Hello Folks, This e-mail is long but very important. Everyone should read it carefully. It contains some news about the organization, and other cool stuffs.
Web Site and Repositories Migration This weekend, me and Rodolfo will be conducting a migration of our website, trac and repository to a new server. We ask everyone to hold your commits after 13/02/2010 at 08:00 AM BRT at this time we'll be dumping the repo and starting the migration. By the end, we'll test the repository and whenever we have it ready we'll be sending another message to this mailing list to let everybody know that the repository is once again available. The website and trac may be unavailable as well during the migration. The blog will suffer only a DNS migration, so it should be painless. UmitProject.com We all love Umit and Open Source, but we need to make money to live. Living for GSoC is not a solution for our needs also, though it is quite a nice help for our students. We all know that Umit has grown only during GSoC seasons, and that's very comprehensible as everyone here needs to work somewhere else to get the money for the rest of the year. What we need for Umit is a way to keep the development up all year long, and offer financial support to our developers to help us with that. Therefore, after a lot of time thinking and defining a business model, we decided to incorporate Umit. Our main goal is to sell services, and pay our contributors to work on our clients' needs. With the money we get from our client, we'll afford our contributors to develop for Umit. Whatever solution we may develop for our clients, we'll try to release as Open Source in our repositories. If there is money left, we'll offer bounties, and sponsor our Umit Summer of Code Students. Isn't it an awesome idea? Everybody is going to benefit: the community, our clients and mainly our contributors: The community will get better open source softwares, with more frequent releases and bug fixes. Our clients will benefit from the knowledge of a real world Open Source Organization, used to face big deals while developing a world wide used application as Umit. And our Contributors will finally make their living, full time, from Open Source software. The company is already incorporated in Brazil, and our HQ is located in Goiânia, Goias, right in the middle of the country. Although it was incorporated here, we don't intend to focus on brazilian clients only. We'll try to make deals in whatever country we may have a contributor. That's cool also, because it won't require our contributors to relocate, though we may do so if needed. After this weekend's migration, you'll notice that umitproject.com will now start to point to the corporation website and umitproject.org will point to the open source organization website. And finally, I'll be granting the copyrights of all Umit codebase to the incorporated company. That will grant a long life to all Umit softwares, and a reliable name to support our community in whatever needs they may present. I would like to stress that the corporation's goal is to support the Umit Project Open Source Organization, and keep it running in good stand and able to offer good solutions for our users. We do not intend to close any software, or to conduct the Open Source Organization in a way that may benefit the Corporation and negatively affect our community. The Corporation lives for the Open Source Organization, not the opposite. Invitation After announcing Umit's incorporation, we would like to invite everyone to contribute to Umit. That's the way we'll get to know you. If it happens that we close a deal in your area, we'll hire you. Google Summer of Code and Umit Summer of Code students are very good candidates for a job with us as the openings will appear. If you ever contributed to Umit yet, start now! Get used to our codebase, interact with our contributors, fix some bugs, develop a feature and we'll keep an eye on you whenever an opening appear. Google Summer of Code 2010 GSoC 2010 is on, and we're planing to participate once again this year! We answered to Leslie's call to help spread the word about the program, and we got in touch with 22 press meanings (magazines, newspapers, radio stations, tv stations and blogs) and we're getting some coverage from that. Here is Brazil, we already got coverage from 3 blogs (as far as I know by now) and our main technology magazine, INFO Exame. That will certainly help GSoC to get more students this year. We're planing to create some other advertisement materials, and we count with all our contributors to help spread the word in their regions. We expect all our contributors to get in touch with local press, and try to get some coverage on GSoC and our participation on the program (I suggest everyone to read Guerilla PR 2.0 to know how to draw media's attention), as well as getting in touch with universities to distribute our flyers and even present a talk on the matter, encouraging students to apply and teaching them how to write a good proposal. We're over 20 contributors by now, and if everybody do the same that I did, we'll certainly provide a consistent help to GSoC, the Open Source Community and to Umit Project. So, join us on spreading the word! Let me know if you need any help. Just drop me an e-mail and I can help you elaborate an email or document to send to press. Umit Summer of Code 2010 This is our second release of USoC, and last year we had a great success with our USoC heros! This year, we hope to achieve an ever greater success, and we'll try to improve the program format, rules and support. What we're offering: - Google's T-shirt (They always offer to send t-shirts to our contributors) - Participation certificate - Mentoring with one of our main contributors - Recommendation Letter - All the support you'll need to get your project sky rocketed - Better chance to get a job with us whenever we have openings - Some softwares licenses to help you work better with us By March we'll be releasing all the rules and the timeline for all those interested in participating. Stay tunned! Call for Proposals Right now we're defining what projects we'll propose to our students for GSoC and USoC 2010. If you have a great idea, just write it down and send it to us. You don't need to elaborate it as if you were applying for a spot at GSoC or USoC, but you need to clearly explain your idea, how it should be developed, who are the targeted users and any other detail you find useful to clarify your idea. Pictures, mockups, sketches are welcome! The deadline for sending these proposals is 8th March 2010. Kind Regards, --- Adriano Monteiro Marques http://www.thoughtspad.com http://www.umitproject.org http://blog.umitproject.org http://www.pythonbenelux.org "Don't stay in bed, unless you can make money in bed." - George Burns ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ SOLARIS 10 is the OS for Data Centers - provides features such as DTrace, Predictive Self Healing and Award Winning ZFS. Get Solaris 10 NOW http://p.sf.net/sfu/solaris-dev2dev _______________________________________________ Umit-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/umit-devel
