Open Source Projects That You Should Know About? 23
cosyne asks: "Seeing the recent announcement about FreeS/WAN reminds me that there are many cool projects that I'm mostly unaware of (or, more often, completely oblivious to), which I only hear about when Slashdot posts a 'Developers finally giving up on this cool project' story. What projects (software or otherwise) are out there that would benefit from more involvement if only they had the publicity?"
Tooting my own horn... (Score:4, Insightful)
My Open Source Project, the jSyncManager Project (http://www.jsyncmanager.org) could certainly use more help and attention. It's a pure Java solution for synchronizing PalmOS based handhelds with applications and databases. It has a completely object-oriented protocol stack, and only requires jUSB or the Java Communications API to communicate, making it completely platform-neutral. It doesn't need to be ported between platforms ala pilot-link, nor does it rely on the Windows HotSync Manager like most other PalmOS-based Java sync solutions, so it will run the same on Linux, OS/2, Windows, MacOS, *BSD, and anything else that can run Java.
We've been doing pretty well attracting users, particularily in the corporate space because the applications and APIs are mature (the project will be celebrating 5 years since its initial 1.0 release this May), stable, and allow easy development in Java.
But getting people to contribute code has been a real hassle, as has been trying to get developers of other Java-based Open Source applications to use our code and specs (like our jConduit plug-in spec for creating your own pure Java conduit plug-ins) -- even in cases where it makes perfect sense to do so (like for JPluck -- a pure Java toolkit for Plucker, which while being pure, cross-platform Java in the toolkit itself, provides only a native Windows conduit for synchroniation).
The project is at the state right now where we have tons of potential users who would like to se more plug-ins, but a complete dearth of willing Open Source developers to actually write them. Sure, now and then some user/developer might supply a patch to fix something minor, but it's exceedingly rare than anyone ever volunteers to develop something new (and when they do, it's rarer still that they actually follow through).
Sorry for the rant -- but the project has long been close to my heart, people who have seen and used it rank it quite highly, and we have lots of willing users -- we're just lacking the developers. It makes me understand why some other OS project administrators (like the LRP guys) can be willing to throw in the towel. Everyone wants new features, but finding the willing developers who will actually put any real time into development can be exceedingly frustrating.
Yaz.