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

  Blat – A Windows (32 & 64 bit) command line SMTP mailer. Use it to automatically eMail logs, the contents of a html FORM, or whatever else you need to send.

• TeXstudio – A LaTeX Editor

  TeXstudio, previously TexMakerX, is a platform-independent LaTeX editor with included PDF viewer. It provides modern features like interactive spell/syntax checking, code folding, extended text navigation, code completion and syntax highlighting.

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

So, here they are, in no particular order. You can cast your vote at http://twtpoll.com/03i0fe.

The vote runs until May 22, to give us time to put together the POTM page for the winner. You can see previous POTMs at sf.net/blog/potm.

• CMU Sphinx

  CMUSphinx is a speaker-independent large vocabulary continuous speech recognizer released under BSD style license. It is also a collection of open source tools and resources that allows researchers and developers to build speech recognition systems.

• Me and My Shadow

  Me and My Shadow is a free libre puzzle/platform game in which you try to reach the exit by solving puzzles. Spikes, moving blocks, fragile blocks and much more stand between you and the exit. Record your moves and let your shadow mimic them to reach blocks you couldn’t reach alone.
  Play through over 40 levels and use the built-in leveleditor to make your own.

• 0 A.D.

  0 A.D. (pronounced “zero ey-dee”) is a free, open-source, cross-platform real-time strategy (RTS) game of ancient warfare. It’s a historically-based war/economy game that allows players to relive or rewrite the history of six ancient Western civilizations, each depicted at their peak of economic growth and military prowess. The six factions are: The Hellenic States (aka The Greeks), the Roman Republic, The Celtic Tribes, the Persian Empire, the Iberian Tribes, and the Carthaginian Empire, each complete with unique artwork, technologies and civilisation bonuses.

• TripleA

  TripleA is a turn based strategy game and board game engine. TripleA comes with multiple games and over 100 more games can be downloaded from the user community. Supports single player vs AI, hot-seat, Play by Email and Forum, and a hosted Online lobby for live play online.

• Art of Illusion

  Art of Illusion is a full featured 3D modelling, rendering, and animation studio. It is written entirely in Java, and can run on almost any operating system.

• Newscoop

  The open content management system for professional journalists. Features include multiple author management, issue-and-section based publishing, geolocation, multilingual content management, and a templating engine supporting HTML5 & mobile.

• Clam AntiVirus

  Clam AntiVirus is a GPL antivirus toolkit for UNIX. The main purpose of this software is the integration with mail servers. It provides a flexible and scalable multi-threaded daemon, a command line scanner and a virus database that is kept up to date

• gPhoto

  gPhoto is a program and library framework that lets users download pictures from their digital cameras. The libgphoto2 library gives you access to hundreds of models of digital cameras on several platforms.

SlashBI will cover everything from B.I. fundamentals for developers, to open-source hypervisor projects, to best practices for handling Big Data—and that’s just for starters. Plus, thanks to the power of the series of tubes we call the Internets, the site will feature copious images, diagrams and video.

SlashBI is just our first site dedicated to a particular tech subject. Please swing by, take a look, and let us know what you think.

(See other Projects Of The Month)

Last week I spoke with Davide Anastasia, Daniel Kaneider, and Franco Comida about the project. Luminance HDR is SourceForge’s May Project Of The Month. (See other POTMs.) The project of the month is chosen through a poll that we conduct via the TwtPoll website. We encourage you to vote in next month’s POTM poll, which should be coming up shortly.

You can listen to my interview with them below.

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.

Rich: Davide, Daniel, and Franco talked with me about the project, and the HDR process in general.

You can see some of the results of their software on their Flickr group, or on their Facebook page.

So, here’s my interview with the Luminance HDR team.

First of all, congratulations on this honor, and thank you so much for being part of the SourceForge community!

Davide: Oh, it’s great to be part of it, actually!

Rich: Tell me about your project. Tell me what it does. Tell me how you all got started doing this.

