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To: noreply@sourceforge.net
Subject: SourceForge: 
From: nobody <nobody@sourceforge.net>
Date: Thu, 22 Feb 2001 01:42:54 -0800

SourceForge update:  February 21st, 2001.

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VA LINUX'S COMMITMENT TO SOURCEFORGE
SUPPORT
TRACKER TOOL
COMPAQ ALPHASERVER PLATFORM IN COMPILE FARM.
LINUX DRIVER DEVELOPMENT PROJECT
-------------

Current Statistics:
16,000 Projects,
125,000 Developers


VA LINUX'S COMMITMENT TO SOURCEFORGE
---
As many of you may know, VA Linux Systems, which owns and manages
SourceForge, released it's 2nd quarter results for fiscal 2001 and also
announced a staff reduction of 25% company wide.

How does this affect SourceForge?  What is VA's commitment to SourceForge?
How is SourceForge making money?

Any company wide reorganization is a difficult process for all who are
involved.  As painful as the process is, this reorganization is actually
good for SourceForge and good for you.

VA Linux is refocusing itself into a number of key areas and one of them is
SourceForge.  This additional focus gives SourceForge additional funding,
more engineers, more hardware, and more support staff to accommodate our
growth and serve the community better.  You'll be seeing a lot of positive
things in the coming months with these additional resources.  (BTW: No one
on the team was let go during the layoffs)

VA's commitment to SourceForge has never been stronger.  The company
recently invested $500,000 in new hardware and we'll continue to add ftp
servers, bandwidth, personnel and other resources necessary to make the
site a continued success.

A number of you have asked about SourceForge's business model, and how VA
can continue to keep SourceForge running for 'free'.  VA has a strong
commitment to the Open Source Community.  It is also generating revenue
from SourceForge and will continue to do so to help support the site and
generate revenue for the company.  SourceForge is currently generating
revenue in three ways.

A) Banner ads on the site. (Page views grew 20% in January alone)

B) Corporate Sponsorships.  This includes hardware in the compile farm and
foundry corporate sponsorships.

C) SourceForge Onsite: This is a service in which we deploy SourceForge's
technology behind a company's firewall so that the company can work
collaboratively to write better software faster internally.

http://www.valinux.com/services/sfos.html
http://www.valinux.com/about/news/releases/020901.html


If you have any specific questions about any information above, please feel
free to write me at pat@sourceforge.net


SUPPORT
---
Good news in the support area.  For those of you who have put in support
requests during the past 60 days, you know there have been delays. I want
to apologize for that.  This has been partially due to the hardware upgrade
in late December, incredible growth in January and some staffing changes
which created a bit of a backlog.

To combat the problem, we've added additional support staff to cut through
the buildup.

We have also recently hired Jacob Moorman, who started two weeks ago in the
role of "Quality of Service Manager".  Jacob's position is to make support
on SourceForge world class, improve the documentation on the site and work
to create tools to make the site easier to administer (such as releasing
locked CVS files).

Jacob is also maintaining the new 'Site Status' page on the site.  The
'Site status' page (the link is located on the left nav bar) is updated
daily and lists all the services available on SourceForge.

Jacob's email address is moorman@sourceforge.net.  Feel free to email him
with suggestions comments and general feedback.



** New Tool** Tracker
---
'Bigdisk' has been putting the finishing touches on a new tool called Tracker.

The new tracker tool combines the functionality of the old bug tracker,
support manager, and patch manager into one tool, along with a bunch of new
features and the ability to create unlimited numbers of additional
trackers, like feature request managers or whatever else you can come up
with.

This powerful new tool will be online within the next 10 days.



COMPAQ ALPHASERVER PLATFORM IN COMPILE FARM.
---
We recently added Compaq Alphas to the SourceForge compile Farm.  This
includes both True 64 on Alpha and Linux on Alpha.  We'll be adding
additional platforms in the coming weeks including Sun Sparc (Solaris and
Linux)and IBM PPC (AIX and Linux).  http://sourceforge.net/compilefarm/




LINUX DRIVER DEVELOPMENT PROJECT
---
Over the past few weeks, we've been working with a few hardware companies
interested in opening up their specs on SourceForge and supporting the Open
Source community's Linux driver development efforts.

Being able to put specs in front of an audience the size of SourceForge is
of tremendous value to companies looking to make their hardware work (or
work better) under Linux. When we talk to these companies, we point to
scores of successful driver projects on the site (from PCMCIA, to printers,
to storage -- 2 of the 10 most active projects are driver-related).

This is a great experiment, and could be a great win for Open Source. To
move things along, we're going to create a foundry and set up resources to
help developers working on Linux driver development.

If this is an itch you'd like to help scratch, subscribe to the Linux
driver development mailing list at:
<linuxdrivers-foundry@lists.sourceforge.net> The more developers that
subscribe and get involved, the easier it will be for us to get more
vendors to open their specs (and the sooner you'll know about it when they
do). [We're especially interested in getting in touch with developers who
are willing to help admin the foundry and recruit vendor participants.]

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