This unofficial page is created in support of Open Source aspects of the National Middleware Initiative of the NSF.
Facilitating Integration of Projects:
After agreeing on these sorts of needs and approaches, the first step would probably be to inventory existing projects and packages. Identify how they address each of these needs today, and what their visions are for the future. Some projects are currently up on http://sourceforge.net, some are using various software on locally supported sites, services of the grid community, etc.
There are a number of popular licences for open source software. In some cases, compatibility between licenses can become an issue if various components which incorporate different licenses need to be tightly integrated. So identifying which licenses are in use and providing advice on licensing issues will be an important early step.
Once we have a better grasp of how existing and planned projects address their needs, we'll be in a position to work out what guidance to give to NMI projects that are looking for advice going forward, whether that means what tools and languages to get started using, or how to further roll out their own existing software.
We'll also start planning how to offer more coherent open source support and integration services to ease both development and deployment tasks. That will probably start off as web pages to point people to the right places to go for downloads, documentation, and integration advice. Next will come offering better alternatives to existing projects in ways that integrate larger pieces of the infrastructure. Simply mirroring and backing up sites may make sense in some cases, and much more comprehensive and unified approaches in other cases.
Here are some sites supporting open source development.
http://www.grids-center.org/ - Grids Research Integration Deployment and Support Center
Will define, develop, deploy, and support an integrated national middleware infrastructure (NMI) supporting 21st Century science and engineering applications.
This is the site supported by VA Linux Systems, which hosts about 30,000 open source projects.
Recent articles:
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/11/12/1456219&mode=nested http://www.fsfeurope.org/news/article2001-10-20-01.en.html - Loïc Dachary [VA asking him to sign over all his copyrights for their proprietary use]
The BerliOS Developer Site is powered by SourceForge Software.
http://sunsite.dk/ - Free Open Source Hosting - 88 Projects supported by donations.
Sunsite.dk offers:
A special-purpose site, supporting projects that relate to The Tigris Mission: Promoting Open Source Software Engineering
A free, open, publically accessible CVS
SourceForge Open Edition: licensed under the GPL. Last GPL'd release: v2.61 [where is a copy?]
The Debian-SF Home Page has a packaged version of SourceForge 2.5.1 for Debian Linux.
"SourceForge.net will be using SourceForge Portal Edition, which will also include proprietary extensions, because it provides functionality that won't be available in future releases of SourceForge Open Edition. We'd like to give our SourceForge.net users access to many of the new features that our enterprise customers will be using, such as the ability to talk with proprietary databases and other software."
HP Devnet also uses Sourceforge Portal edition.
Sourceforge Enterprise Edition - Formerly known as "SourceForge OnSite", priced at perhaps $300/registered user.
Savannah is a Free Software Foundation package based on Sourceforge 2.0, and a site, focussed on Debian Linux packages.
http://savannah.gnu.org/
http://savannah.gnu.org/docs/savannah-plan.html
Savannah future - The Sourceforge code base is "unmaintainable" so they plan to migrate to
phpGroupWare.
SF generic installatation tries to add generic installation, build documentation and supporting scripts/make files to get a sourceforge installation done without the many problems that result from working from the original source. Based on Sourceforge 2.6
phpGroupWare is a multi-user web-based groupware suite written in PHP. It also provides an API for developing additional applications.
CoopX aims at providing a description language, or a file format, or something along those lines, to store the data in Sourceforge-likes. The goal is to ease backups and more importantly to ease transition for migrations.
Tools used by the Mozilla project
BitKeeper provides a family of products for software and web developers:
The goal of the BitKeeper license is to keep three groups of people happy: The Open Source users. People in this camp tend to want the product for free, want to know that they are not dependent on the vendor for support, and need to know they can get the source and fix it themselves should that be necessary. The commercial users. People in this camp want to pay for the product, want to know that the vendor will be there next year to support the product, and they want to know that the costs are shared by having a large base of customers all of whom are paying for the product. The vendor. The vendor wants to keep as many people as possible happy while making a tidy profit to be applied to the next Cool Thing (tm).
The goal of the BitKeeper license is to maximize value to all of these parties. It is trying to make sure that everyone gets as much as they can get. Contrast this with traditional open source licenses. These licenses are completely focussed on one segment: the Open Source community. That's fine, but it leaves the other people out in the cold.
If discussions of licensing drive you mad, just take a deep breath and remember the overriding aim of such licenses, best articulated by Eric Raymond: "We want to make sure that naive users never need to read a license."
The Internet2 Intellectual Property Framework provides a useful statement of underlying principles to use in making licensing decisions.
Pointers to some discussions of licensing models:
Here are some existing middleware-related software development projects, with links to web pages related to them.