blogs.zdnet.com — Google is about to launch a service for the open source community. The question is, what could it be? Garret Rogers thinks it might be a competitor to Source Forge and Krugle. Greg Stein (the Googler who started this whole thing) has worked on projects like SVN and WebDAV and is currently also the Chairman for the Apache Software Foundation.
Jul 25, 2006 View in Crawl 4
im12envJul 25, 2006
haha oh and Check this out<a class="user" href="http://www.digg.com/tech_news/Google_offers_live_traffic_maps_on_cell_phones">http://www.digg.com/tech_news/Google_offers_live_traffic_maps_on_cell_phones</a>
babblingJul 25, 2006
I agree that an "MSDN clone" would be undesirable. MSDN isn't very pleasant to deal with, but the general idea is a good one. There really should be a general documentation website for Free Software.Have you ever tried getting started as a Free Software developer? Finding out about the various libraries, how to use them, and general conventions used (eg. GNU autotools, how to build a deb package, how to write a man page, etc) isn't very welcoming. There's heaps that could be done to improve this, and if the situation were improved, I have no doubt that there would be a lot more people writing Free Software.I think there is room for a website that puts everything in one place:- Tutorials on how to do very specific things (eg. "making a deb package for your project")- Guides on commonly used libraries (eg. "Getting started with GTK: concepts and structure")- Full API references (eg. "The GTK Reference Manual")- Small example programs
babblingJul 25, 2006
Sensible people do not dislike Microsoft for releasing lots of products.There are good reasons for people to dislike Microsoft:- They put pressure on people to use their products because they use their large market share to push out proprietary file formats, codecs and protocols (DOC, WMV/WMA, .NET, DirectX, etc) that only Microsoft software is allowed to use. They sometimes use software patents to help make sure that no one else may use these formats/codecs/protocols. - Their software isn't very good. (although I think this one is a bit silly, because people should just use something else if they don't like Microsoft software)- Their general support for software patents as a method of preventing competition is disturbing:"If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today’s ideas were invented and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete stand-still today. The solution … is patent exchanges … and patenting as much as we can… . A future start-up with no patents of its own will be forced to pay whatever price the giants choose to impose. That price might be high: Established companies have an interest in excluding future competitors." - Bill Gates, 1991- They try their best to lock users into their solutions. For example, Hotmail doesn't allow forwarding, whereas Gmail does. So if I want to switch from Gmail to Hotmail, Google will allow me to do that. If I want to switch from Hotmail to Gmail, Microsoft won't let me have my mail forwarded. This is a nasty tactic and in the long term I think it will harm Microsoft and benefit Google.People trust Google because Google doesn't screw them over.
commodore128Jul 25, 2006
This could be a very good thing. Source Forge is a nightmare to navigate.
gregorrothfussJul 25, 2006
sourceforge has financial problems, and it makes sense to think about the post-sourceforge world:<a class="user" href="http://greg.abstrakt.ch/archives/2005/10/preparing_for_the_postsourceforge_world.html">http://greg.abstrakt.ch/archives/2005/10/preparing_for_the_postsourceforge_world.html</a>
drewthalerJul 25, 2006
Yes, I have heard of Bugzilla. I was including it in the list of free ones that universally suck. Seriously - if you've used a really good tracker you're painfully aware that Bugzilla doesn't measure up.It gets the job done, sure. But that's just the minimum requirement. :-)