My WebLog at Intitut Mines-Telecom, Télécom SudParis
It seems that TWiki community is forking as there was a dispute between TWiki.net (under pressure of venture capitalists) and the rest of the community, over the trademark 🙁
Always amazing these community issues on open source software.
More details here for instance.
We’re seriously considering switching from phpGroupware to eGroupware for some infrastructure needed for a picoforge-based platform that we need to deploy soon.
phpGroupware is unfortunately kinda dead these days, whereas eGroupware seems to have managed to keep some momentum.
Of course we had preferred keeping with phpGroupware when the two projects initially switched apart, in particular because the GNU project-linked QA/copyright policies were a guarantee that our contributions may be better protected in such a collaboration environment (we tried and help the phpGroupware as much as we could, btw, and parts of this history is told when looking at : http://www-public.it-sudparis.eu/~berger_o/weblog/tag/phpgroupware/).
But the copyright policy is not all about successful collaboration, and it happens that phpGroupware fails to deliver from quite a few months now. Btw, I’m not so close to the project to tell exactly what’s happening and why, but looking at the mailing-lists, at least, the situation looks very bad.
So I dare say it lound : the phpGroupware project is quietly dying (at least from my point of view).
But as we need some improvements that were initially planned for its 0.9.18 release (filemanager, accounts, various stuff I’m not really qualified to list completely)… we need to consider what the options are…
And fortunately, it looks like eGroupware has not forked in a too much differing way, from a technical point of view, and that they have even improved some of the things we expected to be coming from phpGroupware 0.9.18.
So it’s very much likely that we’re going to try and switch to eGroupware for some parts of the platform to be deployed in the next month.
This may not concern the whole of the PicoForge infrastructure but only a particular project that builds on top of the current PicoForge infrastructure, with some variations.
As for the future of PicoForge as the libre software forge, it’s not really clear what’s gonna happen, but I think that we may be making a more radical switch some day, for instance by forgetting the old legacy PHP code, and so neither depending on phpGroupware nor eGroupware, but using some more modern tools/frameworks (and why not something like Tine 2.0 ? … no, but we may be inspired by some of its characteristics ;).
Qui vivra verra.
Just a quick message to announce the start of Helios project, whose kick-off occurred yesterday in THALES premises in Palaiseau.
The team is enthuisastic, I think, and I hope we’ll be able to provide usefull integrated tools for Application Lifecycle Management based on Open source tools.
I hope the work we’ll be doing on bug trackers will help improve the process of bug fixing in open source projects and distributions too.
The project doesn’t have a website yet, but things will be setup soon.
More on Helios later in this blog. Stay tuned.
We have presented a paper at the WopDasD 2008 workshop (right after the OSS 2008 conference) in Milano, explaining how RDF could be used to propagate semantically tagged information from the forges to the “repositories of repositories” collecting facts on open-source projects, and advocating to tighter integration of the forges and the research analysis tools.
I was glad that another presentation was made by Kevin Crowston for a paper written by James Howison about the use of RDF semantic schemas to bring more interoperability between the various repositories of repositories (Update 2008/09/22 : slides here). Btw, they explained what RDF is in the slides just before me, so I got more time to talk about the rest 😉
Also quite interesting was the presentation made by Andrea Wiggins for their paper about the workflow for scientific analysis in these repositories of repositories. I guess there’s some momentum towards more interoperability and more integration here. Maybe some web services could interoperate between what’s on the forges and what’s on the repository of repositories.
We’ve discussed this idea at the OSS2008 WoPDaSD 2008 workshop with Sander Striker, and I’d be curious to know if it’s been attempted to analyse contents of mailing-lists with bayesian filter of spamassassin in order to detect particular topics of discussion, instead of filtering out spam.
Sometimes researchers on FLOSS projects try to analyse mailing-lists to detect communication patterns.
Maybe spamassassin could be used as a common bayesian analyser to be train to recognize subjects of discussions in order to help detect common topics in mailing-lists ? Of course this may have allready been tried… will be curious of our comments on that idea.
Update 2008/09/22 : more accurate title, as it is not all about spamassassin (see comment bellow).