[Clipart] Sourceforge Issue

[Bryce Harrington]

On Mon, 19 Apr 2004 Sigmascape1 at cs.com wrote:
> I've had similar issues with SF. SF is really great, but they don't
> like content-based projects. As mentioned earlier, the bandwidth can
> become a big problem for them. It's too bad though. The collaborative
> tools associated with SF would be great for this project and similar
> projects. Isn't there a way to hook up with some university? I've seen
> so many redundant, goofy stuff of various university sites. It seems
> like such a wonderful, open concept as this would be a great match for
> a university or a series of universities.

I've been chatting with the freedesktop.org admins (very nice folks
btw) about this.  Dan's going to set us up with cgi-bin access (it's
granted on a project-by-project basis), and of course we can install php
tools as we see fit.  I did some research on freshmeat for
SourceForge-like project management software and found one called 'PROM'
that I think we could try out first, that's billed as a project-specific
SF-like project management tool.  There's a lot of others available but
they look geared more towards corporate type projects (e.g., with
meeting calendars and labor headcount tracking, etc.) than for open
source projects.  IIRC it has a forum too, which someone had requested
earlier.

I'm also going to set up UseModWiki; the freedesktop's Twiki is okay,
but it isn't quite what Jon and I are used to, and UseModWiki lets us
override the look and feel via CSS, so might be worth a shot.

If anyone else knows of other tools that they'd like to try out on the
site, let me or jon know and we can get you set up with access so you
can plug them in.  We desperately need some kind of clipart upload tool
- PROM has an upload capability IIRC but I'm guessing it'll be a bit
anemic for our use.  Perhaps we could hack it into a better shape for us
though.

With SF I've always thought to myself, "Gee, I think I could put
together a better set of tools than that..." and then of course went
back to SF as the path of least resistance.  So it's kind of nice here
to not have the SF option and be able to finally see what can be done.
:-)

> Last week, I wrote this list about finding a free place to deposit my
> content. It's hard. Maybe a letter-writing effort can be developed,
> aimed at companies that would benefit directly from a repository of
> open, liberally licensed content... maybe a Lindows (linspire),
> Mandrake, Novell/SuSE. There are lots of commercial Linux
> distributions that could use this sort of common resource. Possibly,
> all of these companies and more could set-up something for free
> clipart/content.

Hmm, seems like there used to be a lot more places for posting free
content; perhaps they've gone by the wayside.  Well, if you'd like, and
if you're providing it as Public Domain, send it my way and I'll add it
to the other packages.  Even if it's not vector art, I think we can find
some room for it.  :-)

Bryce