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Tell me how this project got started initially.

Sancho: This began about 8 years ago. I was working in a bank as a security consultant, and I had a lot of spare time. I was working with firewalls, with all systems like BSD, Solaris, AiX. I need to monitor different things – strange things – in that system. And with the usual tools from the big ones like Tivoli and HP – it was pretty difficult to extract information from that system. So I started with a few scripts that just collected data and sent it to me, and the thing started to grow up as an experiment for my day to day work, and after a year or two, the whole thing was something more than a few script. Later I have something – a product which was useful to monitor different kinds of servers – unix servers, Windows servers – I started to monitor network equipment. So I thought that could be something I could do for a living, and I started a company with that idea.

Rich: How is the open source edition related to what you do for your company? Are there some things that you add to that in an enterprise version?

Sancho: The most difficult part of the project was how to make profit from an open source project. So at the first versions, until, I think it was in 2007 or 2008, the product was 100% free. Free as open source, and free for people to pay nothing. We saw in that period that it was very difficult to earn money, mainly because – not because of the license – big companies don’t trust you if all is open. It doesn’t seem professional – for some of them, not for all, but I think it’s difficult. So we focused our strategy to identify what parts of the product will be useful only for big companies. So, our enterprise features are only for big companies. It’s not the same to monitor a small company with 20 servers than to monitor 2000 servers. It’s completely different. So, in Pandora FMS I think 80 or 90% of the features are open. Everybody can just download the package and install and use it. There are thousands of servers using the Open Source. But companies like Telefonica, or other companies in Japan like Rakuten, or Casio, need something specific to monitor a lot of systems in a homogenous way. We call it policies. Probably there is a lot of other applications which use the same approach.

Rich: Where did you get the name for the project? Is it related to the greek myth, or is there some other history behind that?

Sancho: Yeah, that’s it. You need something to warn you if something wrong escapes from the unknown. You need to know. The first logo was an octopus inside a box. Later we added the ‘FMS’ – because “Pandora” is too generic, and it was difficult to search in Google. The ‘F’ initially was for ‘Free Monitoring System’, but someone told me that ‘Free’ is a bad marketing word, so we renamed it as ‘Flexible Monitoring System.’

Rich: How does Pandora compare to some of the competition out there like Nagios?

Sancho: We like to think we are better. The real thing is that the Nagios community is huge, and everybody, when you ask, how do you do monitoring in your company or in your experience, everybody thinks Nagios, because Nagios was the first, or the first in importance to the community. I believe Nagios is not evolving in the same way we do. I think the user interface, and letting the user have the complete power from the console, and not need to enter into screens, or start a process from the shell – it’s very important. And also reporting. It’s one of the most important difference between other solutions and Pandora. Monitoring is very very complex. There’s more than 100 applications for monitoring in the market. There’s a lot of differences between each of them. We like to think Pandora is a horizontal approach, that means you can use Pandora for almost any kind of environment you need. Networking, servers, performance, business applications, reporting, even data mining. Of course, you can integrate all the pieces together. Other applications more focussed on performance, or availability, or even management. Pandora likes to put all these features together.

Rich: On the community side, how involved is the community in the development of the code? Is it primarily your company that develops the code, or do you also have participation from an outside community.

Sancho: The first time we started Open Source, we had some developers who were involved in the project. We have a few developers from the US, another one from Europe, another one from New Zealand. But the kind of development help they provided was only for small features, and not for long-time commitment. More like – I think that feature is OK and I would like to help you do that, or give us suggestions, or bug reporting. Later, when we moved to a more enterprise level, trying to focus on the features big companies need, we lost that kind of contribution, but in exchange we got in contact with companies which were interested in helping us to adapt Pandora to their needs. At this moment we have a full committer relationship, not only for development issues, also about business relationships, with a company in Japan, one of our partners. They have six people in their development team. All of them have access to the repository code. and we have also a company in Ecuador who are helping us also with some development. And we increase a lot of people giving us suggestions, ideas, and of course bug reporting. We have a very populated tracking server – Very active.

Rich: What is in the future for your project? What sorts of new things are you looking at doing in the coming year?

Sancho: We are now working in two different versions. We call it the stable version – we’re probably releasing any time now. It contains just a few new features and a lot of bug fixes, like usual in this kind of development. But we are working also in the next minor version – version 5.2. We are doing now a lot of huge improvements. We are adding the NetFlow feature to Pandora, for free, for Open Source. And we also are adding a new layer for management of different sites of Pandora. We call it metaconsole. We’ll provide a service provider to offer monitoring services to other companies, and be able to manage, why not, 10,000 servers from a single console.

One of the first things I had clear when I started Pandora was that the product should be on SourceForge. Because SourceForge was, for me, the source of knowledge about Open Source projects. It’s the site to be on – to be there. At first we had problems with the product name because it was taken. I had to wait two years until the Pandora name was free again. That’s because your site is really important on the Internet. If it’s an Open Source product, it should be on SourceForge.

Rich: Thank you Sancho for taking the time to speak with me.

Sancho: Thank you too.

JStock is free stock market software. Its intent is to help you invest intelligently, and have fun while you’re doing it. I recently had the pleasure of speaking with Yan Chen Cheok, who is the lead developer on this project. He told me some things about the history leading up to JStock becoming Open Source, and also a little bit about the project itself.

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Rich: Congratulations on the project of the month!

Yan: Oh, thank you very much. I’m really happy about that.

Rich: Let’s talk a little bit about the project. Tell us what JStock does.

Yan: It’s a stock market software, where the object is to make your stock investment fun and easy. The reason we make this software is we want to make the stock investing activity an easy process even for the beginner to the stock market.

Rich: How many of you are involved in this project?

Yan Currently I’m the only main developer. But from time to time I will receive some code contributions from my users – they do some language translation for me, or they see some bug in the bug tracker and they send me code patches, and so on. From time to time I will receive some code patches from them, but most of the time I’m still the only developer fro this project.

Rich: You received a lot of votes for the project of the month, so I take it you have a lot of happy and content users. Where do you think most of your users are in the world?

Yan: Currently most of my users are in Malaysia, because I’m Malaysian myself. Because when I first created this project, I did a lot of marketing and promotion among my own investment community – I tried to talk to them, I tried to introduce this software to them. So this spread from mouth to mouth, so it ended up my users are pretty concentrated in a certain geographic location. I also tried to promote this overseas, like in the United States, but it didn’t work so well because I don’t know much of the investing community out there. I’m only familiar with the community around me.

Rich: Why did you choose to make the software open source?

Yan: I think this needs to go back a few years ago. When I started this project initially, I did not intend to make it Open Source. I started the project because at UCLA I got a contract software project from the stock industry. They wanted someone to create a customized software project for their stock education center. After I finished the software, they refused to pay for the project.

Rich: Oh no!

Yan: Yeah, that’s not a good thing. At first I was quite upset with that because I spent so much effort and time into finishing the project, and I’m not getting paid. Then I was thinking, instead of throwing away the source code, or just letting this software die, why don’t I open source it, and make it grow. If I look back in my code committing history, I see … I think that happened around 2007, August. So I think that’s the time when it got started. It began from a failed software contract project, and I grew it to become an Open Source project with the help of SourceForge.

Rich: That’s a good story. It could have gone much worse.

Yan: I think it’s a good thing, though. If I sold it to them, maybe I’d only get a few hundred users, but now I made it Open Source, and published it on SourceForge, the world-wide users also can enjoy this software. It’s quite a satisfaction for this.

Rich: Again, thank you very much for speaking with me, and congratulations on winning project of the month.

Yan: Oh, thanks.

Rich: If people want to get involved in your project, should they get in touch with you, or should they talk on the forums, or what?

Yan: In our project website, within the wiki, I describe how the code contribution process should go on. So basically they just need to go through any feature request or bug report in the tracker, they can pick up the ticket, then email me a code patch. So, if they do that process several times, then I will give them commit rights. But so far most of the time I only receive only one-time contributions from the contributors, so I still am not able to make them a long-time committer for the project.

Rich: Thank you very much. I wish the best on your project!

If you want to work on this project, join the conversation in the Rigs of Rods forum.

If you’d like to have your project featured on the SourceForge podcast, just drop me a note and we’ll schedule something.

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Rich: How would you describe the concept of “soft body physics” to somebody that’s not familiar with it? What does that mean?

Thomas: There are two principle concepts on how physics work in games or simulations. One side is rigid body physics, and one side is soft body physics. Rigid body physics is an abstraction of an object of how it should behave, in a bigger approach. Like, you describe a car as a box with four wheels attached to it. This is usually the way that rigid body physics works. What we’re doing with soft body physics is we go one level deeper. We describe not how a car should behave, or how a box should behave. We describe how mass points behave, and interaction between those mass points.

Rich: Tell me a bit about the history of the game. How did you get involved doing this?

Thomas: The game itself started in 2005, I think. Pierre-Michel is the original author of that software. He had the idea of doing physics in games differently than it used to be in games. He thought he could do a better job then they were doing, and he started out with the idea, with the node/beam physics. And so it evolved, and it got quite a community around it, and I joined the project in 2007. In 2009, it got open sourced. So, lots of progress since then.

Rich: I was playing the game this morning, and I was impressed by how many vehicles there were, and the incredible level of detail of the individual vehicles. Do those come from the community, or are those all developed by the core team?

Thomas: All of the content that you can download – I think we have thousands of modifications for the game online – and all of those modifications are made by the community. We have currently 43,000 members in the forums. It’s quite hard to create a mod. It’s not that easy. But if you learn how to do it, Rigs of Rods can give you simulation details that not many other simulators can give you. So you can tune your car or your truck or your vehicle to the last bit you would like to. People really like to do that stuff and simulate how it would behave in real life. They love the amount of detail the physics gives them. This is why they give so much detail into creating the models.

Rich: I also spent some time this morning watching car crash videos on YouTube. There are lots of those, and, again, there, the level of detail is really impressive.

Thomas: The crash physics is something that evolves from the way we’re doing physics. Instead of doing rigid bodies, like – a car is a box – we do node/beams. Nodes are the mass points, and beams are the connections between. So, when you design a truck, it’s not like you start designing a truck. It’s more like you design a skeleton in the shape of a truck. And when it all comes together, you put on wheels – that are in the shape of a wheel. And when you start driving, it behaves like a truck. So, we don’t have any specific code in there for trucks or for cars, except for the wheel acceleration. The bonus of that is if you crash something like that against a wall, it will behave correctly. So the automobile industry has been using that idea for years – since the 1970s or something – to simulate car crashes, so that they don’t have to crash a real car. What we’re doing is a very simplified version of this concept. We’re doing the same thing with node pass points, just very simplified so it’s possible to run it in realtime, which is quite an effort to get working.

Rich: The actual physics that are behind the game … is it something that is fairly common in the gaming world now, or are most games of a much simpler physics model?

