I think of this quote often while trying to wrangle project descriptions into the miserly 140 characters that Twitter allows me. I want to tell each of you to rewrite your project summary, and this time make it half as long.

Here’s a few tips in shortening your project summary. (These are not absolute rules, of course – just suggestions you might consider in updating your project summary.) I’ve discussed this before, but I think it’s important enough to talk about again.

* Skip the “this project is an attempt to write software designed to …” bit. These are just extra words, and don’t convey anything about your software. Rather than saying that it’s designed to, or hopes to, or might some day, give me action words.

Before: “This project proposes to write software designed to edit audio recordings.”

After: “Edit audio recordings!”

Same meaning, but without the padding.

* Don’t tell me that it’s free and Open Source. This is SourceForge. Everything here is free, Open Source. It’s assumed. I always edit this part out when posting tweets.

Before: “This software is a free, Open Source podcast catcher.”

After: “Catch podcasts!”

Same meaning, but gets right to the point and doesn’t tell me something I already know.

* Skip words and phrases like “fast”, “easy to use”, “user-friendly”, “feature-rich”, and so on. You don’t have to tell me that your software is good. You have to tell me what it does, and then I can make that judgement on my own. Fast compared to what? Feature-rich? What features? Robust? As measured how? These things don’t add to my understanding of what your project does, and so just get in the way.

Before: This is a fast, robust, full-featured, user friendly birdsong identifier with a lovely blue user interface.

After: Identify birds by their songs!

Takes less time to get to the actual message, and tells me what I can do with it, rather than how happy I’ll be while doing it.

* I probably don’t care what language it’s written in. The “written in Java”, “written in PHP”, “written in objective C++” belongs in the detailed project description, not in the summary statement. I realize that this is a major selling point for some people, but it’s really not what your product *is*. I don’t care that my table was made with a Craftsman reciprocating saw, I care that it doesn’t collapse.

Before: Fast, robust full-featured wine database software, written in php with a mysql back-end.

After: Track your wine cellar on your website!

Tells me what it actually does. You can list your install requirements later.

As always, I’d be happy to advise you personally on how I would rewrite your project summary statement, if it were my project. Not that my answer is always the right one, but having read hundreds of project summaries, I know what catches my attention, and what makes me move on to the next project.

Rich: What does QSMM do? What are “non-deterministic intelligent state models”?

Oleg: QSMM is a framework for development of intelligent systems. Yes, that sounds somewhat pretentiously, but I really consider the framework will help people, who are interested in the area of artificial intelligence, to solve tasks for which they did not have an instrument before.

One can hardly predict how the field of information technology will be developing during next decades. An accepted viewpoint is that cloud and parallel computations will play more and more important parts in the field. I have a suggestion that a new kind of computer programs will also be developing: programs that could adapt their own behavior to solve raised problems more efficiently. That is, after a time, there will come an era of non-deterministic intelligent computer programs, which behavior was only partially specified by a developer.

I think of computer programs, as they are means to put part of one’s soul into an inanimate object–the computer. That process can be understood as transferring a state model from human mind to the computer (and it is applicable not only to a computer program, but to any creative work). At present, computers are typically performing operations in a deterministic way–exactly as a developer programmed them. QSMM is an aid to put a state model into the computer in such a way that the state model will behave non-deterministically and intelligently.

Rich: How did you become interested in this field? What problem were you trying to solve with this software?

Oleg: When I was younger, there became popular the concept of artificial neural nets. That concept was interesting for me as well as for many other people. Soon I made a conclusion for myself that proposed methods of building the nets, training them, and obtaining results of their operation often require considerable amount of computations, somehow resemble numerical alchemy and attempts to do magic using computers.

I wondered if there could be algorithms for training and using neural nets, which efficiently perform on a single-core low speed CPU, and which give results that can be easily interpreted. After several years of thinking and experimenting, I have developed such an algorithm, which provides moderate efficiency of solving certain sort of tasks, and published it as QSMM project.

In contrast to many existing types of artificial neural nets, a kind of neural net used in QSMM produces discrete, not analog output. This makes possible to associate blocks of code, which perform application-specific actions, with every distinct output signal of the net. The process of choosing output signals by the net is controlled by changing numeric quantity called spur or incentive. That is, the net operates as an optimization engine that produces a discrete output based on the discrete input and current value of spur the engine is normally trying to maximize.

Rich: What is the audience for this software? That is, who would use software like this?

