SourceForge new emphasis

From: Grant Bowman (grantbow@svpal.org)
Date: Thu Feb 22 2001 - 01:55:26 PST


I got this and was wondering if there's a way to look for sponsorship
with them now to help the OHS development. There's a Pat but I don't
know what her role is at VA. The SourceForge onsite development tools
generate revenue for VA, so it would help them in further developing
and enhancing the technology they deploy to their customers and the
community at large.

Regards,

--
-- Grant Bowman                                   <grantbow@svpal.org>

----- Forwarded message from nobody <nobody@sourceforge.net> ----- From: nobody <nobody@sourceforge.net> To: noreply@sourceforge.net Subject: SourceForge: Date: Thu, 22 Feb 2001 01:39:52 -0800 Message-Id: <E14VsE4-00021C-00@usw-sf-web3.sourceforge.net>

SourceForge update: February 21st, 2001.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

C) SourceForge Onsite: This is a service in which we deploy SourceForge's technology behind a company's firewall so that the company can work collaboratively to write better software faster internally. http://www.valinux.com/services/sfos.html http://www.valinux.com/about/news/releases/020901.html

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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-- -- Grant Bowman <grantbow@svpal.org>



This archive was generated by hypermail 2.0.0 : Tue Aug 21 2001 - 17:58:02 PDT