Thomas: We released the software in 2009 publicly, as a GPL project, and currently there’s no other games that use it to this level. There were some games that use the same concept, but not to the level where we’re doing it. The problem in the industry is that the industry always sticks to proven models and proven things. If you would like to introduce soft body physics in a game, you would have to prove that it’s working out, and you have to fit all these requirements. For example, if you develop a triple-A game, it should run on all consoles, and iPads, and whatever. So you have quite some barriers. Nowadays, almost all games use rigid body physics, because of the computing time. I always try to compare it with bottom-up and top-down physics – our physics is … we give you a sample of how to put mass points and connections between them, and it’s your problem if stuff is not working. In traditional games, you have a box, and some wheels, and the coder will then tune this box and wheels as long as the thing behaves as a truck or something you would like to have. What we’re doing is that we give people that create the vehicles the ability to create it on their own, so they have to fit to the simulator, not the other way around. So everything you see in there is realistically as much as it can get. If you would do it in real life with mass and values like that, it will behave like that exactly.

Rich: One of the features that you have introduced recently is the ability to play this multiplayer. Are there a lot of people playing this multiplayer, or is this still an experimental thing?

Thomas: Let me quickly look at the server table … yes, there are lots of players online right now, and there are lots of players playing this multiplayer. However, there are in the current version quite some problems playing multiplayer, like, you cannot collide, and things like that. So we’ll need to work more on the multiplayer part. What we have worked on in the last week was a user linking table, so that users could race in the terrains, and the races are then recorded in an online database, and you can collect points. We didn’t think that it would be used that much. But the people spent 417 hours doing 14,400 races on 2500 vehicles on 64 terrains. So, it’s quite used. And people fight about points. So it’s nice, and it adds some gameplay to the sandbox.

Rich: Before we started recording you mentioned … when we were chatting, that there still a lot to do. If someone wanted to become involved in your development community … two questions really. What is there that they could do, and secondly, what sort of skills would be necessary for them to become involved?

Thomas: Since Rigs of Rods is not using a game engine below, we are working on all areas – sound, networking, multiplayer, and graphics, obviously. So we have developers who are working specific parts like sound engine and 3D sound, or networking and then the multiplayer stuff. So we can feature every aspect a developer would like to work on. We have developers that are working just on the scripting part, and developers that are just very specifically working on some features in the game engine itself. Whatever you’re interested in, just tell us, and we can find some spot there. There’s lots of work left on all corners. There are thousands of bugs in there, and on the new version, 0.4, we have a new terrain system that isn’t working completely yet. So that needs a lot of work as well. So please contact us, and we’ll find a slot that’s available for work, and find what we can do.

Rich: You have a very international community with your project. Tell us something more about your translation effort. I see that you have dozens of different languages here that translations are available in. And I know that translation is always an area where many people can get involved even if they don’t have programming experience. So tell us how someone would get plugged in here.

Thomas: We have lots of people who apply to be a translator, and there is lots of translation work going on. We have 700 items that need to be translated per language. And, it’s very simple. You register on our website and apply as a translator. It’s a very simple process. The translation gets used when a user installs the software. So your work will directly influence everyone in the world. For example, we have people translating our software into Japanese, and I was very excited the first time I saw a screenshot with japanese characters on it. It’s awesome that people spend their time to create these translations in their own time.

Rich: When you do translations, I presume you’re using the standard .po files and …

Thomas: Yes, exactly, we use .po and .mo files. It’s the traditional approach, yes.

Rich: So someone who was doing translation for another project could very easily take several projects and do translation efforts on them.

Thomas: Yes. We have written a custom web interface because we would like to have the users translate stuff in a more multi-player fashion, and you can translate stuff directly online. But you can always download the .po file and translate offline and later upload it. It’s a custom web service, but … the online project management tools that were out there didn’t fit our requirements, so we wrote our own thing.

Rich: Once again, congratulations on this honor, and we look forward to seeing more things from your project in the future.

Thomas: Thank you very much, and thank you for the interview.

Rich: October’s project of the month is ProjectLibre, an Open Source alternative to Microsoft Project. Now, as it happens, I spoke with Marc O’Brien of the ProjectLibre project just a few weeks ago. So, in this conversation we focused more on the community aspects of the project, rather than on the technical and functional aspects. Here’s my conversation with Marc.

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Rich: Hi, Marc. Congratulations for being project of the month. I also see you had a record download day yesterday.

Marc I noticed that. I gotta tell you, that is highly appreciated not just by us, but I got so much feedback from the community. People were really pleased, because we really want to focus this and make sure that we can get the progress with it, and part of that’s the user feedback. And so more people using it and getting us feedback the better. So that was excellent. One of the other interesting things – and you and I talked about it last time – I’ve got a personal interest in the geographic dispersion of it. And I’ve been tracking not just the downloads, but the countries. We were stuck on 136 countries for about a week, and with that change, we bumped up to, I think 140 or 141.

Rich: 142. 142 countries.

Marc I need to refresh my screen. Since this morning, two more countries have … that speaks volumes right there. Because I checked first thing this morning, and it was at 140. You’re right. 142.

Rich: This is cool.

Marc It really is. And you and I talked about Africa last time. I do think that Open Source software in general, but this in particular, can have a disproportionate benefit, not numbers-wise, but impact-wise, all over the world. That’s a really cool thing.

Rich: Last time we talked specifically about your project and its history. And that wasn’t so very long ago. Let’s talk a little bit about why you think that this project is important in those countries.

Marc There’s been a lot of progress made in Open Source software for productivity applications and business applications. And you can look no farther than just OpenOffice and LibreOffice, and see the impact that they have will millions and millions of users, and really a very nice alternative to the Office suite from Microsoft. You can look at Google as far as the cloud. Office includes Microsoft Project. Obviously, they have a dominant market share in the project management category. And part of the Office umbrella includes Project. And it turns out that about 7% of all desktops not only include your normal Office suite, but also Microsoft Project. In the ecosystem of Open Source software, it’s very difficult to make that jump as a business, be it a large business or a small business, over to Open Source software if you don’t have complementary packages across the board. You could look at it at first blush and say, 7% is not a big number, but even in a small/medium business, with downwards of 100 employees, you’re still talking about seven desktops that need an alternative in the Open Source space. ProjectLibre is that alternative, so that you can actually open up Microsoft Project files, be it on Linux, Mac, or Windows, and you’ve got an alternative. So that the impact of ProjectLibre is pretty wide spread, because it will allow companies to really deploy Open Source applications on the desktop such as OpenOffice or LibreOffice.

Rich: So far as the third world goes, there’s an enormous amount of illegal software use. Your project and ones like it also fill a role there. Can you talk a bit about that?

Marc I really feel passionately about this because it is a moral dilemma, around the world, whether you manage your project on a spreadsheet or whether you pay $1000 a copy for Microsoft Project or other proprietary vendors. Sometimes we look in the prism of the North American economy, and we see piracy here. Piracy around the world is a moral dilemma – they’re really figuring out whether they can effectively manage projects on a spreadsheet or whether they need to pirate, because the money’s not there. ProjectLibre gives them a free alternative that not only can manage the projects at the same level of functionality and features but also lets them potentially save it out if they have to interact with someone with the proprietary software so that you can actually exchange schedules. I think that the impact on this world-wide will be very significant, because projects are occurring all over the world – Africa, Asia, India, South America – and we can see that by the usage statistics as well.

Rich: And of course that’s not merely in technology businesses. Everyone has projects they have to manage.

Marc That’s exactly right. Project management itself as a discipline is a very interesting discipline. People get their PhDs now, and their Masters degrees, in the project management discipline. Architecture, engineering, and construction is a big segment. Pharmaceuticals is a big segment. Projects occur across the board and it’s very horizontal as far as the applicability.

Marc The community, as well – we are thrilled with the community. The ProjectLibre community at ProjectLibre.org is approaching 1000 people. And I had high expectations for the community involvement, but obviously people are voluntarily joining, and those numbers for one month are just tremendous for us. And we’re trying to manage the community effectively, and we’ll continue to refine how we do that. It’s really been wonderful to see almost 1000 people join the community in the first month.

Rich: I assume that these are primarily users of the software. Are you also seeing code contributions yet?

Marc No, we’re not. We’re seeing contributions from the community. The contributions are primarily on the documentation side, as well as the translations side. The code contributions right now has really been smaller for the team, and I need to give a shout out to the co-founder, Laurent Chretienneau, who is over in France, and is just doing an amazing job with the group. But the code contributions right now are occurring internally, because it’s very complex, with a lot of the bugs being fixed. But the community has really reached out in regards to translations, be it Chinese, Arabic, Spanish, French, Italian … I could keep going. But it’s really been great to get those kind of contributions. But primarily the community is doing a lot of bug testing for us. WIth 1000 people, and growing rapidly, it’s going to be really beneficial for the entire project.

You and I have been focusing on the fact that it’s in 142 countries. But in the United States, about 22% of the downloads are from the United States, and we’re seeing community members from Fortune 500 companies and they’re readily endorsing us. And so we’re getting great feedback. I unfortunately don’t have permission yet to use names, but suffice it to say it’s actually Fortune 10 level companies that are readily adopting it. It really is cool. In one particular instance, are doing so not just domestically, but also with some of their international operations. For them, they’re able to do this effectively because of the interoperability with existing proprietary tools, a.k.a. Microsoft Project. So that as they’re rolling this out, it can be augmenting what they currently have deployed and send the files back and forth. In short order, I want to get a case study out there so that this can really be much more publicized with specific information. But I think that’s one of the things that’s really been gratifying in addition to the global usage, but also the fact that it’s spanning from small/medium enterprises up to, like I said, a Fortune 10. So that’s really great.

Rich: Marc, thank you very much for talking with me again. And I look forward to seeing your download numbers continue to grow.

Marc Rich, I really appreciate it. Thanks for all the support, and it was a pleasure speaking with you again as well. Thanks.

If you’d like to have your project featured on the SourceForge podcast, just drop me a note and we’ll schedule something.

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Rich: First of all, congratulations on the release of your beta.

Marc: Thank you.

Rich: Tell us something about the history of this project. I know that it’s changed its name in the last little bit. Take us back to the beginning and tell us where you’ve been and where you’re going.

Marc: I actually got my start in project management software back in the mainframe days with a company called PSDI, that some people would remember, and then migrated to a DOS-based company that won product of the year by InfoWorld back in the 90s. The founding team has a strong legacy going back to the DOS, Windows days, along with the first team collaboration solution called WebProject. WebProject got acquired, and it kind of terminated the mission which was for Web-based team collaboration and project management software. We launched Progeny, and Progeny had two components, one being the Open Source component, OpenProj, and the other was a cloud component called Project On Demand. That was acquired by Serena Software, and their interest was the cloud computing component, which was Project On Demand. The Open Source component, which is OpenProj, has laid dormant for the last four years. We see it as an important component of the Open Source. So we came back and we rewrote a significant portion of it as ProjectLibre. That’s where ProjectLibre comes from. We are the original founders, and we were the sole developers, of OpenProj as well. And the ProjectLibre product now is release in beta, and we’re really doing a big push with the community. We’ve got a community site out there. It’s been downloaded in the first day in over 65 countries, so I think it’s off to a nice start.