Oleg: Primary audience for QSMM are scientists, who work in the field of artificial intelligence, and non-scientists, who are interested in that field and wishing to create something intelligent, but do not know what to start with. I believe that acquaintance with QSMM of the latter group of people will give them an incentive in the right direction.

Rich: What do you have planned for the next version of this software?

Oleg: The next version of QSMM will probably be a bug fix release. Future versions will be based on feedback I will receive from package users. At present, I have no specific plans what to include in future versions of the package. There are several possible directions of improving the package, and I am going to understand from the feedback whether those improvements are worth of implementing.

Rich: How can I (or anyone) get involved in your project?

Oleg: Improving QSMM is not a routine task, and it requires understanding of how QSMM operates. People who came to that understanding would possibly make substantial improvements to algorithms used in the framework. Developing the package alone for several years has a reverse side that sometimes I cannot see obvious things that might be done to improve it.

I will be very glad to receive feedback on the project. At first, I expect to obtain a lot of bug reports and complaints that something does not work as expected. The feedback generally should be posted to a mailing list for QSMM users. Information on the real examples of using the framework is especially important for me. If you permit that, then good examples of using the framework could be included in its future distributions.

The general rule for QSMM: if you have ideas how to improve the package, then write that to the mailing list, and it will be seen what to do next.

If the embedded audio player below doesn’t work for you, you can download the audio in mp3 and ogg formats.

You can subscribe to this, and future podcasts, in iTunes or elsewhere, at http://feeds.feedburner.com/sourceforge/podcasts, and it’s also listed in the iTunes store.

Ross: Hi, Rich, good to speak to you.

Rich: The last time that we spoke was at ApacheCon, and things were at a much earlier stage then. Tell me what’s happened since then with the community so far as getting them on board with the Apache Way.

Ross: Probably the biggest change since then – which would be back in November – I think the biggest change since then would be that the community has accepted the fact that there isn’t an owning influence who is just going to make things happen for them. So, in the early days, it was, well, who’s going to do our marketing for us, who’s going to do our conferences for us, who’s going to do this, who’s going to do that. And the Apache Software Foundation isn’t set up to do that kind of thing. It doesn’t do that kind of thing. The individual projects have to do it. So I think that’s probably the biggest thing. The project community has recognized that if we want something doing, we’ve got to find a way of doing it ourselves. Once they figured that out, well, they started moving pretty quick. And of course we culminated last week in the release.

Rich: So, when a project enters the Apache Software Foundation, “them” sort of becomes “us”, in a sense?

Ross: Yeah, very much so. The Foundation only exists to provide a legal entity in which the project can exist. It doesn’t exist to control the project, or babysit the project, or make sure the project succeeds. That’s entirely up to the community. So the community does have to become part of the Apache Software Foundation in order to get the most from it.

Rich: What’s the next step? Now that there’s a release out there, and the release is fully under the Apache software license, what’s the next step to getting out of the Incubator?

Ross: Probably each of the mentors has a different opinion on that, so I’ll give you my opinion. I think that there are still some IP issues that needs to be addressed with code that isn’t in the release. The release is IP-clean, and is under an Apache license. But there are still some questions over some of the items that are in the repository as to whether or not they can remain in the repository as it becomes a top-level project. But they’re quite minor, compared to what the team have been working on in order to get the release out there. There is no real issue in terms of diversity. Certainly there is no question about the fact that there is one specific employer who is providing a great deal of input to it. But there are a significant number of people who are independent, and working for other organizations, that are active and showing leadership within the project. So I don’t have any concerns about diversity. So that one’s pretty sorted. And that’s about it, really. It’s just the final cleanup of the items that are used in building the OpenOffice code base, which should take really a matter of weeks, and as far as I’m concerned, I’d be happy to talk about graduation at that point.

Rich: What’s the relationship between the Apache OpenOffice community and the Templates and Extensions communities? Is there a lot of overlap there, or are they just kind of far flung?

Ross: There is some overlap. The Extensions and Templates communities are able to release their software and their plugins and so on, under whatever license they want. And what that means is that they can’t be hosted – or some of them, at least, can’t be hosted within the Apache Software Foundation’s infrastructure, because we only release code under the Apache software license. In those cases, it’s difficult to say that they’re part of the same community. They obviously would be part of the testing community, making sure that their extensions work within OpenOffice. But they maintain their own software, their own extensions, and so on, externally. We’ve had SourceForge step forward to help resolve that problem of, where do these people host stuff. Previously that was owned and hosted by Sun/Oracle. As I said, we can’t host non-Apache licenses, and the project team felt it wasn’t appropriate to demand that all of the extensions became Apache licensed. So SourceForge stepped in. SourceForge are now providing the hosting site for all of those. I’m sure SourceForge would be quite happy to provide development tools for those extensions, since that’s what SourceForge do. And of course the OpenOffice community is welcoming to anybody who wants to come in and help us improve the extension mechanisms within OpenOffice. So there’s overlap, but there’s certainly no requirement for extensions developers to become part of the Apache community.