Davide: The project is a complete solution for HDR photography. What’s HDR? It’s basically the possibility of creating images that have an ideal dynamic range of colors. We do that by merging multiple pictures of the same scene together, and then we post-process them to create a new, say, jpeg or gif image. That’s just a brief introduction to the project.

Rich: I first started seeing photographs like this just a few years ago. How old is this technology?

Davide: Actually it’s pretty old, because there’s been research on this field since the early 90s. We already had commercial products starting at the beginning of the 2000′s. The nice thing is, it seems that Luminance HDR is the unique Open Source solution in this field. That’s why we get so much attention.

Rich: How big is your developer community?

Davide: It’s basically three of us.

Rich: Do you find that professional photographers are you using your software, or is it hobbyists, or …

Davide: We have a very good community spread across Facebook and Flickr. We do have professional photographers using Luminance HDR. In most of the cases they use Luminance HDR to create the first image, and then they post-process with other software solutions, like good commercial ones, or Gimp, and just stay in the Open Source community. We do have a lot of interesting pictures on Flickr, and we would really like to share the link to our Flickr group.

Rich: Tell me something about the HDR process itself. I’ve seen tutorials that say you have to have multiple photographs, and others that say that’s not really necessary. Tell me some more about that.

Davide: Well, it depends. It depends what you want to achieve. Many people just want to achieve the HDR look. They usually start with a single image. But if you really want to cover the entire dynamic range of the scene, then … usually we use a lot of HDR photography for landscapes, because it’s the kind of situation where you really have strong difference between the foreground and background. In this situation, you really need to have a bracket group of pictures. We do recommend three pictures. Let’s say, one to what the camera suggests to be the best exposure, and plus 2 and minus 2 exposure value. And any decent camera can do that. It really opens this possibility to a large base of users.

Rich: What programming language is your software written in?

Davide: It’s mostly C++, with some code in C, here and there. It’s basically legacy code which will be replaced sooner or later. But it’s mostly C++. We do use QT, as a GUI library, widget library. And we do use, obviously, other libraries to read images, for doing color correction. Actually, Franco is doing a really good job with the color management system. He has been working on this thing for a couple of months already. We do have new features coming in pretty soon as well.

Rich: Tell me some more about that. What’s upcoming in future versions of this software?

Davide: We do have a lot of things, actually. As I said, Franco is working on the color management system. And in the meanwhile, I’ve been working on a new engine for the entire Luminance HDR, based on Boost GIL. So we do have a lot of projects going on which will change Luminance HDR a lot in the future. We don’t know the time frame, because, as you can imagine, this is not our first activity, so we do have to manage our time. Probably Daniel and Franco have to speak as well.

Daniel: I’m doing the testing on the Windows side. From the developer point of view I’m the only one who is using Windows as a primary system. So mainly some testing and small patches. So for example improving some small Windows features, like using the Windows progress bar.

Franco: I’ve been working for about two months on the color management system, which enables Luminance to manage the color of the pictures, so they can look the same on the monitor or on a printer. That’s what I’m doing now.

Rich: And when do you anticipate that the next version will be ready?

Davide: We don’t actually know the date. We were thinking to be releasing something in a month’s time, probaby a beta. We do release a stable version pretty much every six months. The last stable version was in January. We usually release one in July, and again in January. And in the meanwhile, we do release some betas here and there, because we want people to test features. We do work a lot with our users. We have a Facebook group and a Flickr group as well. We do create a bit of community around the software. It might be interesting to join one or the other. And we usually collect lots of nice feedback from these communities.

Rich: Thank you all very much for speaking with me.

All: Thank you.

Rich: And congratulations again!

• ClamWin Free Antivirus

  Free Antivirus for Windows. Includes virus scanner, scheduler, virus database updates, context menu integration to MS Windows Explorer and Addin to MS Outlook. Also features easy setup program. Uses a well respected ClamAV scanning engine.