Rich: Where has the project management space gone since we last saw a release of this software?

Marc: That’s a very interesting question, Rich. The project management industry has been dominated by Microsoft. One of the reasons you don’t see many competitors out there is that their market share is so enormous. Maybe we’re foolish to go after them with this Open Source solution. I would say that the biggest move that’s happened in project management software was Oracle acquiring Primavera, which is an excellent company that was very dominant in the Architecture, Engineering and Construction arena – the AEC market – and that, once again, got rolled into Oracle. Microsoft themselves just continues to make this a significant portion of the Office suite. The last estimates we knew, over 6% of all desktop deployments of Office actually contain Project as well. It’s an important component of their revenue stream. It has been four full years since Progeny was acquired, and the commits at SourceForge, and the commits in general, really haven’t occurred in the last four years. Microsoft has come out with Project 2010, and the conversion to Project 2010 was very strong, so the current Open Source tools out there don’t have compatibility. It’s very complex, and so we spent a good deal of the last year writing the import/export round trip capability so that ProjectLibre can simply open existing Project 2010 files and you can actually store them back if you wanted to round-trip it.

Rich: So, what sort of functionality are we talking about?

Marc: It runs the gamut from gantt charts, pert charts, resource, everything from cost controls where you can have actual cost work performed, budgeted cost work performed, you can do all the costing. It’s very very complex software, as far as the behind-the-scenes software goes, and to completely provide round-trip access means we have to have the equivalent functionality. There are even things like different calendars on resources, different calendars on tasks, and projects themselves. Vacation time, cost escalators, if you have overtime costing, or if you want to bill a resource with a different costing structure for different projects. Those are the kind of things outside the “meat and potatoes” of a gantt chart and making tasks. It’s really complex software to replicate in an Open Source project, but that’s what ProjectLibre has.

Rich: You have a release coming out in … what, a couple days now?

Marc: Yes. We put the first beta up there. The community really wanted to see it, so we put that out. We’ve got a release coming out over the weekend, over the long weekend here, it’s going to be a beta 2, and it’ll have installers for Windows and Mac – the .dmg. Actually, the .msi is available right now for Windows. That was uploaded this morning, so there is an installer for that. We’ll have another release next week.

Rich: If somebody wanted to get involved in this project, it sounds like it’s kind of complex and people would have to know quite a bit. Are there places where somebody could start plugging in who didn’t have the entire stack in their mind yet?

Marc: Absolutely. We’ve actually gotten, even pre-release, a lot of contributions. On the translation end, on the documentation end, we even have someone from Africa send us ideas so far as logo changes. So there’s some graphic components there. And we do have a community site, at www.projectlibre.org. People can sign up there and become part of the community. I think documentation, integrations with other software … we’ve had companies contact us who want to integrate in. So I think there’s a number of areas. I think your assessment has some merit as far as the guts of the programming engine itself is very complex. It’s something that, deep knowledge of project management and programming is required, but there’s so much else we can get help on and we really want this to be a community-driven project.

Rich: Is there anything else that your project is trying to accomplish?

Marc: The one other thing is that this is project for the desktop. So this is a replacement of Microsoft Project for the desktop. We’re also in development of a replacement of Microsoft Project Server. That was actually our original mission, was to product a replacement of Microsoft Project Server. Our assumption was that the current Open Source desktop solution would suffice, but when we dug into it, there was just too much that needed updating, and so we really spent the good part of the year updating to release ProjectLibre desktop. But we are going to have a server-side solution as well, and that’s going to be something very new for the marketplace. There’s a lot of complexity to it but our engine is robust enough that the server-side will really be something that the community will embrace I believe.

Rich: Thanks so much for talking with me.

Marc: I really appreciate it, Rich, and I’ll keep you updated on the project.

If you’d like to have your project featured on the SourceForge podcast, just drop me a note and we’ll schedule something.

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Rich: Tell me about OpenMRS. Tell me how it got started, and what your involvement is.

Ben: The idea for OpenMRS was hatched eight year ago … eight or more years ago. Burke Mamlin and and Paul Biondich went over to Kenya and they were tasked with helping fix an EMR that an installation was using there. The term “EMR” is used very loosely – it was just an Access database. But they had 10,000 patients, and so they wanted to be able to keep track of them and do various informatics types of queries and reports and all that. Burke and Paul realized that they wouldn’t be able to just fix what they had, so they started working on a data model for a complete system. And that’s the core of OpenMRS – the data model and how well things are structured to allow any kind of diseases, or data input, really. About the same time, Hamish Fraser at PIH, was realizing that the system that they were using was going to need an overhaul. Their system was actually pretty complex. It was just spaghetti code that was all over the place, so they wanted a clean start. Mutual friends got Hamish, Burke, and Paul together, and they started the collaboration that is OpenMRS. I came on board less than a year later as the first developer. And so I’ve been with OpenMRS since the beginning.

Rich: Are you actually from Kenya?

Ben: I’m not from Kenya. My dad was born there. My parents grew up there as missionary kids. I’ve gone over there a couple times a year since I started. I spent most of last year over in Kenya, because we’re adopting a little Kenyan girl, so that process is long and involved.

Rich: I grew up in Nairobi, myself. The guys that I talked to at OSCON told me that the project had strong ties to Kenya. Where else is OpenMRS being used?

Ben: OpenMRS is used in 72 different countries that we know about. Those are just from various surveys and different download stats that we keep. We don’t actually know the full extent because we don’t have any tracking software. And it’s kind of the Firefox model, where people download it and install it and customize it and use it, and the only time we hear from them is if they have a problem. We know of some of the bigger implementations in South Africa, Rwanda, India. There’s some in Central America. I know of only one in Southeast Asia area, I think it’s in Vietnam. There’s a few in the US, but they’re typically these smaller clinics that operate kind of like a developing world clinic, which is what OpenMRS … we try to hit that outpatient clinic that’s able to help patients and help the managers write reports. There’s a big push right now to make OpenMRS a nationwide system in Rwanda and the Gambia, and … there’s one other country … they haven’t actually come to us for help but we just heard through the grapevine that they want to do that. There’s a pretty wide footprint that we cover. And it’s always fun to hear from people that I don’t’ know that OpenMRS is this big player in the medical records space whereas we have no marketing budget, or any kind of advertising that we do, it’s just kind of spreads.

Rich: Tell us what the software does. Give us an overview of the functionality and how people are using it in the world.

Ben: OpenMRS was written as a patient-based medical records system. Our initial goal wasn’t supply hospitals with a full system where they could do scheduling and billing and insurance and all that stuff. It’s to improve patient care. And the way to do that is through getting the data back to physicians. If the physician sees that there’s value in the system, he’s going to keep using it. So, getting the physician to enter data, and then he see that again, and see the alerts on patients, or reminders … those pieces of information are huge and get the physician to keep using it.

We can convince the actual organizations to start using it by nice easy reports they can get out of OpenMRS. That makes everybody’s life easier. Under the hood, OpenMRS stores all the data in a very coded way. Or, at least, pushes people towards doing it in a coded way, so that doing those reports, doing reminders, those kind of things are very easy to write because things are stored with numbers and IDs instead of free text that has to be searched. OpenMRS is a modular architecture. We can facilitate new features that we don’t quite agree with – something that wouldn’t get into the core of OpenMRS. So people have come along and said, well, we really need to do billing, so we’ll write a billing module. We need to connect with this insurance company, so we’ll write an insurance company module. And there’s a big push now to get OpenMRS into regional hospitals. So, in Rwanda, and India, there are large development teams that are writing different modules to do the workflow within a hospital. That’s pretty cool to see. Groups that are outside of our core team doing their thing and customizing OpenMRS to their needs.

Rich: Are those modules contributed back so that they’re available to other end users?

Ben: A lot of them are. Some of the ones that are contributed back aren’t immediately usable in another country because they’ve coded it in a way that is specific to their workflow. As much as we can, if we can get a word in early in development, we’ll encourage people to write it in a general way so that they can either collaborate with developers in another country, or that they can share it and somebody can easily use it and build upon what they’ve done. It’s unfortunate … what we’ve found is writing something in a general way as opposed to just a quick hack to get your specific use case done usually about doubles the amount of development time. There’s use case gathering, and designing and whatnot, that will go into the development of something generic and that adds a lot of time. When teams are able to invest the extra time to make it generic, they will, but the majority don’t have that luxury. An implementation is always running tight on time and need to have a solution yesterday.

Rich: OpenMRS is an Open Source software project obviously, but is there also an organization that is behind this, driving it?

Ben: Only recently. For the longest time, we just had our parent organizations – the Regenstrief Institute and Partners in Health, and Columbia University, and Kwazulu-Natal University in South Africa. But last year, we started making an OpenMRS Inc., a foundation that’s able to be the non-profit behind the software.

Rich: And where does funding for that come from?

Ben: We’re funded by grants from the larger funding organizations, like the WHO, CDC, IDRC up in Canada … They’ll fund us for either smaller projects that typically would be … go to this country, and do this thing, write this feature for this country. And we can do it in half the time, by writing it on the OpenMRS platform, and then the other half the time, we write general features and further OpenMRS in its general features. But the way funding and granting works, it’s kind of a behind-the-scenes thing. Only recently did some of the granting organizations realize that there is power in the platform, and that all of the different implementations that are using OpenMRS, that they are funding, would actually do better by some of their money coming directly to the OpenMRS organization to make the platform more robust and stronger, instead of just funding somebody to go and install OpenMRS and use it. So we’re not funded by actually doing implementations. We have no stake in a hospital somewhere. We let the community drive those implementations. The universities or consultants will go and actually do the work of installing it and making sure it’s running. There’s a thousand things you have to worry about when you’re running a clinic, that we’d need a much larger organization if OpenMRS was going to do that.

Rich: I was at OSCON [a few weeks ago] and I met some of your colleagues there, and we were attending an evening session on humanitarian open source software. Are you in touch with a larger network of organizations that do this kind of humanitarian non-profit software purely in human interest situations like this?

Ben: A fair number of them. We have a regular call which I think they’ve just labelled the HFOSS call, with a number of groups – I’m not even sure who all is on it – but I’ve joined when I have knowledge on the topic to add, and it’s groups like MIFOS that do microfunding, there’s another lab information software, there’s logistics software, there’s a few different ones that are larger in the space and have knowledge to provide and there’s a bunch of groups that come just to glean the knowledge that we have and ask questions and get answers. It is a small community. There’s definitely not as many groups doing humanitarian software as there should be.

