Gallery YOUR PHOTOS ON YOUR WEBSITE

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GalleryYOUR PHOTOS ON YOUR WEBSITE

• Sourceforge Advisory Council
• Bharat Mediratta
• March 9th, 2006

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About Gallery

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

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Whats great about SourceForge?

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

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What else is great?

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

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Whats not so great?

• SF.net is very tech centric.
• Eg, FRS confuses the heck out of newbies

From -----_at_aol.com Subject Help! I hve been
trying to download Gallery and am frustrated
because I keep getting sent in circles. When I
click "download now" I get information on updates
or an add to buy a T-shirt. How do I download
the program? HELP!
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Whats bad?

• Feature set is years out of date
• Forums arent in the same ballpark as best of
  breed products
• Project search is underpowered
• Trackers arent very customizable. We resort to
  putting special keywords like G2 in the subject
• Mailman is way out of date. Spam overruns us.

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Whats bad (contd)

• User Interface is woeful at times
• Why is the submit news box 55 x 6? You cant
  write anything reasonable in that.
• Admin navigation makes no sense at times. Eg,
  you click News -gt Admin, instead of the other way
  around.
• Why cant I update info about more than one file
  at once in FRS?
• How many bugs do I have in the G2 category?
• Forums are completely worthless.
• Not enough admin tools to keep them in check

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Ow, SourceForge hurts me!

• CVS is so s-l-o-w!
• Development stops!
• This has gotten better (thanks, guys!), and SVN
  holds promise
• Developer vs. Anonymous slows down our
  iterations.
• Users cant easily find existing bugs
• so they file duplicates!

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Make the pain stop!

• Tasks system is very weak
• Who is the task assigned to?
• Why didnt I get notified?
• Who submitted this task?
• File releases are so painful.
• Entire projects (like ReleaseForge) have formed
  to improve this one problem!
• Gallery has released 1300 files and counting.
  Last nights release of 134 files took me 4
  hours, largely because of FRS.

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Whats missing?

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

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So what does all this mean?

• SFs instant feature set makes sense for new
  projects
• As projects grow, they are unable to fit their
  needs into what SF offers
• SF needs to decide whether they care about
  keeping larger projects

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What can SourceForge do?

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

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Pie-in-the-Sky things to try

• Switch to using best-of-breed applications like
  phpBB for forums.
• Let projects pay for a higher level of support
  (not just users)
• Super fast CVS is worth to us
• Open source it again!
• Were PHP devs we would submit patches.

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Conclusion

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