• MediaInfo

  Get technical information and tags of a lot of multimedia files. Supported formats : – Video : AVI/OGM/MKV/MPG/VOB/MP4/3GP/… – Audio : MP3/OGG/MKA/MP4/AAC/…

• SABnzbdPlus

  SABnzbd is a cross-platform binary newsreader. It makes downloading from Usenet easy by automating the whole thing. You give it an NZB file or an RSS feed, it does the rest. Has a web-browser based UI and an API for 3rd-party apps. Ideal for servers too.

• SHJS (Syntax Highlighting in JavaScript)

  SHJS (Syntax Highlighting in JavaScript) is a JavaScript program which highlights source code passages in HTML documents. Documents using SHJS are highlighted on the client side by the web browser.

• 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.

• FreeFileSync

  FreeFileSync is a folder comparison and synchronization tool providing highly optimized performance and usability without needless user interface complexity.

• GNU Octave Repository

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

• NonVisual Desktop Access

  A free and open source screen reader for the Microsoft Windows operating system.

• LMMS (Linux MultiMedia Studio)

  LMMS is a free cross-platform music studio which allows you to produce music with your computer. This includes the creation of melodies and beats, the synthesis and mixing of sounds, and arranging of samples.

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.

Rich: A number of times that I’ve worked with Pentaho in various businesses, the same question comes up repeatedly: What’s with the name? Tell us where the name came from.

Doug: The hardest part of doing a startup is coming up with a decent name. That was actually even harder than the idea or the actual code. Believe it or not, we did spend a lot of time on it. The main thing we were looking for was something that you could Google, and there was absolutely nothing returned. We went through a list of tons of things. Would it pigeon-hole us into a specific product? Would it, over time, sound dated? So we decided we needed to come up with something that really didn’t mean a whole lot, but sounded like it meant something.

James: And something where, no matter how you pronounced it, someone would know how to spell it.

Doug: There were five of us that started the company. Somewhere along the line we got locked into “Penta.” The “Penta” was for five, and “Ho”, well, that just sounded right.

There’s a story on our FAQ that listeners may be interested in. We did come up with a completely different story to explain the origin of “Pentaho,” and actually had a few people fall into the trap. In fact, the first article in a major press mentioned that we were named after a Florida Indian tribe, as our story alludes to. But if you actually read the complete story you would realize that that may not actually in fact be the truth. But we’ve caught some people with that. It’s kind of fun.

One of the turning points early on for us was when you would Google “Pentaho”, and it stop saying “Did you mean pentagon?” Once there were enough links coming back to us to where we were a legitimate name, we knew we’d gotten somewhere.

Rich: Pentaho has been around for quite a while. I’ve used it at a number of jobs that I’ve had. So it’s probably familiar to many of our audience, but could you give us an overview of what the project does?

James: Sure. Absolutely. Pentaho is actually a collection of projects. We’ve got Mondrian, which is a relationally based OLAP engine – so it’s an engine for slicing and dicing multi-dimensional data. We’ve got Pentaho Reporting, which provides web-based and desktop reporting. Outputs PDF, Excel, CSVs, HTML, etc. We’ve got Kettle, or Pentaho Data Integration, which is a data transformation engine. We’ve got Weka, which is a machine learning engine for doing particular analytics, and those kinds of things. Sentiment analysis. And then tying it all together, we’ve got a B.I. platform that integrates all the pieces together, flows data between the different engines, provides web-based user interfaces, etc. So it’s a whole suite that’s all tied together by a platform.

Rich: So, how does this work so far as the development community and whatnot goes. Are they developed as separate projects, or is it one unified developer community, or how does that work?

Doug: Since the projects actually were developed at various times by different people, we merged them when we started Pentaho. So, Mondrian is its own separate SourceForge project, jFreeReport, which is the basis for Pentaho Reporting, is also its own SourceForge project, as is Weka. When we first started Pentaho, our idea was not necessarily to build the entire B.I. suite, but to look what was available in Open Source, and then build a platform that would unify those projects. So, over time, as we got to know the architects and the leads of the other projects, they would join Pentaho as employees, and we’d take over ownership of the project.

