See also: last week's Development page.

Development projects

Why has SourceForge been so successful? It seems that VA Linux clearly saw a gap in the infrastructure available for open source development projects. It is not sufficient to have the source in the open; a living project needs source repositories, bug tracking systems, high-bandwidth download capability, mailing lists, a web presence and more. SourceForge provides all of this via a combination of well-written (open source) software, heavy-duty hardware, and massive bandwidth. Developers who move their projects to SourceForge can concentrate on development; SourceForge makes much of the rest just happen.

SourceForge sounds like a great thing, and it is. But there is one aspect of it that is a cause for concern. Linux and the Internet are, by nature, distributed beasts and better for it. SourceForge has just created, instead, the greatest concentration of free software development that has ever existed. What happens if something goes wrong with SourceForge?

And a lot of things could go wrong. Earthquakes. Crackers. VA Linux Systems goes out of business. Or VA gets acquired by a company that does not share VA's good intentions. Or Larry Augustin retires to Mongolia and is replaced by Steve Ballmer. With the latter scenarios, it is a little disturbing to note that SourceForge's terms of service can be changed at any time without notice. Essentially, SourceForge reserves the right to do anything without telling its users.

SourceForge also has no posted privacy policy (the TOS mentions one, but it's not there - they tell LWN that one is in the works). The value of the SourceForge registration database and mailing lists alone make that lack a bit worrisome. Some of the free mailing list services on the net have done some pretty unethical things with the lists they host. VA's current motives are not in doubt, but companies can change; imagine a scenario where Dell decides to push VA out of the market, VA's stock drops to $7/share, Larry Augustin is shown the door, and a slash-and-burn CEO replaces him. It's not that far-fetched. What then becomes of SourceForge?

Be it by spam, vandalism, natural disaster, or corporate unpleasantness, SourceForge presents a number of scenarios by which free software development, or at least a large portion of it, could be shut down - at least for a while. What the open source development community needs is competition for SourceForge. This statement can be made without criticising SourceForge or VA Linux Systems in any way. One can say "complementary sites" if "competition" does not sit well. But concentrating this much of the free software development process in one spot - any spot - is asking for trouble.

Browsers

Education

Linux Knowledge Base LinuxWorld report. Here is this week's news report from the Linux Knowledge Base project. It takes the form of a report from the LinuxWorld conference. "To be honest, I was rather surprised just how easy it was to get people interested in collaborating together. It really was amazing to me how everyone I talked to wanted to work with us for the benefit of the Linux community. This isn't the same cut-throat world that so many in the Windows world are so painfully aware of." The poor folks also talk about the misfortune of being placed next to the SCO booth.

Linux in Education Report. Here is this week's Seul-EDU Linux in education report. Integration of various education tools seems to be a theme this week, along with a mention of the new K12 Linux site.

LPI Certification has taken a step forward with the announcement of the completion of the merger with Digital Metrics. This merger gives the LPI access to all of Digital Metrics' exam questions. It also gives those who have obtained certification from Digital Metrics a path toward completion of LPI certification.

The LPI has also picked up Maxspeed as a platinum sponsor.

Gaming

On the Desktop

LinuxWorld Gimp status report. Dennis Tenney sent in a brief report on Michael J. Hammel's talk on the Gimp at LinuxWorld this week:

Michael J. Hammel presented a summary of Gimp's past, present and future at the LinuxWorld trade show in New York city on February 3, 2000. The immediate future is a stable 1.2 release in about March or April. This release added too many features, improvements, and just plain cool stuff to list (I took three pages of notes).

Active development is ongoing on the Gimp Hollywood. Developers include folks actively working inside the Hollywood film industry.

The Gimp project is looking for people to help with translation into various languages as they move toward a stable 1.2 release (based on the 1.1 development series). Help is needed with most middle European languages, Japanese and others.

GNOME summary. Havoc Pennington's Gnome Summary for February 2 came out too late for last week's LWN. ome of the news for the week: the Australian Research Council is funding work on a Haskell binding for GNOME, the GNOME Sysadmin Guide is off to a good start, Gnumeric zoom has been implemented, plus documentation, help system and Nautilus news and more.

KDE moves to SourceForge. For those wanting to know more, the KDE project has put up a small FAQ about the move. The main part of the KDE project that is moving to SourceForge is the CVS repository; the FTP server may also move at some point. The web site (www.kde.org) and other resources are staying put for now.

Mosfet at LinuxWorld. More KDE news and development information can be found in Mosfet's report from his trip to LinuxWorld.

Search Engines

Website Development

The path to Zope Zen has been nicely laid out in How-To: Gain Zope Enlightenment By Grokking Object Orientation, posted by Chris McDonough on the Zope.org site. "If you're a nonprogrammer or a programmer who has only a passing understanding of object orientation, this document is for you. If you're an 'OO zealot' already, it's not going to be very helpful. Go watch television instead."

Zope Weekly News for February 9th. This week's Zope Weekly News announces Zope 2.1.4, a bugfix release that has security implications and is therefore recommended.

Wine

Section Editor: Liz Coolbaugh

Project Links
EmbedLinux.net
EMLAB
linux-embedded.com
Gnome
High Availability
ht://Dig
KDE
MagicPoint
Midgard
Mozilla
PHP
YAMS
Wine
Worldforge
Zope

More Information
AppWatch
Freshmeat
LinuxDev

Development tools

Java

Perl

Perl 5.6 beta1. A new development release of Perl, version 5.6 beta1, has been announced. Details on the changes in this release may be found in the release notes.

Python

Here is Dr. Dobb's Python-URL for February 7. It covers the latest in the Python world, and points out some Python poetry...

And here is the Python-URL! for February 3, which arrived too late for last week's LWN. It contains some reminders about upcoming competitions and conferences, links to reports back from the Python conference, ActivateState's decision to join the Python consortium, and a selection of recently released software and books.

Tcl/tk

Here is this week's Dr. Dobb's Tcl-URL with an extensive rundown of recent developments in the Tcl/Tk world.

Section Editor: Liz Coolbaugh

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