1x44: A Boot Goes In

Isn’t there a simple solution we have overlooked? Mozilla need to make a Sourceforge competitor.

Two bird, one stone. waits for applause :stuck_out_tongue:

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I was waiting for one of you to mention Google Code. It had a lot of the features you wanted from Source Forge (including hosting binaries). Except of course Google has dead-pooled it now so I guess it’s a moot point.

Regarding social media advertising, http://dilbert.com/strip/2015-06-16

Was this planned? Will Scott Adams be a guest on the show soon?

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I want to know who comes up with the show titles???

I keep hearing in my head:

Put your left boot in
put your left boot out
put your left boot in
and shake it all about…

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I’m sort of wondering if there really does need to be an all-in-one project hosting service. Many of the things people are after are covered well elsewhere. Maybe we just need a few focused services to fill out the missing pieces.

Let me tell you about Pioneer, a project I do a lot of work on, in particular doing all the ops stuff. We use a combination of third-party and self-hosted services:

  • Source repo - Github
  • Bug/issue tracking - Github
  • Forum - PHPBB (self-hosted)
  • Wiki - MediaWiki (self-hosted)
  • Chat/community - Freenode IRC (with link to their web chat)
  • Binary distribution - Sourceforge
  • Binary builds - self-hosted

So we use Sourceforge for their ability to host large files on their excellent CDN. Most people who download our game have a mirror very close to them, and SF will happy let me SFTP 800MB of builds every day. That’s something I’d actually pay for. Early on, we did distribution via Dropbox and its impossibly slow. Anything with an API would be kinda annoying too, but not impossible. Its just that when your autobuilder is a shell script, things like scp are just so easy.

Github has a “releases” service where you tag a commit and then attach files and a description to it, and it can be scripted through their API, but its clunky and they have no CDN worth talking about.

So of the things I run myself, the forums and the wiki would be easiest to move, but I want something that isn’t covered in ads. I’m not averse to paying for service, but I couldn’t really find anything that did what we wanted and let us pay to get them out of our way. So they’re on a $10 Dreamhost plan, shortly moving to a $5 DigitalOcean VSI.

The autobuilder is the hardest bit. That currently runs on a spare server in my office. Linux builds are run out of chroots, Windows using the MXE cross-builder, and the OS X build is done with some painful scripts running on a colleague’s Mac that he was kind enough to create a SSH account on (because cross-building on OS X is pretty much a non-starter). This arrangement works but requires a lot of care and handholding. I would pay good money for a service that gave you feed source code into and it spits out build artifacts for multiple platforms.

So if one site popped up that did all of these things well, I’d almost certainly use it. In my experience though you can only do one thing well. If you try and split your focus, you end up with a bunch of half-arsed stuff. So no, make a bunch of brand new services, make them play nicely together (OAuth for login, interesting integration points, etc) and let me at them.

(Handwaving over how to make money, of course).

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So, I went to your site there and it looks very interesting. Does it come with time to play it? :smile:

I will mention a minor annoyance with the web page. I played the trailer on the page and, while playing, it kept wanting to go to the next picture. That trailer is good. Makes me want to play.

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[quote=“oldgeek, post:26, topic:10497, full:true”]
So, I went to your site there and it looks very interesting. Does it come with time to play it? :smile:[/quote]

Heh, I wish. I joined the project four years ago. I don’t think I’ve actually played the game in all that time!

Hmm, yeah. The slideshow is designed for images and doesn’t really know anything about video. I didn’t think of that though. I’ll see what I can do with it, thanks for the heads up!

I doubt it.

Great show, good points, but I doubt it.

Github ftw.

I was always surprised SourceForge never offered a paid model with private repos, wikis, etc similar to GitHub. Was that something they agreed not to do when selling SourceForge Enterprise to CollabNet?

Anyways, whatever comes along either by SourceForce or to replace them, I think that is the right commercial model. Offer something free to community and open source projects. Assuming the workflow they come up with is actually enjoyable, users will clamor for it at work where there is actually money to pay for it.

That is not to say I’m against adds on download pages or other aspects of the service. I just don’t think its a sustainable business model on its own. Especially since to make the service usable again, it has to be done in a much less obnoxious way. (eg no more deceptive forms between the download page and your binary, that turn out to be optional ads)

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@sil @jono @jeremy If SourceForge isn’t responsive to interview requests, consider inviting on some of the past community managers for some fun SourceForge history and a discussion of how we got here?. Theres a lot of good folks that have been through those roles including Rich Bowen and Ross Turk.

A question which we can hopefully put to them in the next show, that :slight_smile:

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Did you catch the recent posts by Dave Camp and crew on the future of firefox?

https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/firefox-dev/2015-July/003062.html
https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2015/07/02/what-to-look-forward-to-from-firefox/

“So new feature work is going to revolve around giving users the control to shape their web. We’re going to start with one area where people really want more control - online privacy. You’ll start to see the first stab at this - an improved Private Browsing mode - land shortly in Firefox.”

Yay! Nice one Moz team. Also, devote effort to convincing people, in parallel, that privacy is important (that is: not by extolling it as a selling point for Mozilla, but privacy qua privacy). Then those who are convinced will assess the market and come to Moz because they’re the best at it, not come to Moz and then learn about privacy.

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Couldn’t agree more @sil privacy online, or anywhere else is essential. Too much information on us all is too easily available. We need more education on this . Too many people believe that if you have done nothing wrong you have nothing to hide.

Believing that privacy isn’t important because you have nothing to hide is like believing that freedom of speech isn’t important because you have nothing to say.

Don’t know who said that originally, but it is wisdom.

The governments keep talking about the need for transparency. Now, I realize that they mean that for their subjects.

This is just rhetoric the government, at least here in the UK, may say it wants transparency it’s not for its subjects - it may be about its subjects though. They want to know everything about you but want to keep details hidden from you.

For example we have recently had a change of government here and the new government in spite of only getting 36.9% of the votes cast, that’s less than 25% of those eligible to vote has a small but workable majority meaning they can do whatever they want.

Some may argue that our voting system is flawed but that’s separate discussion which I don’t intend to pursue here.

One of this governments first acts was to severely reduce welfare removing benefits from some of the poorest in out society particularly the disabled. The result of which is that a number of people have committed suicide. I know this to be a fact because I know personally one family where this has happened.

Whether you choose to agree with the government that this unfortunate result is a necessary evil because the government need to balance the budget and somebody has to suffer, or you believe the government has set its priorities wrongly and needs continue supplying these benefits by placing an heavier burden on the rich is an interesting political argument that yet again I do not want to discuss here.

The point of this post is transparency - it is apparently OK for the government to set conditions which make some people find life untenable - but not OK for us to want to know how many people are affected by this.

If anybody wants to pick up on the legitimacy of the UK election system or the politics of austerity feel free to start a new thread and I’ll be happy to discuss my thoughts but I have no intention of pushing them unless anybody is genuinely interested.

Well, at least they aren’t a drain on society anymore (heavy, heavy, dripping sarcasm with looks of utter disgust here (I am so often made sick by this world)).

I imagine that each of those politicians managed to keep their pet projects funded though! Probably managed to vote themselves a raise too.

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Any Robert Heinlein readers here? I remember reading, decades ago, one novel that he envisioned a government system that the members of the government were drafted in, based on qualifications. That anyone who actually wanted the position was automatically disqualified. He said that the best administrators were the ones physically dragged in, kicking and screaming.

Anyone remember which novel that scenario was from?