Rich: One of the things that was mentioned at that session was the difficulty in finding volunteer developers to work on these projects. One of the things that was cited in that is that, typically, in Open Source, people work on stuff that interests them, that’s for their own use, that scratches an itch, as the saying goes. And that in HFOSS, you’re working on software that you’ll probably never use yourself. If people were interested in getting involved in software for the public good, software for the benefit of people that they might not even meet, where could they plug in? Do you have specific tasks that maybe people could plug into?

[See how you can get involved!]

Ben: We actually get a fair number of volunteers that will stumble across the project and just want to help. I talk with a few people that say that they write software during the day that helps a furniture manufacturer make more money, and so when they go home they want to actually use their skills for something that will help other people. And so we get those kind of people. There’s a few that are developing world programmers that see that it’s used in their country, and they say, that’s great, we think this is great software, and want to add to it. So having that humanitarian bent really gives us an advantage over some random library in Linux, because I very much agree that if you’re not using the software, then you’re probably not going to want to program for it, but because we’re doing good in the world, developers will see that, and say, that’s great, I want to provide some help for that. I think the Summer of Code is a good example of this. I don’t know if you’re familiar with what Google does every year. And when they list out the hundred and forty some projects, a lot of the applicants for that are from overseas. 75, 80% or more are from overseas, because the stipend for the summer is much larger than they would make. And when they see our project, and see that we’re working in their country, we get a lot of applications. We’ve been blessed by Google because we get a lot of applications to our project, that we’re able to have more students, as compared to some other Open Source project, that might not be working for the common good, or in a developing country.

Rich: What are your Summer of Code students working on this summer?

Ben: I think we have sixteen students this year. Most of them are working on modules. OpenMRS – again, I’ll compare it to Firefox. We have pluggable modules that people can write that will modify any part of the system. So, at a clinic that wants to add a page to manage their thingmajig inventory doesn’t need to come to us and say, hey, I think this is a great feature, you should put it in here. They can just write a module and install it in their system, and be done with it. We’ve found that the best way and the fastest way to get things written and tested and get it into the hands of implementers is to put it into a module. So we try to put all students on a module if we can. Most of them are doing that. They’re writing things like, the ability to customize a patient summary – the one-page abstract that a doctor sees. My student is working on an HTML5 type of canvas that will allow a doctor at point of care to draw what he’s seeing. Maybe there’s a lesion on the hand, and he needs to mark where that is, so he’s able to actually draw that out right there on that form. This year’s crop is actually really good. I’m impressed with all the students so far. We require that they do a presentation at midterm, on one of our weekly developer calls, and they have to present what they’ve done so far. Almost all of them have presented something and they are almost done with their task. And it looks to be almost immediately usable by implementation.

Rich: Thanks a lot for taking the time to talk to me.

Audio editing by Audacity. Intro music by Arianne.

If you’d like to have your project featured on the SourceForge podcast, just drop me a note and we’ll schedule something.

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Related Content:

• Technical paper discussing Malware Classifier
• Slides from conference presentations

Here’s my conversation with Karthik.

Rich: We’re talking about the Malware Classifier.

Karthik: Right. It’s a project up on the Adobe Open Source site, it’s called Malware Classifier.

Rich: Tell me something about the Malware Classifier. What is it trying to accomplish?

Karthik: It’s a tool that uses a machine learning algorithm to try to quickly determine whether a binary under analysis – a Win32 binary – is malware possibly, or a clean file. It uses four machine learning algorithms that were generated by running certain classifiers against a data set of about 100,000 malicious programs, and 16,000 clean programs. This is part of some research I did when I was a grad student at U.C. Irvine, and something I continued to do when I started working at Adobe about a year and a half ago. The tool released on SourceForge is a culmination of the research I did and it incorporates the distilled versions of four of the six classifiers that I used in my research.

Rich: When you say it uses a machine learning algorithm, does it have a feedback loop where you tell it whether it’s correct or not, and then it learns further from that, or it’s just based on the data that it’s already got?

Karthik: It’s more the latter. There’s no learning happening within the source code itself. It’s a result of training that happened in advance by training the classifiers against the data set that we discussed a minute ago. The results of that training was incorporated into the script. If you think about it, it really is simple. I’ve labelled the four algorithms that I’m using – the classifiers that I’m using. If you look at the python source code, there’s a bunch of decision trees that incorporate the learning that the algorithms experienced when they were training with the data set, and my hope is really that people will look at this stuff, and if they’re interested in machine learning and malware classification, either use the tool themselves, or extend it by running their own machine learning algorithm, and extending the current four set of classifiers or writing their own classifiers.

Rich: I’m curious if your research gave you any idea of how the classification of “malicious” might evolve over time. Would a tool like this run on today’s software work on software from six years ago, or six years in the future, do you think? Do the “malicious” techniques tend to persist over time?

Karthik: I have to take a couple of steps back and talk about what it is that these classifiers use to make a determination of whether something is possibly malicious, or something is clean. I used a technique called “feature reduction”. The end product of my research was that I identified seven features within the file format these binaries are compiled in – the file format is called the P.E., or portable executable format – essentially the values these seven features that are compared in a large decision tree in each of the four classifiers. The second aspect of your question is, would the classifiers be relevant to data or files from six years ago or files that are compiled in the future. I think in general, the problem in machine learning is there is a possibility of training our models to fit the data at hand – sort of over-fitting the problem, and I accept that’s a valid concern here as well because, for example, I only had 16,000 clean programs to train with, and I had 100,000 malicious programs, so you could argue that the algorithm learned that malicious programs all share the characteristics of of those 100,000 files, and clean programs all share only the characteristics of the 16,000 files. So there’s the disparity in the size of the data set, and also the specificity of the files that are used in this data set. The overall purpose of this project was to evangelize the idea that one could use machine learning and use it with a limited number of features to solve a problem within given parameters with an established false positive and true positive rate. I don’t expect this program to be used commercially, it’s just the idea that I’m trying to spread by the use of this tool.

Rich: Are you looking for a community of people to become involved in this project to move it forward, or is it pretty much done?

Karthik: I’ve given talks at a few conferences on this topic, and I’m hoping the community would look at that research and if they’re interested, pick it up. I’ve outlined the methods and techniques and given the background on how someone could be introduced into machine learning and follow the train of research that I did myself. So, yes, I’m hopeful that other people look at this and build on it themselves for their own environment. One example that comes to mind readily is, a lot of people work in research or analysis for I.T. companies. The application of research like this is that they could look at unknown binaries that their environments receive, and if their antivirus programs are in lag, they could train their models over time with the binaries in their environment, and then extent the script so that it grows for their particular environment. I am hopeful that the community picks up on this idea and goes to town with it.

There’s one aspect that I covered when I was speaking about this research at conferences – it’s that you need to be a domain expert in whatever domain you’re trying to apply machine learning in. There is the necessity that you understand what you’re doing when you’re trying to apply machine learning to that domain. So, I have some experience being a malware analyst, and that helped me along the way as I was determining which features to use in machine learning. I think in the end it comes back to looking at the research. There’s technical papers, there’s hundreds of slides that have been published, and there’s the source code that’s available, so I’m really hopeful that people out there who are keen on machine learning, which is, in my opinion, an underutilized technique in computer security in general, I’m hopeful that this research is at the vanguard of what people are interested in doing in the community and they look at the paper, the slides, and the tools, and build on it, and help make security better for everyone.

Rich: That’s really an interesting point. I think that people not involved with this field of programming tend to assume that you just sic the computer on things and it figures stuff out. It’s interesting that you point that out.

Karthik: This isn’t a panacea. You can make it fit to your problem, but you have to have some knowledge about the problem so that the solution can be brought to bear correctly.

Rich: Thanks so much for taking a few minutes to talk to me.

Karthik: My pleasure, Rich.

Paul Hunt, who is the designer of these fonts, is actually on vacation this week. But he generously accepted a phone call from me, and we talked a little bit about the fonts, and this Open Source project. Here’s that conversation.

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Paul: What we’ve just released today was an Open Source typeface family that I’ve been working on for the past three years. And it’s a typeface family designed for user interfaces.

Rich: What font file formats will this be released in?

Paul: We released the fonts today in OpenType format with CFF outlines, and we also released the fonts in TrueType format as well.

Rich: What does it actually mean that a font is Open Source? What is the source that you’d be talking about in this case?

Paul: In a lot of cases I think the sources are simply the fonts. Usually, in the case of the Google web fonts, they also have some VFB files available. Adobe has a set of tools that we use for producing typefaces, and that set of tools is called the Adobe Font Development Kit for OpenType. It uses a set of files to compile the fonts. In our case, we have made all of the files that we used in the production of the Source Sans typefaces, we have made those Open Source. So if somebody is interested in following a similar work flow to what we used, they can do so because … I’m just going to refer to our toolkit as the SDK for the remainder of the interview … if people use our SDK tools, they can, because we make them freely available. They’re not Open Source, but anybody can download them and use them to produce fonts.

Rich: If somebody were to develop their own set of fonts using your tools, what kind of distribution mechanism are available?

Paul: I think it’s quite popular for people to distribute Open Source fonts through Googles “Google Web Fonts” directory. At Adobe, we have a partnership with SourceForge, so it made sense for us to go ahead and offer our fonts through that channel, although the fonts have also been put on Google Web Fonts, as well. The fonts went live everywhere today. They went live on SourceForge, they went live on Google Web Fonts, they went live on our own TypeKit service, as well as on other web font servers. A couple other places the fonts will be available – shortly will be in Google Docs, and in Google Presentations.

We did do a blog post on our Adobe TypBlography blog so if people are interested in more information about why we decided to make the fonts and those types of things they can visit our blog and get some more details that way.

Rich: Thanks so much for your time, and enjoy your vacation!

If you’d like to have your project featured on the SourceForge podcast, just drop me a note and we’ll schedule something.

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Rich: Congratulations on being project of the month!

[See former Projects of the Month.]

Mark: Thank you. That certainly comes from everybody who’s involved with XOOPS. It’s a credit to everybody who’s involved with XOOPS.

Michael: It’s definitely a great honor for our community and we are extremely happy about this award.

Rich: For those that are not familiar with your project, can you give us a brief summary of what XOOPS does?

Mark: XOOPS is a content management system. It’s designed to help people get quickly up and running with lots of good common functionality. So, like some of the other content management systems out there that others may know, it’s a very mature, very secure, easy to use system. You can install the basic content management system that has all the permissioning, all the plugins and hooks for other functional modules to be added in. Then you can add in page content management, you can add in forums, you can add in frequently asked questions modules, social networking modules … whatever type of functionality that you really need for a website that’s pretty common out there, calendaring, etc, it exists in XOOPS. Somebody has built at least one module, typically we have several modules to choose from, each with different types of functionality and you can plug those in. We also have module packs, we have our first one up, we’re working to build several other to make it even easier to just pull down a pack together and download those and get them installed.

Rich: Looking at the download statistics from your project, it’s obvious that you have a very international following. Why do you think that is?

