On 3/9/2011 3:09 PM, Elizabeth Naramore wrote:
After some discussion in IRC today, it was deemed that I should send
this to the list. As you guys know, I'm the Community Development
Manager for SourceForge, and one of my goals is to help us help projects
like yours. You guys are awesome, and many of you know me personally, so
I hope that you will not be afraid to give me honest feedback. In fact,
I'm counting on that. So don't worry about anything, just be honest.
That's the only way we can get better, and the only way we can help open
source.
1. What are 3 things keeping you from hosting your downloads through us?
In random order:
a. Wasn't sure how to get started. (After poking for a few minutes, it
seems it's pretty simple to start, but then things get confusing
immediately. What's "Beta Forge"? Should I choose that to start? If I
use up my project name, on the wrong choice, is it gone forever? Etc.)
b. Perceived "old tech" associated with SourceForge compared to the "new
hotness" of GitHub, Google Code. The idea that most of the projects
there are dodgy, ill-maintained/abandoned, UX-deprived, half-baked
programs that won't even run on my modern architecture, and don't want
that perception associated with Habari.
c. Questions about ownership/control of code, project, and resources as
they might be related to the project structure/organization. For
example, licensing in the Google Code repo (which is where Habari was
before we went out on our own) couldn't be multi-license, the -extras
repo (the public repo for ASL-compatible community plugins) would have
been too difficult to maintain, granular permissions to branches in the
SVN repo were impossible, integration between our services becomes more
complex when they're spread across different services (JibbyBot, wiki
lookups, manual, docs, schema definitions, etc.), and there was no
possibility to style the whole system uniformly across resources to
prevent people visiting the download (or any resource) page from asking
"Is this Habari or something else?".
2. If you could change 3 things about SourceForge, what would they be?
a. The perception that mostly dodgy software (see above) is housed there.
b. Better promotion of features. I can't see what SF does without
creating a project.
c. Provide direct, visible links for software downloads to use via wget.
d. Offer Habari as a default hosted app. ;)
3. What are the 3 most important factors for the success of your project?
I'm sure I don't gauge our success in the same way as most people or
other projects. But.
a. Making sure that we convert users into contributors and/or advocates.
b. Providing tools that let people easily contribute in the ways they
are able.
c. To get people in the web development world not to think of Habari as
"like WordPress" but a useful tool in its own right, whether due to its
architecture or some features that it offers that are different.
4. What is an obstacle you've had to overcome with your project, or
something that you're currently struggling with?
Infrastructure maintenance and cost.
Coordinating releases is a pain in the butt. (Ah, the beauty of
GitHub's code review features.)
Integrating translations. This seems like a missing feature on SF? We
use Launchpad, which is still not under our infrastructure umbrella.
These answers will probably spawn more questions. Feel free to ask
directly, if you want. Hope this has been helpful.
Owen
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