Rich: Jürgen told me a little bit about where he expects the project to go in the future. As a mentor of an incubating project, what’s your thing going forward? Do you remain part of the project once it graduates, or is that the end of the road for your involvement?

Ross: As a mentor, that’s the end of the road for my involvement. Once the project graduates, they’ve shown that they understand the Apache Way and that they’re operating according to the way that we expect projects to operate. I would step down as a mentor. I may or may not choose to remain a member of the community. I’m not an OpenOffice developer. I’ve never been an OpenOffice developer. And I don’t expect to become one. So it’s not likely that I myself would remain a committer. But I think some of the other mentors will stay around, will go with the project. They would then become just normal members of the Project Management Committee with equal rights to everybody else in the community. If I wanted to regain those rights, as it were, after stepping down, then I would have to start from scratch, just like anybody else who would be joining the project fresh.

Rich: So, to be a mentor of an incubating project, you don’t actually have to be a developer on that project, or even familiar with the code base?

Ross: Absolutely not. No, our job is not a technical one at all. We have no opinion … as mentors, we have no opinion on where the project should be going technically. We’re only there to help the project community find their way in the Apache Software Foundation, understand how to get things done on our infrastructure, understand the processes behind our I.P. due diligence, release, etc., understand where to ask questions when they don’t know how to do something, all that kind of thing. We give them a leg up, if you like, into doing things the Apache Way. But we absolutely don’t need to be part of the technical team. And in many ways, it’s best if we’re not part of the technical team, because it’s good for the project to feel … good for the project community to feel that they are in control of the technical aspects of their project. They don’t come to Apache in order to get technical guidance, so it’s a good idea, as far as I’m concerned, if the mentors are not technically engaged with the project.

Rich: How has it been working with the OpenOffice community?

Ross: Something needs to be said about the strength of the community around Apache Open Office. It’s come here in a very difficult situation. There are certain tensions within the community – the original OpenOffice.org community, that have absolutely nothing to do with the current community members within the Apache OpenOffice project. And whilst it’s been a rocky road along the way sometimes, there’s been some rather messy things said in public, I think we’re beginning to see real collaboration between the other ODF projects in the community and the environment, and the OpenOffice community. We’ve seen it in a number of security issues that have come up during incubation. We’ve seen it in some of the code enhancements that are going on in there. We’ve seen it in some of the documentation work that’s happening. And I think now with the release of the Apache OpenOffice project, that can only increase. So, anybody who’s been sitting on the fence, waiting to see what happens with respect to these communities, please come along. Don’t sit on the fence. Do participate. We do want to build a stronger Open Documentation Format Foundation. And we want to be able to collaborate where appropriate on the code that works with those documents. So, having people like SourceForge step up, IBM, SugarCRM, and the hundreds of independents who are out there who are getting involved in various ways – we need to see more of that happening. We need to see more and more people come in and working under the Apache OpenOffice banner, and contributing back to the ecosystem as a whole, as a result.

Rich: Thanks a lot for taking the time to speak with me.

Ross: No problem. It’s always a pleasure, Rich.

As always, we’re very proud of our SourceForge projects. Thanks for being part of our community.

• Kiwix

  Offline reader for Wikipedia and other Web sites.

• Fink

  Fink is an attempt to bring the full world of Unix Open Source software to Darwin and Mac OS X. Packages are downloaded and built automatically and installed into a tree managed by dpkg, all with full dependency tracking.

• Arch Bang

  ArchBang is a simple GNU/Linux distribution which provides you with a lightweight Arch Linux system combined with the OpenBox window manager.
  Suitable for both desktop and portable systems – It is fast, stable, and always up to date.

• Album Art Downloader

  The Album Art Downloader is a program designed to make life easier for anyone who wishes to find and update their album art for their music collection. The sources for the pictures can be defined by creating plugin scripts.

• Tiggit Indie Game Installer

  Tiggit is a game distribution system modeled after Steam, Desura and the likes.

  It is currenly experimental, very minimalistic and only features freeware & OSS games, but has an ambitious goals list for the future.

