[Fsf-friends] fsf must rate and talk about application softwares too

[Kush]

What I was thinking is that if we had some sort of user feedback on 
various softwares of  a certain class/type and that experential 
knowledge could be put in a sort of ever evolving wiki --(which is kept 
short and sweet and can be easily grasped by others). We don't have to 
think of a flame wars though they will inevitably happen but we could 
think in terms of avoiding flame wars by talking about features etc 
analytically --it may be an exercise in self restraint and not getting 
provoked and some neuro linguistic programming but it can be done. The 
problem is we have to start somewhere and not give up just because its 
too difficult. (if we haven't tried even, then we have lost the battle 
at the conception stage itself ;))

Rating features do not need to be hard and fast. They could be wrongly 
thought about initially but could be corrected over time. i would give 
importance to the following features/characteristics of a product
1 how good does the development and documentation team look?
2 how long has the product's user's community been active?
3 what are the key strengths of the product's community? can this be 
gauged from the website
4 what is the communication/collaboration strength of the community?

product itself
1 what features does it have that others also have
2 what features are special or exclusive?
3 how buggy is the product? which key bugs need to be sorted out before 
significant adoption by newcomers happen?
4 how fast are important bugs removed? how fast are important features 
added?
5 how long ago have they started developing?
6 how is the user interface experience?
7 how is the documentation and mailing list help?
8 do they have plans for a CRM sort of bug list (--e.g. openoffice 
problems are got back to very fast-- within a day or so) where people's 
concerns are replied to, reasonably soon
9 is there a distinct seperation between developers and a user support 
team (help and customer support functions, documentation function, 
handholding/troubleshooting functions)
10 are the developers good communicators or do they get bugged by newbie 
talk?
and so on and so forth.

These are just ideas at this point in time and maybe some others like 
pcquest magazine etc have already started doing such reviews but for 
superficial categories of products. We could influence them to talk 
about more relevant product categories but pcquest also has a drawback 
that their survey process is market driven.

We need to list websites which help do surveys such as surveymonkey.com 
or formsite.com etc etc. i don't know of any open source software sites 
which do surveys and allow transparency in the result formation process.

Maybe at the end of the day -- we will have to show how to do all this 
rather than just talk. AND THIS is a BIG Project of impartially 
evaluating and continuously improving our methodologies of rating KEY 
open source application softwares.

Kush
PS: I won't be able to respond so much in the coming days but this idea 
will remain in the back of my mind and someday may start as a 
sustainable activity unless somebody else beats us to it ;). Will keep 
reading the responses and may reply once in a while. Thanks for your inputs.

Ramakrishna Reddy wrote:
> On 6/16/06, Kush <be_a_sport at rogers.com> wrote:
>> Hi all,
>>
>> Right now it is easy to always go to sites which provide certain kinds
>> of application softwares but in the real world people need collaborative
>> softwares. I think the business world is using propreitary applications
>> for distributed work and we don't have sites which give any ratings for
>> such softwares from the open source world.
>>
>
> Rating based on what? Most of the projects start as  a  hobby to solve
> one own need or purpose, when someone who's also in need same kind of
> application he would ask the author a copy of it. I think its  a bad
> idea for an organisation like FSF to act like Gartner, IDG  to rate a
> piece of free software against another free software, esp the
> softwares used for Distributed work, where FOSS applications have a
> very higher market share than proprietary equivalents.
>
>
>> I am talking of the virtual private network applications or CRM or CMS
>> or wiki type softwares where lay people can really collaborate in an
>> office or group setting. We have no rating mechanisms to judge which
>> features are better among a group of softwares. Typically people are
>> interested in knowing
>>
>
> Wikis are one kind of collaborate software, which has seen much
> succes, I can't think of a proprietary product, that has seen a wiki
> kind of sucess in the recent times.
>
>> 1 whether moin moin is better than (and in what ways) mediawiki or zwiki
>> etc etc in the field of wiki softwares. (I came across Moin moin
>> accidentally thru the dapper ubuntu cd which features it in the
>> opencd.org project.)
>
> Pitching Moin Moin vs Mediawiki or any other piece of software, would
> lead just to a flame war. We cant seriously justify why one CMS is
> better than another. It all counts down to the user scenario, may be
> Rails is cooler than mediawiki, but mediawiki has its own advantages.
>
>> or
>> whether egroupware is better than other softwares in the same line?
>> (groupware substitutes for lotus notes etc)
>> or whether joomla is comparable to drupal or mambo etc etc in features"
>> (cms applications)
>> or whether openoffice's base application (database) is any good and if
>> there are alternatives available in the open source world at present
>> which can take on msaccess? (or a workaround with a mysql application
>> for ms access)
>> or how does freegis compare with postgis and maxdb etc gis application
>> softwares ? (in the gis world of open source software)
>>
>> or whether ruby on rails will soon outpace python, perl and php in web
>> based application development? (though perl, php, python each have a
>> HUGe body of historical strength)
>
> For Eg.
> Ruby on Rails replacing python, perl and php in web app development,
> This is one of the popular fads  floating around, Ruby on rails is
> only good for some kinda applications where there is lot hierarchy
> involved Esp. MVC , it not good for every kinda web development. So
> how do ya rate it against a PHP based web app like Mojavi. and pitch
> Rails for world domination ?
>
>
>> Or whether eclipse is better than kdevelop(c++) or anjuta or bluefish or
>> boa constructor(python or delphi/pascal) or other IDEs? (when newbies
>> have to develop open source softwares)
>>
>> or the merits/demerits of IDE tools which are linked to version control
>> system tools like cvs or subversion etc etc--which are the best tools in
>> version control according to various features/parameters
>>
>
> This also would lead to a flame war , BTW Emacs still rocks, -----No
> Comments------ :D
>
>
>> or whether there are better tools than argo UML (poseidon is
>> propreitary) in the field of application development software in terms
>> of high level requirements specifications software and automatic
>> generation of software tools
>>
>> or what are the strengths vs weaknesses in short form and
>> dispassionately analysed etc without advertising jargon.
>>
>
> RTFM as people would say, to know what the app is good at.
>
>> I don't know any place where such information can be easily read and
>> found. and these are the things which really matter for laymen to come
>> to speed in the adoption of open source software in India.
>> Sourceforge.net earlier used to  give a maturity rating (development
>> status) for an application but it does not do so now.
>
> sf.net were smart enough to take out rating system based on maturity
>
> Regards
> ---
> Ramakrishna Reddy                       GPG Key ID:31FF0090
> Fingerprint =  18D7 3FC1 784B B57F C08F  32B9 4496 B2A1 31FF 0090
>
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