Re: [Debian-sf-devel] New alexandria BASELINE: should we open up a new one ? Where ?

[Tim Uckun]

> I wouldn't really ever expect an active, quality open source project to come
> out of VA Linux. At the time that I bailed out, it was clear that the company
> was thrashing and not able to sell their services, since the open source code
> was available for free. Virtually no one was paying to have the SF system
> installed, and no one was buying the "big" install services. The companies
> that could afford the "big deals" already had the resources to install and
> modify the code themselves.

Speaking as a mid level management guy (and a hacker) it was worth it for 
me to pay someone to install sourceforge. Not 40K which VA wanted (we just 
can't afford that kind of money) but a couple of thousand certainly is not 
out of  the question. Unfortunately the guys I hired to do the install were 
naive about how long it would take and did not allocate enough time to it. 
Therefore here I am trying to make the damned thing work.  Right now the 
generic install (as performed by the contractors) is not functional. I have 
already found some bugs and fixed them and tracking more down as I 
can.  The debian package will not install at all at this point and I am 
trying to get into the bottom of that too. It's been quite furstrating to 
say the least.

I guess what I am trying to say is that I do see a market for sourceforge 
in the business world. It's a complicated thing to install and set up and I 
think that if someone could deliver a turnkey type of solution for under 5K 
It might find a market in the medium sized buisnesses (especially if you 
add some groupware functionality like calendars or email reading)

> I'm willing to put in significant effort -- and my obvious expertise with SF
> -- on an active, open source, GPL fork of the code. I think a project name and
> hosting location should be chosen, a new CVS tree and mailing lists should be
> set up and a base 2.6 release should be rolled out to freshmeat and then we
> should get busy and radically improve/clean up the system.
>
> Since the current SF software was always written with the intention that it
> was centered around SF.net, if we were to jettison that preconception, we
> could make huge changes and cleanups to the codebase pretty quickly.

I'm in if you need help. I am pretty good at php coding and decent at perl.
Right now I am 50/50 as to whether I want to continue to try and SF working 
or go on to something else. TUTOS, phpgroupware and projeckt (a zope 
product) seem to have limited capability to do some of the stuff SF 
does.  None of them have the depth of SF but all of them offer a calender 
module.  I would rather have a pure php solution myself so I would welcome 
the challenge of working to make SF better.






:wq
Tim Uckun
US Investigations Services/Due Diligence
 http://www.diligence.com/