• LinCity-NG

  LinCity-NG is a city simulation game. In the game, you are required to build and maintain a city. You can win the game either by building a sustainable economy or by evacuating all citizens with spaceships.

• SamsChannelEditor

  SamsChannelEditor is a desktop application for editing a channel list from your Samsung TV. Now sorting channels should be much easier.

• DVDx

  DVDx 4.0 is a very easy to use audio/video encoder and a powerful DVD copier. Read DVDs and audio/video files, encode to popular video formats: (S)VCD/CVD/DVD, Xvid/Divx, MPEG-4, H.264/AVC, QuickTime, Flash Video, Ogg, WebM, AC.3, MP3, MP4/AAC etc.

• KeePass Password Safe

  KeePass is a free, open source, light-weight and easy-to-use password manager for Windows, Linux, Mac OS X and mobile devices. You can store your passwords in a highly-encrypted database, which is locked with one master password or key file.

Thanks for being part of the SourceForge community!

April Project Of The Month – Luminance HDR

This month’s Project Of The Month is Luminance HDR. Luminance HDR is a complete software solution for HDR photography. HDR – High Dynamic Range Imaging – is a means of processing photographs to bring out the full range of colors and lighting available in a scene. Luminance HDR is the only Open Source tool that provides this functionality.

Please remember to cast your vote for the June POTM. You can read more about the projects on the ballot at https://sourceforge.net/blog/vote-potm-201206/

The vote will run until May 21st, giving us enough time to interview the winner. Follow us on Twitter (@sourceforge) to find out the winner before everyone else.

Apache OpenOffice 3.4

No doubt you’ve heard a lot about Apache OpenOffice 3.4 in the last few weeks. It’s the first release of OpenOffice under the Apache name, and SourceForge is very proud to have had a small part in this release. We’re supplying some of the download bandwidth for the 3.4 release and other Apache OpenOffice downloads. We’re also hosting the OpenOffice Templates site and the OpenOffice Extensions site.

We had several blog posts about this over the last few weeks. First, we posted an article about how, and why, SourceForge is partnering with OpenOffice on downloads. We had a short video showcasing some of the new features in OpenOffice 3.4. And we had an interview with Jüergen Schmidt about his role in getting the release out.

Can you tell we’re excited to be a small part of this?

Share your opinions with Geeknet

We’d like to invite you to join the Geeknet Panel.  As a Geeknet Panel member, you will be invited to participate in various usability studies, web surveys and focus groups to sound off about the state of the IT industry today, and which direction you think technology should move in the future. Your opinions can influence how product development teams and thought leaders across the industry view technology.

Join Now.  It only takes few minutes!

Fastest Growing Projects

Each month I get a report of the fastest growing projects for the month. Often, they contain an equal mix of familiar and new. This usually means that the familiar projects have pushed out a new release, and that the new projects have been discovered by a new audience.

This month, these are the top ten growth projects:

OpenOffice.org: A wonderful multiplatform and multilingual office suite.

KeePass Password Safe: KeePass – A free open source password manager.

Burn: Create data discs with advanced data settings. Create video and audio discs, Burn will convert if needed. Create DVD-Video discs. Recreate discs. Burn doesn’t reinvent the wheel, it uses many powerful open source Unix utilities and is also open source.

qBittorrent: An advanced and multi-platform BitTorrent client with a nice Qt4 user interface as well as a Web UI for remote control and an integrated search engine. qBittorrent aims to meet the needs of most users while using as little CPU and memory as possible.

MediaPortal: Turn your PC into a very advanced MediaCenter/HTPC

GNU Octave Repository: Central storage place for script and function files used with GNU Octave.

ICS Rom VK :  Android ROMs

SamyGO: Samsung TV Firmware Hacking

Liferay Portal: The world’s leading enterprise open source portal framework

SugarCRM – commercial open source CRM: A complete CRM system for businesses of all sizes. Core CRM functionality includes sales automation, marketing campaigns, support cases, project mgmt, calendaring and more. Built in PHP, supports MySQL and SQL Server.

Podcasts and blog posts

We’ve had yet another month of great project podcasts, and I’d like to mention some of them. If you’d like to have me interview you about your SourceForge project, or some other topic you feel would be of interest to the SourceForge audience, please don’t hesitate to email me at rbowen@sourceforge.net

CMU Sphinx is a speech recognition engine. I spoke with several members of the team about their project and the surrounding speech recognition and speech simulation ecosystem.

Pentaho is a business intelligence and data analysis suite, compromising several complementary projects. There’s also a commercial entity behind this project, offering commercial support and services.