Michael: XOOPS has been an international project from the very beginning, when it was started 10 years ago. The first developers were from Japan, Germany, China, USA, and several other countries. So we’ve made a key requirement that it will be translated into all major languages, and to make it easy to customize it for local requirements. We are very popular in Japan, Taiwan, Brazil, France, and many other countries.

This is also reflected in our development community, where we have our developers coming from different countries, such as France, Libya, Japan, China, Portugal, Brazil, Australia, Russia, and many others. The beauty of a project such as XOOPS is that it allows people join together, regardless of their country of origin, gender, race, religion, or politics, and focus on something they enjoy, which is developing XOOPS.

Rich: When evaluating a CMS, of course we want to see what other sites are using it. Can you tell us a few of your recent success stories with XOOPS?

Michael: Yes, XOOPS has several installations that we can be very proud of. The most recent success story is from Libya, where the new government was looking for an Open Source solution, and after some tough testing of several CMS projects, they’ve decided for XOOPS. As a result the new Ministry of Defense and the National Election Commission are both running on XOOPS, and we hope that more of the government institutions in Lybia will follow.

Another success story is State of Parana in Brazil, where all government Websites (and they have over 300 of them), are running on XOOPS. Also the Brazilian CIA, the Brazilian Intelligence Agency is running on XOOPS.

We have also a whole county in Taiwan running their school system on XOOPS.

Of course, there are many others less visible users, but not less happy with XOOPS.

Rich: What’s happened recently? Have you had some important release recently that you want to tell us about?

Mark: 2.5.5 came out a short while back. That’s a bug and security release in that branch. We’re working on the 2.6.0 branch, and we’re working to incorporate a number of member-driven and -desired improvements to XOOPS. In terms of when that is, that’s kind of up to that developer group – the core team – and I believe it’s going to be out this year. I’m just not sure of the exact timing of that.

Rich: What will we see in this new release?

Mark: One of the biggest pushes that we’re doing is to bring a much more consistent management interface to the entire XOOPS collection of modules, and to bring forward a better API to make that easier for the module developers. That’s one of the key things that XOOPS has always done is try and make it easier for the module developers to do those routine things.

Rich: Michael, is there anything you’d like to add about upcoming releases?

Michael: As Mark mentioned, the focus of 2.6.0 is on refactoring and simplifying our architecture and our API. While other CMS systems might be written in a procedural way, XOOPS was from the very beginning very Object Oriented, which is even reflected in our name: XOOPS stands for eXtended Object Oriented Portal System. But over time, you know how it is, you tend to add baggage, and from time to time you need to do a little house cleaning. In XOOPS 2.6, that’s the focus, in order to keep XOOPS as pure OOP as possible, and the architecture and API as consistent as possible. We’ll be looking at that, and we’ll be adding some new ways, new classes, to make module development easier for our developers.

We hope, that after being a Project of the Month, more SourceForge members will try XOOPS, and will join our community as users and developers.

Rich: If folks are looking to get involved in the project, are the plugins the best way to get involved, or is there opportunities to get onto the core team?

Mark: There’s absolutely the opportunity to get on the core team. We would ask people to come in and get involved however they want to, whether that’s answering questions on the forum, helping with the documentation, building modules, getting involved with particular module developers to help enhance or build those. Then once you become familiar with all the various API issues within XOOPS, certainly come back and contribute those. We are very community driven, and there’s threads on our forums where, even if you’re not writing code, at least you can come back and give suggestions and/or contribute code to the project that helps the core developers fix or enhance a particular are. So while I’m not on the core team, I have certainly contributed code and suggestions back myself. XOOPS is a very secure system. It’s easy to develop on. It’s object oriented and the key is to keep code in that methodology, because it builds straight off of the core. It’s got a really good, mature presentation layer capability, so that when people want to change the look and feel, but don’t want to get into the PHP code – since we use Smarty templates, all you really need to know is HTML. So it’s really easy to change the look and feel of the site because of that – just getting involved with the HTML templates. For somebody who wants to get in and have their site have great functionality, get up and running, wants to be able to make the changes but isn’t a PHP developer, make their site look like their own and different from the others, it’s a quick, easy methodology to get going.

Rich: Congratulations on the project of the month.

Mark: We’re excited and we appreciate it, too. We appreciate the highlight.

Rich: I look forward to talking with you again some time. Thanks a lot.

Mark: Thanks, Richard.

Michael: Thanks, Richard, and thanks everybody for listening.

If you’d like to have your project featured on the SourceForge podcast, just drop me a note and we’ll schedule something.

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Rich: Tell us something about the game. Tell us the storyline of the game.

Jitspoe: Paintball2 is the sequel for the Quake Innovation paintball that was made for Quake 1. Paintball2 was made on Quake 2. It started out as a mod. Since ID software released the source code for Quake 2, we’ve taken that and made it its own standalone game. It is a full standalone game now. You can just download it – it’s completely free. The engine is Open Source under the GPL. It’s just a free game. You can play it online. Just a fun, multi-player game.

Rich: So, the game-play is kind of Quake-ish, except you have paint guns, right?

Jitspoe: Yeah. It has the Quake 2 movement style, so it’s very fast-paced. And the paintball element brings a one-shot kill degree to the game, so it’s even more fast-paced than Quake in a lot of ways. You’ve got a lot of fast-paced movement, you can run and jump around. Quake 2 has mechanics we call “strafe jumping” where you can actually build up your acceleration as long as you stay in the air, so people will keep jumping. And you can jump off of ramps and get extra height. So there’s a lot of fast movement. The single-shot kills lets people kill people with a single shot, but it’s pretty difficult because the movement speed is so fast that it kind of balances out in that regard.

Rich: This project’s been going for about 9 years now. How big is the community?

Jitspoe: It’s actually gone over ten years now if you count the time it was in development on Quake 2 as a mod. But I guess it’s probably 9 years on SourceForge since it’s been Open Source. The community is … unfortunately it’s getting a little bit smaller now. A lot of people have moved on. There were a lot of people that played when they were younger but now they’ve gotten families and moved on – they aren’t playing games as much. It’s a little bit slow right now. I’m hoping to build that up. It’s a little difficult to get fresh blood in an old game.

Rich: If somebody did want to get involved, where can they fit in?

Jitspoe: Mostly we’re looking for getting a lot of players – to get more people playing the game, to help build the popularity. As far as development goes, we’ve actually got something on our website, it’s called the feature vote list. If there’s a feature you want, you can request that, and people can vote on features they want, and if people want to help out they can look at that feature list and see if there’s anything that they could contribute to. So if you want to help out on the development side, that’s a good place to start.

Rich: And that website is DigitalPaint.org

Jitspoe: That’s correct, and there’s a feature vote list right on the top of that web page.

Rich: What kind of functionality, what kind of features are you working on for upcoming releases?

Jitspoe: Right now I’m working on setting up a tutorial map. I believe the most difficult thing for getting this game to grow is the barrier to entry. It’s a kind of difficult game. It’s not your typical shooter where you just put the reticle on somebody and shoot, and everyone moves at the same speed. There’s a lot of mechanics that you have to learn over time, and people aren’t going to get that. People get in the game and people are going to be flying around at 300 miles an hour and they’re just like, what’s going on? I can’t shoot anybody. I just keep dying. So I’m hoping that a tutorial map and some things to kind of help new players get into the game, understand what’s going on, understand what the game modes are, things like that, will help. We get a lot of people downloading the game, but hopefully this will help get the people that download to continue to play.

Rich: And what platforms is this game available for?

Jitspoe: Currently it’s just on the PC. There is a Windows and Linux version.

Rich: Tell me about the various different game modes that are mentioned in the project description.

Jitspoe: The most popular game mode is probably the capture the flag game mode. Typically you’ve got … it’s kind like your standard capture the flag. Each team has a flag and you take the enemy flag and bring it back to your base. Paintball2 has a little bit of a twist on that. In some maps … It’s up to the mapper to decide how he wants to develop the map, but a lot of people will have multiple flags. Some of the maps get kind of difficult to get the flag because everyone sits there and defends the one flag. But game play can be a lot different on other maps where there’s multiple flags, so you can’t easily defend a single flag. There’s a couple different types of capture the flag. You’ve got your traditional colored flags on each side, and other maps have a center flag where you have to get the center flag and bring it to the enemy base to capture. We’ve also got the standard death match game where it’s a free for all. You just get points for killing people. Team death match – same type of thing, except it’s for teams. There’s a couple kind of unique game modes – we’ve got something we call pong, kind of like soccer with paint ball guns. You’ve got this big ball in the middle and you’re trying to hit it into the enemy base. There’s a king of the hill game mode, where there’s a central space, that you try to stay on there. For every few seconds that you hold the hill you get points. And there’s also a siege game mode, where it alternates between attackers and defenders. The defenders get points for every attacker that they kill, and the attackers get points if they get the flag out of the base and the defenders are not able to leave the base.

Rich: I definitely need to give this a try. Sounds like something my son and I would enjoy.

Jitspoe: Yeah, that’s the other great thing about it. It’s great for all ages. A lot of people have been using this for LAN parties with kids, because there’s no violence but it still has that really fast paced competitive game play, so it’s good for the experienced gamers as well.

Rich: Thanks a lot for speaking with me. I look forward to trying this out.

Jitspoe: I appreciate what you guys do at SourceForge. It’s great to have a place to host all of this stuff and not have to worry about paying for bandwidth to host downloads and things like that, because we’re definitely not making money off of this. We’re just doing it for fun.

Rich: Awesome. Thanks a lot.

Jitspoe: Thank you!

If you’d like to have your project featured on the SourceForge podcast, just drop me a note and we’ll schedule something.

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Rich: I’ve been familiar with SugarCRM for many years. It’s not a new project. I’ve used it at a couple different companies. Tell me about your involvement with the project. What do you do with the project?

John: Currently I serve as community manager of the project, and really what my main role is, is to help evangelize to the overall developer community that we have around it. Which is really vast, because it covers not only people in the Open Source world that are contributing to the project, but it’s also covering a lot of developers that build add-ons and extensions for it, it’s covering or VAR partner network, our customers, our ISV network, just a really big group, globally, of people that are using Sugar in all sorts of different ways to solve the problems they’re seeing.

Rich: SugarCRM has been around … what … ten years?

John: It was founded in 2004, by a set of three men that came from the CRM industry. John Roberts, Jacob Taylor, and Clint Oram. And we’re fortunate enough to have Clint Oram still with the company. He’s the last co-founder to be a part of it. It’s been a very vibrant project. We were originally a SourceForge project of the month way back in 2004 or 2005. And since them we’ve really grown quite a bit. Our project has matured really nicely and grown. We still have not only our Open Source edition – our CE edition – and we’ve moved our primary downloads back to SourceForge to drive home our commitment to Open Source and our commitment to being part of the Open Source community. We also have a number of commercial products that build on top of the core that CE provides, to deliver that value-add to business.

Rich: What kind of a company needs a CRM? Does everyone need one of these?

