Rockbox International Devcon 2008

Rockbox devcon logo

(I dug up the old “devcon 2006” logo and I like it so much I thought I could use it again!)

I’d like to suggest that we set a date and place for the Rockbox International Devcon 2008 soon so that we all can start planning for it properly.

Personally, I would claim that having it near an international flight hub is a good idea (why Stockholm Sweden is ruled out this time), and since the dollar is dirt cheap now it is probably a good idea for both US-citizens and non-US citizens to have it in the US.

Within the US, I would suggest that the east coast and New York is among the best choices due to it being a frequent and often cheap destination from several places in Europe.

But of course, this requires that we have a volunteering person or preferably more than one person in that region who can hunt a suitable place and do some basic arranging for this kind of event. Any takers?

And if not New York, is there any other friends near an international flight hub that think they could work as “host” for devcon2008?

I would also suggest that we pick a date in the latter half of June. Around the weekends 21-22 or 28-29.

What do you think?

Please take answers/responses to the Rockbox forums.

Make Them Pick Us

Given that there are an endless series of open source and free software projects around. What makes companies and projects likely to chose to depend and use one of the existing ones rather than to write it themselves or possibly buy a closed-source solution instead? I’ll try to answer a few of the things that might matter, and deal with how curl and libcurl relates to them.

Proven Track Record

The project needs to have been around for a while, so that external people can see that the development continues and that there is a continued interest in the project from developers and users. That bug reports are acknowledged and fixed, that it has been scrutinized for the most obvious security problems etc. The curl project started almost ten years ago, have done more than one hundred releases and there is now more developer activity in the project than ever before.

Certified Goodness

With companies and associations that “certify” others, you can get others’ views on the quality of the projects.

The company named OpenLogic offers “certification” of open source software for companies to feel safer. I must admit I like seeing they’ve certified curl and libcurl. You can get their sales-pitch style description of their certification process here.

Of course I also like to see curl going to rung 2 on the scan.coverity.com list as it would mean a second (independent from the first) source would also claim that there’s a reasonable level of quality in the product.

If they did it so can we

With a vast list of existing companies and products that already are using the project, newcomers can see that this and that company and project already depend on this, and that fact alone makes the project even more likely to be a solid and trustworthy choice.

Being the answer when the question comes

Being known is important. When someone asks for help and guidance about what possible solutions there are to a particular problem, you want a large portion of your target audience to know about your project and to say “oh for doing X you could try project Y”. I want people to think libcurl when asked a question about doing internet-related transfers, like HTTP or FTP.

This is of course a matter of marketing and getting known to lots of people is a hard thing for an open source project with nothing but volunteers with no particular company backing.

Being a fine project

Of course the prerequisite to all points above is that the project is well maintained, the source is written in a nice manner and that there’s an open and prosperous community…