And there was the Luminance HDR project of the month podcast.  I talked a little about Luminance HDR at the start of this mailing.

Also, not a podcast, but I wrote a little something about Open Source games because I find myself constantly finding more games on SourceForge. It’s a wonder I ever get any work done.

In Closing…

Geeknet is hiring. We’d love to have you on the team.

For the latest news about SourceForge, follow us on Twitter: @sourceforge for news and project release announcements, and @sfnet_ops for information on site outages and updates, and our Facebook page for longer postings.

In particular, if you have a SourceForge project, I’d love to talk with you about it for the SourceForge blog – possibly record a podcast.

I’ll also be speaking speaking at the conference.

Tek is one of my favorite conferences. It’s small, but it’s filled with amazing speakers from the PHP world, and I always come away with new inspiration.

Looking forward to seeing you there.

The OpenOffice Extensions site has hundreds of extensions from dictionaries to PDF manipulation.

And the OpenOffice Templates site has many hundreds of templates for creating everything from receipts to business cards.

As home of these two sites, we are gathering some statistical information, about top downloads, top countries and operating systems. Top downloads are probably of great interest to end-users, so that they might know at a glance which extension or template may be of interest to them.

Top 10 Templates

Basic Resume
Tri Fold Brochure
This is a Resume
Business card template
2012 Month/Year Calendar and Planner with Holidays
DIN Brief mit Fenster links
Chronological Resume
Resume Template
Project Management Template with Gant Schedule Creation
Simple Resume

Top 10 Extensions

Oracle PDF Import Extension
Russian Dictionary
Professional Template Pack II – English
US English Spell Checking Dictionary
MySQL Connector for OpenOffice.org
Oracle Report Builder
German (de-DE igerman98) dictionaries
OpenOffice.org2GoogleDocs – export & import to Google Docs, Zoho, WebDAV
Professional Template Pack – English
de.OpenOffice.org – German Templates

There’s not much difference between the top countries by downloads between Extensions and Templates. Considering that few of them are language dependent this comes with no surprise, though.

The situation for Operating Systems is actually different, and it could probably inspire some speculations. We’ll keep monitoring these metrics and we’ll regularly keep you posted.

I recently spoke with Russell Ossendryver, the author of that business card template, about how he got started working on this.

This all started when Worldlabel.com sponsored a Openoffice.org template contest. They became interested in trying to help the community develop a large archive of user friendly templates. When the template repository site launched, it was obvious that there was a lack of business card templates for the community, so Russ decided to create a simple Business Card template design which can be used universally. He used basic design functions available in Openoffice including insert image, text boxes, created color gradients and more. He also decided to write a howto on making business cards.

Rich: What skills are required to contribute a template to the OO project?

Russ: Very little skills are required. Some basic knowledge of how to use tables, inserting a text boxes and changing font type is all what is required. Of course the skill needed for some templates is extremely high, for example a perpetual calendar in a spreadsheet is complicated.

Rich: What’s the motivation for contributing a template to the community, rather than keeping it to yourself?

Russ: There is nothing like sharing, and if ones creation can help others that is extremely rewarding. There is also some satisfaction creating a template which becomes popular and is greatly needed. I must admit, i check once in a while to see how popular my templates are. Its kind off competitive making it fun -:) The more willing people are to give, the likeliness of people joining in increases.

Rich: What’s missing? (i.e., what templates could I contribute?)

Russ: I think there is a little of everything, but we need more, there is nothing like a variety of choices for our community. Microsoft spends huge resources on their Office template gallery, so we need to keep adding. If there is one area I think the community needs more templates is legal forms i.e. pleading forms But, we can also use more presentation templates, business cards, and resume templates are all ways popular.