Rich: I’ve interviewed a number of projects where the project came out of the company, either because they developed something in house and then Open Sourced it, or because the entire organization was built around an idea that was Open Source. This is very much the other way around. I’d like to hear more about how this works. The people that work on these various projects – are they all employees of your company?

Doug: The chief architects of each of those projects are. They also have their own community members that are independent, as Open Source projects typically are. The projects themselves – so, like, Mondrian is an embeddable OLAP engine – there are other people that use it and embed it. There’s no friction between its Open Source-ness, and the fact that we use it for our embedded engine. The best part of that for us is we have the architect, we can help shape the roadmap, and all kind of work together for integration.

Rich: Now, you have an enterprise edition of some of these products, is that right?

James: Yes, that’s correct.

Rich: What’s the relationship between the Open Source version, the enterprise version, your employees, and the community?

James: The community edition is designed to be a platform that you can build business intelligence, business analytics projects on top of, whether it’s reporting, data integration, machine learning slicing and dicing, whatever. So if you look at our usage world-wide, and Doug’s got figures he can give you, we’ve got people installing and using our software in 180 countries world wide. And there’s no business intelligence vendor – IBM, Oracle, Microsoft – none of these companies have sales and services for business intelligence in that many countries. So our community edition is full-featured. People all over the world using it to develop projects. The enterprise edition adds features on top which large IT shops will be expecting out of a business intelligence suite. So we’ve got things in there for administration, for maintenance, we’ve got features in there that lower the cost of ownership. There are some U.I. bells and whistles in there, in the enterprise edition. We have a WYSIWYG, drag-and-drop slice and dice user interface. But our community edition has something analogous. In the enterprise edition there’s an ad-hoc interactive reporting user interface, but the community edition has something … it’s not as sexy, it’s not as fun to play with, but the basic functionality is also there in the community edition.

Some people don’t like our business model. They say our community edition is cut down, it’s demoware. They’ve obviously never used it, because that’s not the way our business model actually works. We can’t be successful if our community edition isn’t something that you could actually use in practice.

Doug: The last … I think about the last six developers we hired – and every one of them were top-notch – came from the community. So these are guys that were contributing, working for business intelligence companies, or system integrators, or consultants, that just got really good with our stuff, and either asked, or we offered, a job. So we picked up a lot of tremendous talent from the community base.

Rich: That’s really a great thing to hear. I often encourage people to participate in Open Source, very self-servingly as “resume fodder,” but also because it expands your expertise in so many different areas so greatly.

Doug: Absolutely. And those guys typically have the best work ethic, and really love what they’re doing. But the bottom line for us is, it’s almost like an “America’s Got Talent” kind of deal. We need somebody, we look out there, see who’s really good. That part, when we came into it, we didn’t quite expect so much, that that would be another benefit of Open Source beyond the adoption, and contributions, and plugins and all that fun stuff.

Rich: Your suite of products is extremely full-featured. Like I said, I’ve used it. Where do you go in the future? What do you have planned for upcoming versions?

James: One of the things that we feel is important technology-wise about the platform is that it’s very pluggable. So, our data integration engine is pluggable. Our report designer is pluggable. Our machine learning engine is pluggable. Our business intelligence server is pluggable. So, we’re developing a lot of new things as plugins. We’ve got a couple things that we’re doing with big data. We recently Open Sourced all of our big data componentry. So, working with Hadoop, Cassandra, MongoDB, HBase, etc., all of that, is now in Open Source. We’ve got an effort underway to add more functionality around the big data stuff. In recent versions we’ve added a few more plugin points into our community edition. So we’ve got a new visualization API, so that you can create and plug in new visualizations. And a client-side data access API – it’s an API where visualizations can get to many different data sources on the server. And that data access API is also pluggable, so if you have a custom data source that you want to expose to all of our client-side visualizations, you can create plugins in that area as well. We’re working on a big release for later this year where we’re moving to a CMS-based repository. We’re adding in REST services for everywhere. We’ve had web services before, but we’re adding many more REST web services into the product. So that’s a bit of a rearchitecture for our next major release. But as Doug said, we’ve got a very active community because of these plugin systems, so a lot of our code contributions – which is what most people talk about when they talk about Open Source contributions, people primarily tend to focus on code contributions, which I think, in terms of volume is one of the smallest contribution areas for most Open Source projects. If you think about the number of people using Linux vs. the number of people contributing to the kernel, it’s a very very skewed number. So we get contributions – localization, documentation, QA. And a lot of people just downloading the product and trying it and using it, and maybe finding something in the install guide that isn’t quite right – that’s a contribution. So, we get these contributions in many differnet forms.