John: Really, yeah. That’s one of the fascinating things, is, if you look at the market share numbers that you see from IDG and places like that, the way that we look at it is, there’s a very small market of what we currently analyze in the CRM market is actually tapped and using CRM. There’s a huge percentage – probably 90% of the market out there that’s still open and up for grabs. Really any organization that’s looking to help manage themselves, if they have customers – which, any company out there has customers – and they’re trying to help manage that. Back in the old days, people used Rolodex on their desks to kind of flip through and figure out all my customers. They wrote notes on it. To the grown-up version of that is somebody living out of an Excel spreadsheet. Which, surprisingly – you laugh, but you’d be surprised how many companies still do that. It’s taking those philosophies and building it into a structured system so that the data, you can actually do something with. It’s not dead data sitting there, but it’s data you can interact with, you can report on, you can have analysis on, you can really gain some true intelligence with.

Rich: One of the biggest difficulties that I have is not in technology, but in behavior. I have trouble keeping up with it. I contact a customer, and I talk with them, and then two days later I think, I should have made a note about that. Technology can’t solve that problem.

John: No, but here’s what’s nice with the CRM. You can help build processes, so that those things are tracked. If you think of how much intelligence you’re capturing about a customer you’re dealing with, and, where does it all go? It sticks in the back of your head, it’s written on a post-it note, it’s stuck on a form somewhere, or whatever. Here, you can actually capture it, right in there on the record, so that somebody can jump in and see exactly what’s going on. They can see a lot of the history, they can see, oh, they bought this from us, we tried to work with them on this, this is their history with us as a company. It’s really nice that way.

Rich: What do you have coming up in the future for Sugar?

John: Right now we’re in the final release phases of Sugar 6.5. That’s our big major release for this Spring. We have a lot of really neat stuff coming in it. We’re continuing to speed up and all a lot of performance improvements to the app. We’re continuing a push on our AJAX interface. The other big thing we’ve started doing the last couple of release is that we’ve looked out to our Open Source community and we pulled some projects in from there. One that we did in the 6.4 release is, we replaced our entire calendaring system with one that was developed as an Open Source project, by somebody who uses Sugar. They contributed it back to us and now we’ve integrated that into the product. In 6.5 we did the same thing with an extension that adds iCal support. They’ve contributed it back to us. We’ve pulled it into the product, and now we release that. We’ve been trying to work with that. Our community comes up with such amazing and great ideas. It really implores us to take advantage of that and really find ways we can pull them back into the product. It’s not even with big stuff like that. A lot of times it’s smaller stuff. One of the interesting things I’ve seen over the last year, we’ve got so much more community participation in the project. About 10% of all of the bugs that are fixed in the project actually come from code contributions from our community. Which, if you think about regular Open Source projects, it’s no big deal, but for commercial one like ours, and, quite frankly, CRM is not the most interesting software to deal with on the face of the planet. It really is a kind of cool statistic. It’s one that we’re really proud of. So, we’re seeing a lot more community involvement. A lot of AJAX and UI improvements. A lot of performance improvements under the hood. Some projects that we’re pulling in from the external side. We’re continuing to build stuff on the commercial editions as well quite a bit. Working on improving the UX with that. Adding some new functionality there. Down the road, we’re in the first stages of redoing a lot of the components under the hood in our platform. So, in 6.5, for one example, we’re switching over to using jQuery from YUI for our Javascript library. We’re still having YUI there for a while – there’s going to be a transition period, but moving forward we’re going to start using jQuery. In our 6.6 release, which is going to be later this year, we’re going to be replacing our web services interface to be more RESTful, so that’s a really exciting add-on. And a lot of other improvements like that. Our big focus from the product side – it’s not necessarily new flashy functionality, but its finish – it’s helping improve the user experience in the product, because there’s so many pieces of CRM software out there – business software in general – but really in the CRM world we see this – it’s designed for the sales executive in mind. It’s designed to be a piece of software that sells to them. What we’re trying to do is flip that. We’re trying to make a piece of software that the end-user, the lead-scrubber, the office worker, or whatever, that they can be excited and passionate about and enjoy using, and really help solve their needs. We see so many people with CRM deployments – the number one reason a CRM deployment fails is user adoption. The users just don’t use it.

Rich: Yeah. That’s kind of what I was alluding to earlier.

John: It’s true. If you look at all of the big names, especially some historical ones, like Sebol, that’s the classic one out there, it’s something that was designed for the executive staff in mind, it was not designed for any human being actually to use it. And that’s really the focus we’re trying to do. We’re trying to do. We’re trying to put the user first. We’re focusing on the user experience and making sure everything we’re doing helps solve the user’s problems, so that they can be successful and productive.

Rich: Tell me something about SugarForge.

John: SugarForge is our online community around add-ons and extensions around the product. Currently we have over 1000 projects there, with over 32,000 developers that work on these. It’s a nice combination of Open Source developers that maybe just hacked on something for their instance, they threw it up there for the community to enjoy. We have a number of third-party developers who are using SugarForge as a way to bootstrap, and say, I’ve built these interesting modules, I’ll put them up here for people to use, or maybe for sale, or whatever. And then we have a number of ISV partners, that also will leverage the platform as well. The counterpart to SugarForge is SugarExchange, and that is our app directory where we have a number of apps for sale. ISV partners out their offerings up there. It’s really the place to go for any Sugar user to look for add-ons and extensions for their Sugar instance.

The project itself is growing really well. A CRM comes with the commutation that it’s just a piece of software that you deploy for sales people or marketing people to use. But I think really the interesting thing about it is, at its core, it’s a developer platform for any sort of business application. We see a lot of cases where they will take the app, they will strip out all of the main modules, and instead they’ll deploy something entire different on top. We have a lot of partners that just do this for customers. We have some interesting one-off cases I’ve heard. There’s a scientific library somewhere that uses Sugar CE for recording test results, because it’s just a really easy way if you need a CRUD interface to a database, relatively easily, you can do it. You can go in to module builder in studio, you can build all the fields out, you can add logic hooks, it’s very easy to deal with. I imagine you’ve built apps in your time. You spend so much of the time building up the toolset to get to the point where you can actually deal with business logic. So a lot of what Sugar can do for you, if you’re building something inside of your business, is it can take the place of all of that time you’re investing to build what widgets look like, or pick what framework I’m using under the hood. That framework doesn’t have authentication so I need to build authentication out, I have to build ACLs out. I’m going to have to design how the CRUD interface works. Sugar takes all of the guesswork out of that, because it already provides something for you to use. You can just concentrate entirely on your business logic. And so that’s where, to me, the really exciting part of Sugar is. It’s a great CRM, and it competes very well in that market, and it’s the market leader in an open CRM, and probably one of the market leaders in CRM in general. But I think where it sets itself apart from all the rest is it can be that application that can meld around your business process so that if maybe you’re not trying to deploy it in the purist CRM sense, you can use it to help automate any business process you have inside of your company.

Rich: It’s pretty cool when something you develop gets used in a way that you didn’t even remotely anticipate.

John: It blows us away every day when we hear these weird cases of people using it – I have a buddy of mine that uses Sugar for tracking his home inventory so that if his house ever burns down he can go to his Sugar system and see what’s in there. It’s neat stuff like that – from being a developer, and I still kind of am although not as practicing as I normally am, I remember going through those things and you spend so much time on the toolset, and instead Sugar gives you a toolset already to work with, so focus on the business logic. It can help the go-to-market time for anything you’re building, get that much faster.

Rich: Thank you John.

John: No problem.

If you’d like to have your project featured on the SourceForge podcast, just drop me a note and we’ll schedule something.

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Rich: Congratulations on being Project of the Month.

[See former Projects of the Month.]

Brian: Thank you. I’ve wanted Liferay to be on there for years. I’m very happy about it.

Rich: Tell me something about the project. How long has it been going, and what problem space is it trying to solve?

Brian: The project started in 2000, and the problem we’re trying to solve is that we want people to be able to build websites using the Java platform, quickly. That’s the problem it’s trying to solve. And specifically, we’re a portal. And if you look at traditional portals, from the last ten years, they’ve usually been very heavy-weight, sort of like your EJB app server. And so we look at ourselves in the Java space, we feel like we’re the Tomcat of the web platform. And we compete directly with Drupal, DotNetNuke – while Drupal’s for PHP, DotNetNuke is for dot.NET – And we’re a lightweight version of, say, WebSphere Portal, Oracle WebCenter, and so forth. And Microsoft Sharepoint. So that’s the problem space we’re in.

We want to help people build web sites. And not just websites in general, but social networks, and content management websites, very quickly.

Rich: Tell me some of your success stories. Who’s using your project successfully on, say, big websites?

Brian: Something that just launched recently, as far as a “cool factor”, is Marines.com.

It shows the content management aspect of Liferay. The site doesn’t look like a traditional portal, but it’s very pretty. Another one that’s in that vein would be Sesame Street. We all grew up with Big Bird, and it was one of the top websites last year.

So you can see how Liferay’s very flexible in that respect. Some other really cool examples would be developer.cisco.com. This is Cisco – they needed a collaboration website, and they built it on top of Liferay. Another one that’s sort of in that vein that’s more on the social network side would be teambeachbody.com. What they did was that they wanted to create a social network that wasn’t built around the friends you have, but the people that you coach into becoming better exercise people. You can go to that website and that’s all built on top of Liferay. So that’s just a small set of many many case studies that we have.

Rich: Do you have any sites that have surprised you? Sites that are doing something that … something unexpected with your product that maybe you hadn’t thought of when you designed it?

Brian: Not really because, well, people are doing a lot of things I didn’t expect, but none of them surprise us because Liferay itself was built to be flexible. So when we see them doing this we go, oh, yeah, that’s exactly what it was … it’s something it was built for. So not really – nothing that really surprises us.

Rich: On the community side, how do people get involved with your project? What sort of things might somebody get plugged into?

Brian: Usually, people download our product and then they’ll participate in our forums. I think we have 700,000 [Editor: Brian later corrected this to 500,000] posts this year. It’s getting close … I think we’ll reach 1,000,000 this year. There’s lots of people participating in the Liferay message boards. Another way is that they’ll find bugs, or they’ll contribute patches. And they can do that on our website, as well. Your traditional Open Source way, through forums, through our online collaboration stuff, and through our issue tracker. And, of course, our Symposiums and events where people come and have hackathons and we just code all day, and so forth.

Rich: Tell us about upcoming events.

Brian: I’m actually not sure if this has been announced yet, but I think some time in February or March we’re going to be opening up to the community where people actually come to our offices in LA, and we’re going to have a huge two-day hackathon. That’s mainly geared towards the community, and geek hackers. Towards developers and the general community, our ‘Java One’ or our ‘OSCon’ would be our Symposiums. And we’re having one in San Francisco this year, at the end of October, and we’re going to have one in Germany as well, so that people who can’t fly from Europe can attend both of the events. And those are the events where we showcase our case studies. We’ll have our clients, our community members, our partners and so forth, come and showcase their Liferay efforts.