• Vistumbler
  Vistumbler is a wireless network scanner for Vista. WiFiDB is a database written in php to store Vistumbler VS1 files. Keeps track of total access points w/gps, maps to kml, signal graphs, statistics, and more.
• MediaPortal
  MediaPortal turns your PC into a very advanced MediaCenter / HTPC. It allows you to listen to your favorite music & radio, watch and store your videos and DVDs, view, schedule and record live TV as a digital video recorder and much much more
• Liferay Portal
  Liferay Portal is the world’s leading enterprise open source portal framework, offering integrated Web publishing and content management, an enterprise service bus and service-oriented architecture, and compatibility with all major IT infrastructure
• xVideoServiceThief
  xVideoServiceThief is a tool for downloading your favourite video clips from a lot of video websites. xVideoServiceThief also provide you the ability to convert each video in most popular formats: AVI, MPEG1, MPEG2, WMV, MP4, 3GP, MP3 file formats.
• D-Fend Reloaded
  D-Fend Reloaded is a graphical environment for DOSBox. D-Fend Reloaded is a successor of the discontinued D-Fend. Both environments look alike and D-Fend Reloaded contains all features of D-Fend. Even the D-Fend config files can be used.
• InstagramDownloader
  Instagram Downloader ( Public Accounts)
• iText®, a JAVA-PDF library
  This library contains classes that generate documents in the Portable Document Format (PDF).
• Klavaro Touch Typing Tutor
  A touch typing tutor very flexible, supporting customizable keyboard layouts. You can edit and save new or unknown keyboard layouts, as the basic course was designed to not depend on specific ones. Also, there are some charts about the learning process

At this point, SourceForge project administration involved two separate pages. One was for adding users to groups and another was for adding groups to permissions. There wasn’t any explanation on either page that you need to use both pages to add a user and make sure they had the correct permissions. We decided to improve this by unifying the two pages. The new interface needed to make it easy to see at a glance what users were working on the project and what they were allowed to do.

Here’s the new and improved interface:

Hopefully it’s clear what’s going on here since that was the goal of the redesign! As you can see, users and permissions are clearly associated with a user group. Users can be removed here by clicking their name. They are added through the “Add” button. All possible permissions for a group are shown in the right column. At a glance, you can see if a group has the permission (a check mark) or not (a barred circle). To toggle a permission for a group, the project administrator can click it.

Why are some of the checks in a circle? Allura user groups can inherit permissions from each other. Basically, if a group is more privileged than another group, it will have all of the permissions of the less privileged group. For instance, an Admin group user will be able to do anything a basic Member could do, plus the Admin permissions. Similarly, a Member will have all the permissions a non-logged in user does, plus any permissions granted to Member. To see where a group is inheriting a permission from, hover over the permission and a tooltip will explain it.

If you’re a project administrator and you’re using the latest version of SourceForge, you can use the improved page in the admin area under “User Permissions”.

SourceForge and our sister site, Slashdot, have long served as go-to places for developers and other IT pros looking to learn more about what’s going on in tech. After we noticed an uptick in demand for information on business intelligence, we launched a site called SlashBI which provided news and expert commentary on that fast-growing segment. Recent articles have covered everything from federal agencies’ need for more data analysts, to the Apple iPad’s effect on business intelligence vendors, to best practices for managing analytics applications within the enterprise.

Now, we’re complementing SlashBI with SlashCloud, dedicated to the latest information about cloud computing.

The cloud is, well, something of a cloudy concept for some people. Companies routinely fight over their definition of it (think Oracle and Salesforce). Customers question whether they need it. SlashCloud will present a clearer picture of the cloud via a mix of news and commentary from a roster of content experts, business leaders, and analysts. Our launch stories include an interview with Salesforce EVP and former Heroku CEO Byron Sebastian, a comparison of Google Drive to other cloud-storage options, and a call for businesses to embrace the cloud on its own terms.

SlashCloud is the next in our series of verticals dedicated to specific technologies. Please take a look, and let us know what you think. You can also visit the SlashCloud Facebook and Google+ pages, follow the site on Twitter, and sign up for the weekly newsletter.

–Rich

(Cloud image from Shutterstock)

SourceForge is very proud to have a small part in the this release, as we’re helping out with the download mirroring, and we’re also hosting the Extensions sites.

I’ve got one more video in the works, which hopefully I’ll have done later this week. Can you tell we’re geeked about OpenOffice?

Apache OpenOffice has a number of exciting new features, but the main effort on this release has gone into replacing or rewriting any components that were not compliant with the Apache license.

The video below covers some of the new features. I’ve got another video in the works covering more of the new features, so don’t think that this is all that’s in there.

SourceForge is very proud to host the Templates and Extensions sites, as well as helping out with the distribution of the main release.
We wish OpenOffice enormous success with their new release, and we’re proud to have a small part in that.

Stay tuned for two more videos. I was able to interview Jürgen Schmidt, the Apache OpenOffice release manager, last week, and we talked some about what was involved in getting this release out. And, as I mentioned above, I have another video in the works with some of the other new features.

• UMPlayer

  UMPlayer is a cross-platform multimedia player supporting many audio and video codecs and file formats as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols. It boasts many advanced features such as built-in subtitle search and YouTube player.

