Gallery YOUR PHOTOS ON YOUR WEBSITE Sourceforge Advisory

Gallery YOUR PHOTOS ON YOUR WEBSITE Sourceforge Advisory Council Bharat Mediratta March 9 th, 2006

About Gallery • • • Web based photo sharing product Written in PHP Installed on 300, 000+ websites Joined Source. Forge. net in June 2000 In the top 30 most active projects ~30 member team

What’s great about Source. Forge? • Most central place to find Open Source – If we rank highly here, we get found • Content distribution network! – Without this, we cannot afford to release code • Instant Feature Set – Small projects get everything they need to get off the ground (bug tracker, cvs, mailing lists, etc) • High availability -- SF’s uptime is excellent

What else is great? • Rapid technical support (for most things) • Distributed project administration • Pretty good site documentation • Easily supports high volume, archived mailing lists. • Compile farm can be very handy

What’s not so great? • SF. net is very tech centric. – Eg, FRS confuses the heck out of newbies: From: -----@aol. com Subject: Help! I hve been trying to download Gallery and am frustrated because I keep getting sent in circles. When I click "download now" I get information on updates or an add to buy a T-shirt. How do I download the program? HELP!

What’s bad? • Feature set is years out of date – Forums aren’t in the same ballpark as best of breed products – Project search is underpowered – Trackers aren’t very customizable. We resort to putting special keywords like [G 2] in the subject – Mailman is way out of date. Spam overruns us.

What’s bad (cont’d) • User Interface is woeful at times – Why is the “submit news” box 55 x 6? You can’t write anything reasonable in that. – Admin navigation makes no sense at times. Eg, you click News -> Admin, instead of the other way around. – Why can’t I update info about more than one file at once in FRS? – How many bugs do I have in the G 2 category? • Forums are completely worthless. – Not enough admin tools to keep them in check

Ow, Source. Forge hurts me! • CVS is so s-l-o-w! – Development stops! – This has gotten better (thanks, guys!), and SVN holds promise – Developer vs. Anonymous slows down our iterations. • Users can’t easily find existing bugs – …so they file duplicates!

Make the pain stop! • Tasks system is very weak – Who is the task assigned to? – Why didn’t I get notified? – Who submitted this task? • File releases are so painful. – Entire projects (like Release. Forge) have formed to improve this one problem! – Gallery has released 1300+ files and counting. Last night’s release of 134 files took me 4 hours, largely because of FRS.

What’s missing? • SF apps cannot compete with best of breed products (eg: php. BB forums) • SF embedded apps are not up to date with the latest code (eg: mailman is way, way behind) • SF does not provide easy access to the data. – You can download the entire CVS repository, or up to 32 MB of your tracker data in XML – We have written apps to scrape the HTML pages (!) to get tracker data (so that we can do things like feature voting)

So what does all this mean? • SF’s “instant feature set” makes sense for new projects • As projects grow, they are unable to fit their needs into what SF offers • SF needs to decide whether they care about keeping larger projects

What can Source. Forge do? • Provide APIs to get to the data – Then admins can automate posting news stories, file releases, administering the tracker – Letting projects interoperate with SF. net data so they can hook into the SF backbone. • Focus on usability! – – Newbies need to be able to download the app! We want newbies to be able to file bugs easily Keep tools like mailman current! Add greater flexibility to tracker/tasks tools to help projects manage themselves.

Pie-in-the-Sky things to try • Switch to using best-of-breed applications like php. BB forums. • Let projects pay for a higher level of support (not just users) – Super fast CVS is worth $$$ to us • Open source it again! – We’re PHP devs – we would submit patches.

Conclusion • SF is a huge enabler in the Open Source arena – it gets new projects off the ground • As projects grow, SF becomes less and less useful as the project outgrows what SF offers • With a focus on usability and data interchange, SF could provide the backbone for larger projects and keep them as customers.