Rich: Liferay.com is a commercial venture that’s based around the project – is that right?

Brian: Correct. Most people separate their ventures, where they’ll have a .org and a .com website. We didn’t see a reason to do that so we merged it. So .com is our community website, and when you log in, it gives you additional … for our customers, it gives you additional access. But both of them are hosted off of Liferay.com. We don’t separate the community’s effort from our commercial effort.

Rich: What sort of additional services do your paying customers have access to?

Brian: One of the things is that they get long-term support on the version that they’re using. A lot of the banks and large organizations that use us, they need the version of Liferay that they’re building on top of to be supported five years from now. That’s not something they can get from the community edition without themselves investing a ton of work. Another one is … we’re the experts in our own product. We have a lot of engineers working here, and we know our stuff. So they’ll pay for support for it, so that when they use the product and they run into an issue, instead of them spending ten hours on the issue, they can just call us and we’ll spend two hours, because we’ll diagnose it, and they’ll save a ton of time. Another one is, if they want to customize the product, we’ll do some professional services, we’ll help them implement it, or we’ll connect them with a partner that’s closer to them, or has expertise in their specific vertical. And we’ll partner with them in that sense. Those are the ways in which we make money. And Liferay’s actually grown the last couple of years. What’s unique about us as a company, and as a community, is that we’re the only Open Source company that I know of, of our size, that has no venture capital. We have about 300 employees – maybe more than that now, I don’t keep active count – across 7-10 countries. I don’t even know how many offices we have. So we’ve been able to bootstrap ourselves, make money, and provide a very good quality service to our customers.

Rich: Is the developer community around Liferay primarily your paid employees, or is there representation from outside of your company as well?

Brian: That’s a very interesting question, because we develop a lot of stuff in-house, with the collaboration of the community, but we do the majority of the push. But it’s hard to quantify, because even if we do the majority of the push, the community helps out so much in testing different environments, testing out different possible paths. If you think about how somebody can click through something, there’s practically an infinite way in which somebody could do something in some environment. So the community helps out a lot in patches, and a lot of time in features as well. But a lot of times what ends up happening is, the people contribute. They love working on Liferay, and we need to hire engineers. So even though they were a community member, they end up joining us, so that screws up the metrics. A lot of the people who are currently employed by Liferay were once community members. But they are no longer, because they’re not employed by us. So they can do what they were doing for fun, full time.

Rich: I see on your website that you’re currently hiring, so I guess that is still in action.

Brian: Yeah. It’s very much in action. I’d say that almost half of the people that we’ve hired came from the community. And that’s why we have to have so many different offices. Because they’re a developer in some country, and we say, you’re so good, we want you to work with us full time. Do the stuff you’re doing that’s awesome, but do it full time.

Rich: What’s in the future for the Liferay product?

Brian: We really see the portal as the web platform for delivering applications. We’ve seen how the different commercial offerings are morphing into that. I’ll give you an example. You look at SalesForce. They’re primarily a CRM app. But they’ve really morphed into a portal by providing a way for people to develop applications quickly. Or you look at Facebook. They’re primarily a social network, but the apps add so much value into it. Our sweet spot is, we are an app platform. We want to be the de facto standard for it, and I think we quickly are, if we are not already, in the Java space. We want to grow that. And from there we want to pivot by providing specific vertical apps that add value. So a quick example is, how did Microsoft do it? They started with Windows. From there they pivoted to Office, Internet Explorer, SQL Server, BizTalk, and SharePoint, and they’ve added all this value. You look at Oracle, they start off as a database, and now they’ve built all these apps for enterprise, and they do so much more than just databases. In the same way, we see our core bread and butter being the portal – being the web platform. We see ourselves pivoting and adding on additional apps that tie into the portal that would add a lot of value. And all that stuff would be Open Source, with a commercial offering as well for certain large enterprises. And one example of that would be our new product Liferay Sync. Liferay portal itself has always had a content management system and a document management system built in. We really beefed it up this past year, but what we realized is, as you know, a lot of people use local, operating system, desktop based programs that allow you to sync files. So what if I don’t want that stuff hosted by a third party, but I want to host it on Amazon, but I want to own the data. I want to be the one to manage the servers not some third party. They can do that now. So they don’t have to worry about 10G, or 20G, or 100G, they can just get a TB, and pay a much smaller fee. So those are some of the ways in which we’re extending beyond the portal.

Rich: Tell me about the beginning of this project. Why’d you get started in the first place?

Brian: What happened was, it was around 2000, during the peak of the dot.com boom, and my pastor asked me to build a website for his church. I was also working for a consulting company at the time that was heavily emphasizing social networks. Back in 2000, they just gave it a different name, which was ‘e-business communities.’ They really stressed social networks, and they really stressed collaboration online. So I thought, wouldn’t it be great if my church could leverage the software that we were using at work, and the company at the time had about 200 people. My church size is about 150-200 people. If we could all collaborate online, that would be great. So I went to the software vendor, and they said to me, sure – it’ll cost you $100,000 for the license, and every user per year year is going to be $200. There’s no way my church can afford that. So, I looked at what the product did, and I looked at Open Source alternatives, and I didn’t like any of them. So I started writing it. Our church was the first implementation of that, and then I started to tinker with it. But I wanted it to be more than just for churches, because I wanted it to benefit a lot of non-profits, a lot of different organizations. And so I tried to make it generic. And over time as it became more and more generic, lots of institutions started using it – education sector, government sector, banks, financial sector. All these different organizations. And that’s what’s led to what we have today. And it’s been twelve years since we first played around with it.

And I have to thank SourceForge, because if it was not for Sourceforge, there’s no way we could have distributed our app – our program – back then. And if you look at our downloads, you guys have given us tons of bandwidth over the years. So I’m very very appreciative of what SourceForge has done for us.

Rich: Thank you very much for speaking with me. And, again, congratulations.

Brian: Yeah. Thank you for even letting us participate in SourceForge. Thank you for all the stuff you guys have done for us. I really appreciate what you guys do and very thankful for the award.

If you’d like to have your project featured on the SourceForge podcast, just drop me a note and we’ll schedule something.

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Rich: I’m speaking with Tim Hoffmann, who is a member of the TeXstudio project. TeX is a typesetting language. It used to be used primarily for technical documentation. It was used a lot in mathematics, and since has expanded into many other realms. Tell me something about the project. What are you trying to accomplish with the project? How long have you been doing this?

Tim: I, myself, am a member of the project since about half a year ago. The project itself started I think in 2009. So, as you said, TeX or LaTeX is a typesetting language which is used mostly in science. Actually, it goes back to the 80s, already, when it was invented. And since then, it’s widely used. But because it’s so old, it has some issues which can – now, because we have today the computational power and the data available – which can be relieved by a good development environment. It’s actually the goal of TeXstudio is to make it more easy for the user to write documents in LaTeX.

Rich: What sort of functionality does it have toward that end?

Tim: Before I started contributing to TeXstudio itself, I tried a lot of other editors. They support the user to a certain extent, but I think most of them fall short in some way. For example, it’s a bit cumbersome to write tables in LaTeX. There are some editors which have an assistant, so you can create a new table, but once it’s there you cannot edit it via the assistant any more, but you have to go to the plain TeX. And so we thought, we have to support the user a bit more. For example, we have now functionality to edit the tables inline. Of course this means that we, to a certain extent, have to understand the language of TeX. So it’s not just the syntax, we analyze and highlight. By the way, I think TeXstudio is one of the editors with the most refined syntax highlighting system for TeX, which makes it much easier to read the document source code. But also we try – and this is still in its infancy – but we try to map the symantics of the commands, so we can really interpret what they mean – the commands to have a table, so we can assist the user if he wants to change something on the table.

Rich: Do you use TeX or LaTeX in your daily job? Is this a tool that you use actively for some projects of your own?

Tim: Yes. I am a physicist, and I regularly use TeX for papers and for my thesis.

Rich: To what extent is the TeXstudio community open to new contributors?

Tim: We’re very open to new contributors. You can contribute on various levels. So you don’t have to necessarily be able to program. You can contribute either by creating some documentation, or you can translate TeXstudio to a new language, or you can design icons if you want, or package TeXstudio for some other distribution. But of course, if you can program, you are very welcome also to contribute code.

Rich: What is planned for upcoming releases of this product? You talked about one set of functionality that’s under development. Is there anything else that we can expect in the future?

Tim: In the version control system we have quite a lot of new things which are not yet released. This includes a complete new build system. So, essentially, if you have a LaTeX document, you compile the source code to a final PDF, for example. This is a bit similar to compilation of some software. It can be a quite complicated process. TeXstudio can manage this for you. So you just press one button and you get the complete document out. Other things we have now is support for different tools of TeX. So, there’s a complete ecosystem of different TeX compilers and additional programs which handle bibliographies, and so on. We’ve recently implemented support for a lot of them. To go a bit more into the future, one aim we have is to make better project management. For example, you can have TeX documents – if you have a large document, like if you’re writing a book, it can be split into many different files, and we want to have a unified view for the user which is abstracted from the high level, but just shows the logic of the document. And of course, also we are trying to improve the user interface.

Rich: Thank you, Tim, for taking time to do this. And I wish you much success on your project.

Tim: Thank you very much. It was a pleasure talking to you.

Rich: I’m speaking with Kieran Pilkington, and Erik Johansson, and Aviv Sharon. They are all involved with the 0 A.D. project.

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Rich: 0 A.D. is a strategy, civilization building game. Thank you so much for speaking with me.

Erik: Thanks for having us.

Rich: I gotta mention, one of the really cool things about this interview is that we span seventeen timezones within this phone call. This, to me, illustrates one of the great points of Open Source software, which is that it really doesn’t matter where in the world you’re located, you can participate in a project like this.

How long have you guys been working on this game? What inspired you to start working on it?

Erik: Actual work started in 2003, 2004, but the idea existed a bit earlier. The inspiration came from … they (the developers) decided to bring the civilizations in Age of Empire I to the engine of Age of Empire II: The Age of Kings. But then the ambition increased a bit, and we decided to try and create our own engine, and all these years later, here we are.

Aviv: It started out as a mod for Age of Empires II: The Age of Kings, and it ended up being a standalone game. Development for the most of the time was for a closed-source, proprietary game, but it was always meant to be freeware. And then in the summer of 2009, we decided to go Open Source, and we haven’t looked back.

Rich: How many developers are there on this project?

Erik: That’s the hardest question to answer. There are, say, five to twenty that are reasonably active, but some people are old team members who stay around as advisors, and some additional are contributing without being official team members. It’s hard to say an exact number, but, say, about twenty at any given time. But over the years there have been many many more. At least …

Aviv: In the hundreds. Easily in the hundreds.

Rich: Wow. Is there room for other people to come in and participate? And what sort of openings would there be for those folks?