• SugarCRM – commercial open source CRM

  A complete CRM system for businesses of all sizes. Core CRM functionality includes sales automation, marketing campaigns, support cases, project mgmt, calendaring and more. Built in PHP, supports MySQL and SQL Server.

• Whited00r

  Speed up your old iOS device with Whited00r.
  Available on:
  iPhone 2G
  iPhone 3G
  iPod Touch 1G
  iPod Touch 2G (MB model only)

• Openbravo ERP

  Openbravo 3, the agile ERP, is a modular, ready to use, 100% web-based open source business management system written in Java, that automates all of the core business processes for small and mid-sized companies.

• pseint

  PSeInt is a pseudo-code interepreter for spanish-speaking programming students. Its main porpouse is to be a tool for learning and understanding the basic concepts about programming and aplying them with an easy understanding spanish pseudocode.

• AkelPad

  A simple notepad-like text editor with many features. It is designed to be a small and fast.

• Mega Mario

  Mega Mario is a Super Mario Bros. 1 clone. It features everything the original features – with better graphics, higher resolution, smoother movement and new levels. The story of Mario and Luigi continues, in old-school style. Also visit the official HP.

• Blat – Windows Command Line SMTP Mailer

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SourceForge helps the Apache OpenOffice by serving downloads for the Extensions and the Templates sites, as well as the shortly upcoming Apache OpenOffice 3.4 Release.

Read below to learn more about how we pursue our mission to become the most trusted source for Open Source Software by doing, and what lessons we learned from working with the Apache Way.

Let’s start with a little background information about OpenOffice.

In the beginning it was StarOffice

Actually very few people know that OpenOffice was one of the first productivity suites around. In fact everything started back in 1984 when a company called StarDivision started to develop StarOffice. A few years later, in 1999, Sun Microsystems bought StarDivision, after which Sun Microsystems, just ten years ago started to distribute a version of it as open source software: OpenOffice.org was born.

Ten years later, Sun Microsystems was in turn acquired by Oracle, and in June 2011 contributed the suite, the trademarks and the domains to the Apache Incubator.

SourceForge’s Mission and What we do for the Apache OpenOffice Incubator

Our Mission is changed: it’s no longer just about providing a forge, we now ask ourselves what we can do for open source. The best way we found to serve open source projects is actually understand their needs, and help them to fulfill those needs.

In the Apache OpenOffice Podling case, we thought we could help by reengineering and restoring the Extensions and the Templates websites. As part of the incubation process at Apache, Oracle – former sponsor and host of the OpenOffice project – was progressively migrating services and websites under the Apache umbrella. In the process some of these services were momentarily discontinued or – like for the Extensions and Templates sites – moved to temporary locations which were unable to serve those services with the previous level of service.

Given the fact that a relevant number of services and websites were to be migrated, we stepped into the process to take care of two websites, providing OpenOffice users with a centralized access to important resources, like Extensions and Templates. We needed to reengineer both Drupal platforms, upgrade the supported PHP version and instruct the authentication system to serve over 40,000 users, formerly authenticated by the Oracle authentication server.

Both websites are now fully operational, restored and well supported at SourceForge at the following addresses: Extensions and Templates. In collaboration with the Podling Project Management Committee (PPMC) we kept Extensions’ and Templates’ users informed about all changes, as well as we finally provided them with stats about top downloads, geographies and operating systems.

It might worthwhile to mention that SourceForge is not locking in Apache OpenOffice in any manner. In fact all Drupal configurations and applications are available to the PPMC, and the ‘neighborhoods’ – def – serving those downloads are fully open source and available at http://sourceforge.net/p/allura.

As a matter of fact we serve the Apache OpenOffice project and everyone else keeping them out of ‘data jails‘ as Eric Raymond called them.

You can put data (the source code revision history, mailing list address lists, bug reports) into them, but getting a complete snapshot of that data back out often ranges from painful to impossible.

At SourceForge we provide a fully open source platform that make it possible for everyone to easily migrate data and projects. SourceForge is not just about free and open source software, but it’s about freedom of choice, and we’ll make sure you’ll keep using both our forge and directory by helping your project to grow.

Takeaways from the collaboration and the future ahead.

In the collaboration process we gained Apache OpenOffice’s trust — which is expressed in the Apache OpenOffice Blog entry about the project timeline as well as in Apache OpenOffice mentor’s appreciative words. Actually the partnership has been recently extended to solve another challenging issues: help Apache to manage the expected OpenOffice downloads’ peaks for the upcoming new release.

