, da qualche anno a questa parte il tasso di innovazione, che in un software opensource dovrebbe doppiare il corrispondente commerciale, era pari a zero. In più Oracle sembra tutto tranne che os friendly.
      Un cambiamento era necessario. Quelli di DF saranno anche dei casinisti ma almeno sono volenterosi.

    • Norbert 6:13 am on November 8, 2010 Permalink

      Roberto said:
      “How to contribute is well explained, but unfortunately some not-so-innocent requests for contributions are not without risks.”

      No change is without risk. That been said, a clean code reduce the risk of changes. So these ‘cosmetic’ changes are in fine lowering the overall risk by removing unnecessary complexity, inconsistencies, that accumulated over time.
      If you want an illustration of that phenomena, I invite you to browse some source files in the binfilter module. That illustrate how unloved decade-old code end-up looking like. and a lot of it is indeed cosmetic, but cosmetic matter when one try to parse a multi-millions-line code-base to figure out how to fix a multi-year old bug…

      Roberto said:
      “Discussing and elaborating development guidelines should be a priority, probably more important than enabling people to make cosmetic changes.”
      One doesn’t preclude the other.
      And bear in mind that these ‘cosmetics’ change:
      1/ Are low-risk and accessible way for new people to get used to the process
      2/ Are an excellent way to gain some familiarity with the code, it’s structure, it’s quirks
      3/ Allow the more senior developer to benefit from the clean-up without having to spend the significant amount of man-power that some of these clean-up require (that is why most of these haven’t been done. not because they are not important, but because the cost/benefit ratio was not perceived to be high enough to percolate on the top of the priority list, and because quite a few of these changes are dull hard work that more senior dev can escape by finding more technically challenging things to do)
      4/ Allow the project to detect and groom new contributors…

      Roberto said:
      “While individuals may prefer to avoid the burden of copyright agreements, corporations and companies tend to like them more.”

      Of course they do. Copyright assignment is a way for corporation to turn ‘volunteers’ work’ into ‘developers’ work for free’. In other words converting ‘free as in freedom’ into ‘free as in beer’.
      And – as far as I am concerned – it is not a problem of ‘burden of assignment’, it is a matter of principle: I will share my work, but if you want to own it, you need to pay for it.

      And finally an editorial detail:
      Roberto said:
      “Other decisions are considered even riskier by expert developers,”
      Blind quotes are not very productive. Unnamed experts referencing unspecified risks is indeed very hard to address or refute.

    • Roberto Galoppini 1:49 pm on November 8, 2010 Permalink

      Hi Norbert,

      thank you to join the conversation. As I clarified later cutting bridges with the upstream project is a very sensitive decisions, something in my opinion should be discussed and agreed by stakeholders before it is implemented. That’s why I called it a priority.

      In fact these non functional changes are not a way to get people acquainted with the code – that is something that require time and dedication – but maybe a way to make more complex integrating upstream contributions.

      About copyright there are many different opinions among LibreOffice developers, and I firmly believe that potential corporate sponsors may have an opinion on this. Taking similar decision without a public and transparent process (à la GPLv3) is a choice, only time will tell if it was the right one, though.

      About your editorial notes, if you followed all the links you know I have been pointing to few existing public sources, everytime it was appliable. As soon as I’ll get a public reference for that I’ll be happy to share it.

    • Giuseppe 10:09 am on November 12, 2010 Permalink

      Hi Norbert,

      a very short comment:

      Norbert said:


      And finally an editorial detail:
      Roberto said:
      ‘Other decisions are considered even riskier by expert developers,’
      Blind quotes are not very productive. Unnamed experts referencing unspecified risks is indeed very hard to address or refute.

      It was me that around the middle of October, in a private mail, exchanged some thoughts with Roberto on the matter.
      At that time I noted that changing the code will end in some difficulty in keeping it in sync with OOo that at the
      time I thought of as a sort of “upstream”.
      That was the ‘risk’ I thought about.
      Then I was referring to this change as an example:

      http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Development/Easy_Hacks#Removal.2FReplacement_of_the_String.2FUniString.2FByteString_with_OUString.2FOString_once_and_for_all

      But now, after three weeks, I believe OOo will be no longer the “upstream” version of LibO, it’s just a starting point.
      So, in the future, merging OOo code into LibO will matter less, being LibO something different.

    • Roberto Galoppini 2:34 pm on November 12, 2010 Permalink

      Thank you Giuseppe for having joined this conversation. You are the second person here talking about LibO as something different, wondering if it is sustainable to consider merging OOo code into LibO a minor issue, though. Apparently 90 code hackers already joined Libo, let’s see in six months from now what this would mean to end users.

c
Compose new post
j
Next post/Next comment
k
Previous post/Previous comment
r
Reply
e
Edit
o
Show/Hide comments
t
Go to top
l
Go to login
h
Show/Hide help
shift + esc
Cancel