Aviv: We’re glad you asked that because we’re always looking for new contributors to join 0 A.D. and help promote the game to a more complete state. We are always seeking new programmers in all fields of programming from low-level code to AI and random map scripts and higher-level programming. We are always looking for graphic artists, both 2D, and textures, and user interface, and also 3D models and animation. We’re looking for people to help us organize the development, document it, manage contributions in sound, and many more openings we have which we constantly promote in the designated thread that we will happily link to.

For most positions we ask applicants to fill out a short form. We are pretty open about who can join, and programmers are welcome to join at any time without any application process.

Erik: Programmers start out as community members, and add their patches to the code. If we find that they continue to add lots of good stuff, we ask them to be on the team. The only real difference there is that they get commit access to our SVN, but apart from that we’re really open in the programming part.

Rich: To what degree do you strive for historical accuracy in your game?

Erik: To a great degree, but on the other hand we let game play and fun go before history. So, like if there is a situation where they go against it, we decide in favor of fun, so to speak.

Aviv: We plan all our units, and all our buildings based on reconstructions of how the units and the buildings might have looked like in the ancient world. For each civilization we plan technologies based on the distinguishing features of each civilization. We even give the units and the buildings names in the original languages. We try to construct the original ancient Greek, Latin, Punic, Celtic, etc., in order to give the game some real historical depth, and perhaps teach players something about ancient history.

Rich: Is someone on your project a historian?

Erik: Not per se, but over the years we have had both professional historians and amateur historians review everything. That’s continually going on – if we find something that seems to prove something that we’ve done wrong, we go back and look at things again.

Kieran: Over the years we’ve had several people come in to the community and actually tell us that certain names of units and buildings and such were incorrect, and so we’ve taken their feedback and actually incorporated it into the game. So it’s a continually ongoing process.

Aviv: Our main menu screen used to depict a scene from Sparta, and somebody pointed out that the shield actually belonged to Athens, so we changed it.

Rich: [Laughs] That’s very cool. How much of the world is covered by the game?

Aviv: Right now it covers six civilizations. It covers three city states in Ancient Greece: Athens, Sparta, Macedonians. Other civilizations are Rome, Carthage, the Celtic tribes, the Iberian tribes, Persia, and we’re adding, now, the Mauryan Indians, which are the original civilization of the Indus valley in the Indian subcontinent. We’re actually crowdsourcing the design for this civilization, and we’re welcoming the community to contribute historical information for us to design the buildings and technologies for this new civilization we’re adding.

Rich: Do you have much interaction or collaboration with any of the other Open Source gaming communities?

Aviv: We’re kind of in the middle between the Indie game world and the Open Source software world. We don’t quite belong to either culture entirely. We certainly invite more projects to reach out. Perhaps we can find new ways to collaborate. We do believe that a large part of the code that we developed can be used for other projects. But at the moment we’re more focused on developing 0 A.D. to completion, and writing a lot of code and implementing a lot of features that are specific to 0 A.D., than implementing general solutions for all sorts of games.

Rich: What does “developing to completion” mean? Where do you go from here? What do you have still to do?

Kieran: At the moment we’re still in the Alpha stages, which is essentially meaning that not all of the major features are completed yet. We still have a few to go. Namely: gates, and separate civilization technology trees and other bits and pieces. Once all of the major features have been implemented, we’ll move to the Beta phase, which is essentially just refining things, adding bug fixes, and making sure that the game is balanced in terms of game play and that sort of thing. Which hopefully isn’t too far off. Each release has a various set of features that are targeted for that release. And the current amount of tickets left numbers about three hundred. That’s another emphasis for extra developers. We’re always happy to have them come on board and help us out. Get this game completed faster.

Aviv: Unlike other Open Source projects, we actually have an idea of a completed game. And we have an idea of when we’re done. We do want to reach this state of completion and reach some closure, and not just keep this project developing endlessly. And we hope to reach that state in late 2013.

Rich: As you’ve been working on this project, what’s been been your biggest surprise that’s come along during this process?

Aviv: The biggest surprise would probably be the excellent reception that 0 A.D. has had in many different communities of fans. From indie game and modder fans to Linux communities – Linux and Free Open Source software communities, and all sorts of fun comments that we keep getting. It’s like Empire Earth, and Rise of Nations, had a baby and it came out free. All sorts of funny, heart warming comments that we keep getting from our fans, and we’d like to reach out and say thank you for all this encouragement that really keeps us going.

Rich: Thank you so much for being willing to do this interview and gathering across many less convenient times than mine. Good luck with your project.

Erik: Thank you. It’s a pleasure.

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Ross: Hi, Rich, good to speak to you.

Rich: The last time that we spoke was at ApacheCon, and things were at a much earlier stage then. Tell me what’s happened since then with the community so far as getting them on board with the Apache Way.

Ross: Probably the biggest change since then – which would be back in November – I think the biggest change since then would be that the community has accepted the fact that there isn’t an owning influence who is just going to make things happen for them. So, in the early days, it was, well, who’s going to do our marketing for us, who’s going to do our conferences for us, who’s going to do this, who’s going to do that. And the Apache Software Foundation isn’t set up to do that kind of thing. It doesn’t do that kind of thing. The individual projects have to do it. So I think that’s probably the biggest thing. The project community has recognized that if we want something doing, we’ve got to find a way of doing it ourselves. Once they figured that out, well, they started moving pretty quick. And of course we culminated last week in the release.

Rich: So, when a project enters the Apache Software Foundation, “them” sort of becomes “us”, in a sense?

Ross: Yeah, very much so. The Foundation only exists to provide a legal entity in which the project can exist. It doesn’t exist to control the project, or babysit the project, or make sure the project succeeds. That’s entirely up to the community. So the community does have to become part of the Apache Software Foundation in order to get the most from it.

Rich: What’s the next step? Now that there’s a release out there, and the release is fully under the Apache software license, what’s the next step to getting out of the Incubator?

Ross: Probably each of the mentors has a different opinion on that, so I’ll give you my opinion. I think that there are still some IP issues that needs to be addressed with code that isn’t in the release. The release is IP-clean, and is under an Apache license. But there are still some questions over some of the items that are in the repository as to whether or not they can remain in the repository as it becomes a top-level project. But they’re quite minor, compared to what the team have been working on in order to get the release out there. There is no real issue in terms of diversity. Certainly there is no question about the fact that there is one specific employer who is providing a great deal of input to it. But there are a significant number of people who are independent, and working for other organizations, that are active and showing leadership within the project. So I don’t have any concerns about diversity. So that one’s pretty sorted. And that’s about it, really. It’s just the final cleanup of the items that are used in building the OpenOffice code base, which should take really a matter of weeks, and as far as I’m concerned, I’d be happy to talk about graduation at that point.

Rich: What’s the relationship between the Apache OpenOffice community and the Templates and Extensions communities? Is there a lot of overlap there, or are they just kind of far flung?

Ross: There is some overlap. The Extensions and Templates communities are able to release their software and their plugins and so on, under whatever license they want. And what that means is that they can’t be hosted – or some of them, at least, can’t be hosted within the Apache Software Foundation’s infrastructure, because we only release code under the Apache software license. In those cases, it’s difficult to say that they’re part of the same community. They obviously would be part of the testing community, making sure that their extensions work within OpenOffice. But they maintain their own software, their own extensions, and so on, externally. We’ve had SourceForge step forward to help resolve that problem of, where do these people host stuff. Previously that was owned and hosted by Sun/Oracle. As I said, we can’t host non-Apache licenses, and the project team felt it wasn’t appropriate to demand that all of the extensions became Apache licensed. So SourceForge stepped in. SourceForge are now providing the hosting site for all of those. I’m sure SourceForge would be quite happy to provide development tools for those extensions, since that’s what SourceForge do. And of course the OpenOffice community is welcoming to anybody who wants to come in and help us improve the extension mechanisms within OpenOffice. So there’s overlap, but there’s certainly no requirement for extensions developers to become part of the Apache community.

Rich: Jürgen told me a little bit about where he expects the project to go in the future. As a mentor of an incubating project, what’s your thing going forward? Do you remain part of the project once it graduates, or is that the end of the road for your involvement?

Ross: As a mentor, that’s the end of the road for my involvement. Once the project graduates, they’ve shown that they understand the Apache Way and that they’re operating according to the way that we expect projects to operate. I would step down as a mentor. I may or may not choose to remain a member of the community. I’m not an OpenOffice developer. I’ve never been an OpenOffice developer. And I don’t expect to become one. So it’s not likely that I myself would remain a committer. But I think some of the other mentors will stay around, will go with the project. They would then become just normal members of the Project Management Committee with equal rights to everybody else in the community. If I wanted to regain those rights, as it were, after stepping down, then I would have to start from scratch, just like anybody else who would be joining the project fresh.

Rich: So, to be a mentor of an incubating project, you don’t actually have to be a developer on that project, or even familiar with the code base?

Ross: Absolutely not. No, our job is not a technical one at all. We have no opinion … as mentors, we have no opinion on where the project should be going technically. We’re only there to help the project community find their way in the Apache Software Foundation, understand how to get things done on our infrastructure, understand the processes behind our I.P. due diligence, release, etc., understand where to ask questions when they don’t know how to do something, all that kind of thing. We give them a leg up, if you like, into doing things the Apache Way. But we absolutely don’t need to be part of the technical team. And in many ways, it’s best if we’re not part of the technical team, because it’s good for the project to feel … good for the project community to feel that they are in control of the technical aspects of their project. They don’t come to Apache in order to get technical guidance, so it’s a good idea, as far as I’m concerned, if the mentors are not technically engaged with the project.

Rich: How has it been working with the OpenOffice community?

Ross: Something needs to be said about the strength of the community around Apache Open Office. It’s come here in a very difficult situation. There are certain tensions within the community – the original OpenOffice.org community, that have absolutely nothing to do with the current community members within the Apache OpenOffice project. And whilst it’s been a rocky road along the way sometimes, there’s been some rather messy things said in public, I think we’re beginning to see real collaboration between the other ODF projects in the community and the environment, and the OpenOffice community. We’ve seen it in a number of security issues that have come up during incubation. We’ve seen it in some of the code enhancements that are going on in there. We’ve seen it in some of the documentation work that’s happening. And I think now with the release of the Apache OpenOffice project, that can only increase. So, anybody who’s been sitting on the fence, waiting to see what happens with respect to these communities, please come along. Don’t sit on the fence. Do participate. We do want to build a stronger Open Documentation Format Foundation. And we want to be able to collaborate where appropriate on the code that works with those documents. So, having people like SourceForge step up, IBM, SugarCRM, and the hundreds of independents who are out there who are getting involved in various ways – we need to see more of that happening. We need to see more and more people come in and working under the Apache OpenOffice banner, and contributing back to the ecosystem as a whole, as a result.

Rich: Thanks a lot for taking the time to speak with me.

Ross: No problem. It’s always a pleasure, Rich.