I know I've said it before, but this time I'm serious... the End is Near:

web2project is nearing v1.0

We - mostly Pedro - have been pounding on bugs, features, and all kinds of shiny and nifty new bits for the last 9 months.  The most important parts are the UI, performance, and security/permissions.

First, I'm not going to go into the security fixes again, but the permissions improvements are huge.  Not only can you quickly review an individual's permissions by going to the User Permissions Information screen but the system now caches the permissions calculations.  This reduces the overall number of queries on any page by approximately 90%.  Yes, you read that correctly... 90%.

I've talked about the two facets of the Open Source Community before, a quick summary of that one is:

First, you have the "Free Software" crowd. This segment of the community is based on the concept that "all software should be free". They actively work to further this goal via licenses and practices which encourage source code to be opened up and made available to others.

[snip]

Second, you have the "Open Source" crowd who believe that the OSS community provides real value to people and businesses for a fraction of the cost of the alternatives. Therefore, it's in their and the community's best interest to continue making contributions and improve the underlying infrastructure.

From this CSC report from 2004 (horribly dated, but interesting nonetheless), it shows that businesses accepted Linux, et al, into their application stacks years ago. Most of them didn't get into Open Source for a political or ideological agenda, they got involved because it made sense.

Recently on Slashdot, this article - Do we still need LUGs?- came up and it raised an interesting point:

A few years ago, LUGs enjoyed a heady heyday. If you were lucky enough to have a LUG close enough to drive to, you probably attended meetings regularly. Enthusiasm, both for Linux and the ideals for which it stands, drove an agenda full of exciting presentations, nights dedicated to getting a new distribution installed on your desktop, and lots of free stuff from companies like Red Hat, Corel, and SUSE, who wanted us to catch the fever.

In my previous discussion of the Open Source Community - I described the fundamental dichotomy that exists in the two halves of the community. Generally, we all get along and drive towards similar goals... even if our motivations are a bit different and our goals don't completely align. Anyway, with the recent release of GPL3, it didn't take a rocket surgeon to see that things were going to get excited.

Just a few weeks ago, I announced in this space the dotProject Files Module Update. The purpose of this update will allow your System Admin to replace the existing file system storage backend with Subversion for a more robust version control option. That said, I know Subversion isn't the only system out there...

If you are a dotProject user and would like to help make additional backends available, I need your input. More than that, I need your help. The only other system on my priority list is CVS but I know there are numerous other document management and version control systems out there that should be considered. Which ones are the most important to you? Which ones have you implemented? Which ones would you like to implement?