[JDEV] Jabber Advocacy

[David Waite]

-= COBNET =- wrote:

>> From: Julian Missig <julian at jabber.org>
>> Reply-To: jdev at jabber.org
>> To: jdev at jabber.org
>> Subject: Re: [JDEV] Jabber Advocacy
>> Date: Tue, 26 Mar 2002 15:53:00 -0500
>
<snip>

>>
>> It's not likely that you'll be able to convince the sourceforge crew to
>> do anything, no matter how many users want it. There are some, uh,
>> /interesting/ circumstances going on there. Part of the reason we're
>> going to have a mass exodus from sourceforge to jabberstudio is because
>> the future of sourceforge is very questionable and the developers aren't
>> on any kind of regular cycle.
>>
>> Julian
>> -- 
>> email: julian at jabber.org
>> jabber:julian at jabber.org
>>
>
> Why is it actually questionable that sourceforge will come to an end. 
> I must say that I just started to like it! If it would come to an end, 
> will nobody else be able to do a further development of it?
>
> What do you man with "the developers aren't on any kind of regular 
> cycle" (English isn't my native language :( )
>
> Mattias Campe
> (JID: cobnet at jabber.org)

1. Sourceforge is owned by VALinux, a company which has had considerable 
financial difficulties
2. Sourceforge the project was open-sourced, but has been closed in 
order to make the sale of Sourceforge the product more enticing.
3. #2 has caused a bit of an exodus of Free Software projects from 
sourceforge, to the point that several features which made transitioning 
a project from sourceforge before are now disabled.
4. #2 and #3 have caused the sourceforge codebase (and community) to 
fork, see http://savannah.gnu.org

This is ignoring that sourceforge has _never_ had good administration; I 
once had to wait over 30 days to get CVS restored for a project. What 
made this really annoying was that restoring consisted solely of 
untarring the cvs repo I uploaded - but they do not give you shell 
access to the location of the CVS repository. When they finally did 
this, they set the permissions wrong, and after waiting three weeks for 
them to run _that_ one line command, I exploited a hole in their CVS 
installation just so I could finally work on my project again ;-)

The one nice thing about JabberStudio (over sourceforge) is that the 
people administrating it care about the projects on it - otherwise they 
wouldn't have given them hosting space :-) The other nice thing is it is 
a project in itself - a lot of people say that Jabber is 'more than 
Instant Messaging' but integration with an environment like JabberStudio 
is both a great proof of concept and a great opportunity to really 
innovate in this area.

For instance, I would love to get newsfeeds from projects I'm interested 
in. I'd love to get notifications when forums I posted to or topic I 
watched get replies. I would be really interested to get a message when 
someone checks a change into source code control which I've been waiting 
for. It would also be really cool to have a logged, searchable groupchat 
room available for project meetings.

I believe every one of these ideas have been proposed at some point 
already (and plenty more as well), and these are just the tip of the 
iceburg.

-David Waite