In the other articles in this section it is suggested and argued that it would be good for educational institutions to adopt Open Source Software (OS-Software) for their practices. As a reader you might be convinced by now to use OS-Software for your e-learning environment, but not sure about what’s out there to fulfil your needs without using proprietary software solutions. It is a very difficult -if not impossible- question to answer, what OS-Software you might need to enhance your educational needs, because the answer depends on those specific needs.

This article tries to give some leads where to look for a possible OS-solution for e-learning support. There is a resource on the net where developers and users of OS-Software can meet. The organisation that is responsible for maintaining this resource is called SourceForge. You might navigate around at that site and see for yourself whether it offers what you need. But the amount of software that you can in there is enormous and this is why we did some preliminary work for you in this Key Issue to get a grip on SourceForge and help you find your way around.

The environment SourceForge

SourceForge offers a playground for developers to start a project for OS-Software development or improvement. A developer who is interested in a certain project can join a group or start a project himself. Sometimes existing software lacks a very handy feature that might be implemented or fails at some points. Or it might be that there is a good idea for software that doesn’t exist yet or that an existing product is re-developed into a possibly better one. To achieve that, developers write their own requirements or take submitted requests into account. Together they define a project and start to develop the OS-Software and make it available to the public.

SourceForge enables this process: it offers memory space to save the program code of new software, a system to keep track of the versions, a platform for the developers to centralise their communication and their project management (Collaborative Development System), a test environment (compile farm) and of course a site to make the different versions available via the Internet. If a user wants to download a specific piece of software, it will be available as a copy on a dozen websites (mirrors) so that there will be one close by to enable fast downloading. If you want to read more about the services of SourcForge you might find useful information on documentation (http://sourceforge.net/docman/display_doc.php?docid=753&group_id=1).

The code of the software is always available and most of the time the software is free to download. A mistaken conception of the idea of Open Software is that it is always free. This is not always the case. As stated clearly in an article of the Open Source Initiative (http://www.opensource.org/advocacy/free-notfree.php|) there is a lot of confusion between the terms “Free Software” and “Open Software”. Sometimes they collide, sometimes not. For a further discussion on costs, see another article in this directory (http://wiki.ossite.org/index.php?title=Key_Issues:_Is_OSS_really_cheaper_than_proprietary_software%3F&action=edit|).

The organisation behind it

Who is behind SourceForge and why? SourceForge is developed and maintained by OSTG, which stands for: Open Source Technology Group Inc. You can get a good impression of what this organisation does in their introductory text on OSTG (http://sourceforge.net/docman/display_doc.php?docid=6025&group_id=1|). In short: OSTG offers a number of websites with information on open source software, articles, news, references and forums and so on to help managers, end-users and in general all people that are about to deploy an OSS solution, to make a good decision on what to use. It has 270 million pages of information and about 18 million of visitors a month. They try to promote open source software. In their vision, the OS development model offers a better long-term viability, faster development and a possible better quality. There are plenty of other reasons for choosing OS-software like low-cost and compliance with standards and so on, which we will leave for the moment. OSTG has a number of sites that focus on software (code and executables), more than on information alone like SourceForge, Freshmeat, and DevChannel. Of these we explored SourceForge more extensively because it is the biggest of the three. There is even a bigger chance to find there what you need.

How to get around

First you go to [1] (http://sourceforge.net). There are two ways to get at the projects you want, but we found one more useful than the other. You can surf to “software map” in the header and search by topic. You might want to seek on “Education”, but the result will be hundreds of projects that have, for example, as intended audience ‘education’, but are not at all what you are looking for. You also might do a query on other aspects of the projects (which every project description contains) like the following:

• Database Environment:
• Development Status:
• Intended Audience:
• License:
• Operating System:
• Programming Language:
• Topic:
• Translations:
• User Interface:

If a project interests you, you can follow the links to the homepage to get a more thorough description. Every description of a project in SourceForge contains the information above, a short description and a section of the files that can be downloaded. If you browse via the software map, you get an idea of how it works quickly.

To get all the projects on a certain subject/problem domain, you might find what you want faster via the search option. To the left you can search on ‘software/project’. The right term to find for instance software on Learning Management Systems is its abbreviation ‘LMS’. Of course you should know what search term is suitable for your needs. The search engine looks in the project name and the project description. The search will look for any of your descriptors so make sure to put them between quotes if you like to query with a more complex term.

This might result in many promising pages of projects that are not interesting to you after all because they run on a different platform or are in a stage that is far from a usable release. It turns out to be a best practice to use a combination of those search methods. First you navigate by operating system or development status (or some of the other attributes listed above) and then you fill in (at the bottom) a search term like ‘LMS’.

For example, if you browse by status, you have the following options: Inactive, Planning, Pre-Alpha, Alpha, Beta, Production/Stable, Mature. Those denote – except for ‘Inactive’ – an increasing level of development. You can combine filters by clicking on the required or excluding filter icon next to the attributes of each project. So if you searched for ‘LMS’ and clicked in the resulting set of projects within any of them on the icon ‘required’ pictured behind the information on licenses (for example), an extra filter on licenses will be set with the value of that specific project. Doing so, you can refine your search more and more although there is no dropdown menu to choose from. If, for example, none of the projects shown on the page has the attribute ‘licence’ set to ‘GNU Public License’ and you want to filter on that, you have to skip to the next page hoping to refine your search there or browse by license instead. By combining a few filters you may decrease the resulting set of projects from almost thousand to one or two specific ones. So these filtering options are a powerful and necessary tool to reduce the time needed to read and judge all the projects.

If you want to use SourceForge more

If you have found (a number of) interesting projects that seem to be promising, but have not all of the features yet implemented, you might want to get informed (automatically) of what happens in these projects. In that case it is good to register for a free account. It offers you a number of extra options:

• You can bookmark pages you have visited
• You can post on discussion forums
• You can submit bugs, feature requests and so on
• You can subscribe to newsletters
• You can edit trackers of a project (see further)
• You might join a team or start your own project

You also get an email-address of your own that forwards every mail to your private email. If you, on top of this want to register for further features to use, like monitoring the tracking changes, you have to pay 39 US$. After paying that amount you will be notified automatically by email of all the changes in projects you told the system to monitor for you.

Register an account

It involves a few steps to register an account at SourceForge:

1. You click on ‘my sf.net’ at the top of the page and then on ‘new account’.
2. You supply a working personal email-address and a new password.
3. After you received an email with an internet address, you open this link in your browser and choose a username (between 3 and 15 characters) and a display name without restrictions.
4. You confirm your filled in data and you can login.