I’ve actually got a paper called The Beekeeper Model, which describes our philosophy around the business model in terms of describing it as a bee farm. And in there we list out over a dozen different ways that you can contribute to Open Source projects in addition to the code.

And we’re also adding, to help foster and encourage this development of plugins, we’re rolling out a marketplace where you can discover plugins that are available, and get help downloading and getting support for plugins that you want to try. That aspect of it has been very encouraging. Our dashboard framework was contributed by one of our partners. Our connectivity to things like SalesForce.com, SAP, those were contributed by community members. The community includes … it’s not just people who are using the community edition. We get contributions from customers, we get contributions from partners. It’s a model where everyone can be acting purely selfishly, in a self-serving manner, and by doing that, it actually makes everything better for everyone else as well. But it’s such a strong model because you can act purely selfishly, so … I’ve contributed to different Open Source projects – I’ve contributed bug fixes to JBoss, but it was because I didn’t want to have to reapplying my fix. I completely selfishly gave JBoss my code fix, because I didn’t want to maintain it. It’s a really nice model that way. It’s a lot of fun, and it’s very productive compared with the proprietary world we were used to before.

Rich: You said you’re installed in 180 countries. Tell me something about one of your customers, and what they’re doing with your product that’s exciting, that’s ignited your imagination.

Doug: One of our fun success stories is a company called Sheetz. They operate about 400 convenience store locations throughout the northeast. They had about a dozen different reporting products and didn’t have anything that really worked all together. They standardized on Pentaho. They rolled it out to their stores, and their people seemed to really like it. We get a lot of good press from those guys.

Our platform is OEM-able and embeddable, There’s a company called Marketo. They’re a SAS-based marketing provider. They embed our reporting and analytics right in that product. So that’s another kinda cool usage.

And then, we’ve recently got into – about a year and a half ago – into the big data space. There’s a company called ShareableInk. They’re also a Pentaho user and have written case studies about the stuff that they’ve done.

So we’ve got a lot of different areas, not just the analytics, but embedded and SAS and big data. Starting out from zero, five of us that started the company back in 2004, with almost no code, and then coming down to now, where these big corporations – we’ve got banks and hospitals, and people that depend on our stuff, and the stuff that we have acquired through the other projects, it’s kind of mind blowing.

James: And also, if you look on the community side, there are interesting projects that are going on world wide with Pentaho. One of which is OpenMRS, which is a medical records system. It’s an Open Source health care system, that’s used primarily in eight hospitals in Asia and Africa. It’s a project that is stewarded out of the U.S.. We’re working with that team to provide better reporting and analysis of the data that they’re collecting. It’s really interesting to see the different use cases and ideas that people have for using the software.

[ See more success stories ]

Doug: Another thing that I feel is satisfying about working in Open Source is that you get much more direct contact between the software developers working on the code and the people that have the use case that are actually trying to use the software. In a proprietary company you’ve got layers of account managers and support people trying to ensure that the engineers don’t actually talk to the customer. Whereas in this model there’s much more of a direct connection to find out what people are doing and why. I think that’s very satisfying about this business model and about working with Open Source.

Rich: Thank you, James and Doug, for speaking with me.

Doug: And thank you.

James: Yeah, thanks for talking with us. Good luck with SourceForge. We couldn’t have done it without you.

Doug: Absolutely.