We let facts speak for themselves, and we are improving our ability to partner with well recognized open source players, the Apache Software Foundation, not very differently from what we have done for BerliOS or we’ll do for others in the future.

For serving our open source constituencies – developers and users – we allocate two engineering teams to provide a better dev experience, and an easy way to find open source software. Our mission has changed, and we are putting more of our energy into becoming The Most Trusted Partner for Open Source.

We love that people have started to notice that.

Thanks.

I would like to take the opportunity here to thank Ross Gardler, who mentored the SourceForge teams through the collaboration process, Rob Weir for his inputs and support, and Gavin McDonald and the whole Apache Infrastructure team, who provided us with all necessary information for a successful migration.

It is also appropriate to give credit here to our SiteOp team, especially Jacob Moorman, Wayne Witzel and Dave Brondsema, for enabling our Allura open source forge to deliver on performance and the overall project delivery. Our contractor Antonio De Marco, who turned all our specifications in a working platform.
Last but not least, I wish to say thanks to Andrea Pescetti, who provided us with all details about how the Apache OpenOffice Extensions & Templates websites work.

Roberto Galoppini, SourceForge Business Development Director and now Apache Open Office committer and PPMC member.

The issue I was trying to debug was that a variable I was setting was getting overwritten at some point but I could not figure out where or why. I’m a pretty dab hand at using pdb (or, more accurately, ipdb), but while trying to step through the code, I got lost in the maze that is the Pylons / TurboGears controller dispatch. All was bleak, and I despaired.

If only, I thought to myself, pdb supported watchpoints! If you’re not familiar with them, watchpoints are similar to breakpoints, except that instead of stopping on a specific line, they stop when a particular variable changes. Perfect for my situation. gdb, for C, supports them, but pdb, alas, does not. There are some Python IDEs that support them, such as Eric and PyScripter (neither of which I have used), but my development environment isn’t suited to using an IDE.

After some digging, I did manage to come across a stackoverflow answer in which Michael Hoffman managed to implement watchpoints in pdb using the alias command and some internal knowledge of pdb. Perfect, I thought! However, as with many things in life, it was not as easy as it seemed.

The commands work by repeatedly adding themselves to the internal command queue in pdb until the condition is met. The first hurdle I ran into is that, as I mentioned earlier, I prefer ipdb. However, the implementation of the command queue in ipdb is essentially the same as in pdb, such that it only took a few minor modifications to account for those differences. The second issue I ran into was that the original snippet was set up to watch variables, while I needed to watch an attribute. This, too, was not terribly difficult to work around. The part that caused me the most difficulty was in getting the stepwatch command working.

Because the nextwatch command stays in the current frame, it worked fine. However, the stepwatch implementation was relying on some global variables and imports to always be available, and unfortunately global only applies to code parsed at the same time as the global statement. What this meant for me was that all of the internal variables used to implement the watchpoint commands disappeared as soon as I left the current source file. Since my issue required jumping in and out of the Pylons and TurboGears dispatch code, that happened almost immediately.

Well, I thought, if they can’t be global, I’ll just have to stash them somewhere where I know I can get them again later. So, I stashed them in pdb and just had the command reimport pdb before using it to ensure it was available in the current scope. This, in turn, ran me into the issue that statement lists can only include simple statements, and not compound statements like if / else.

After jumping through some hoops to get the syntax correct, I was finally able to get it working, and found the spot that was overwriting my variable in no time flat.

Here is my modified version, which I have saved away in my .pdbrc file:

It’s pretty dense, unfortunately, because of pdb’s limitations on what python code it will accept within the .pdbrc file or in aliases. However, it’s very straightforward to use. To give a brief example of the stepwatch command in action, consider this contrived example python file:

Running this will stop on line 25 and drop you into ipdb, from which you can use stepwatch to find where a.value gets changed:

Note that once the stepwatch command was issued, no further input was required on my part to reach the exact spot where the value was modified. This worked across multiple stack frames and would have worked across multiple files.

Aside from the IDEs with watch commands available, I found out later that PyConquer, while not having watchpoints per se, does have the ability to watch a variable and notify you of the exact location where it is changed, and to what. However, I prefer not having to switch to a different tool to find the location, then go set a breakpoint there.

I also subsequently found Pdb++, written by Antonio Cuni to aid working on PyPy, which has a few additional commands, watch being one of them. I have not had a chance, yet, to test this out, but it seems like it could be a cleaner solution.

As it turns out, actually fixing my variable being overwritten was a much more difficult proposition, but you can’t win them all, I guess.

Watch image from Shutterstock