Posted on August 2nd, 2007%
It’s a new month, which means it’s time for me to pick a free, open source product to donate to. This month was an easy decision: I picked the product that I use every day to manage my code (and code history): TortoiseSVN.
I’m not the only one who’s ga-ga over TortoiseSVN; they recently were declared the Best Tool or Utility for Developers by the folks at SourceForge. With Subversion being the de-facto source code management standard (even Microsoft is starting to pay attention to it), it’s no surprise that TortoiseSVN is so widely loved.
I’m happy to have joined the list of those who’ve donated to TortoiseSVN!
My donation history to date far is as follows.
TortoiseSVN (August 2007)
OpenOffice (June 2007)
FileZilla (July 2007)
. . .
→ Read More: Supporting free software: TortoiseSVN
Posted on July 2nd, 2007%
Last month, I announced that I’ll start donating $5 per month to a free and/or open source project. The first donation went to OpenOffice. This month, the donation goes to FileZilla, the free, open-source FTP client.
FileZilla is one of those utilities that you take for granted. It works so well that you tend to not think about it. There’s barely a day that goes by when I don’t fire up FileZilla at least once. Granted, there are plenty of FTP clients out there, and I’ve used many, but none satisfied me as much as FileZilla.
Thanks to Tim Kosse for starting and maintaining FileZilla over the years.
. . .
→ Read More: Supporting Free Software: FileZilla
Posted on June 28th, 2007%
Last month, I posted about how I will start donating $5 per month to a free and/or open source project that I feel is worthy of my $5. (The first recipient was OpenOffice.) Over the past few days, the focus on .Net OSS projects has grown, partially thanks to Jeff Atwood. Ayende talks about putting OSS funds to good use on his projects (notably Castle/MonoRail/ActiveRecord), and a month ago Phil Haack talked about the growing .Net OSS attention.
Speaking of Phil Haack, he wrote today about his push for June 26th being “Contribute to Open Source Day“. To those professionals who use OSS projects regularly, I think $5 a month is hardly a lot of money.
(It’s not July yet, so I won’t announce who will get my next $5, but I assure you they will deserve it.)
Will you join the initiative to give $5 a month to a worthy open source project?
. . .
→ Read More: Supporting free software II: The saga continues
Posted on June 4th, 2007%
I’ve been a fan of free things for a long time, whether it be software or web sites. “If it’s for free, it’s for me.” Scanning through my list of installed programs and bookmarked web sites, I find the following.
Note: The list below includes free software that is not a free version of commercial software. As an example, Grisoft‘s free software is excluded, as those are feature-limited versions of commercial software.
CastleProject (MonoRail, et. al.)
FileZilla (FTP client)
Cropper (screen capture)
Launchy (keystroke launcher)
Firefox (plus many add-ins)
NAnt (build tool)
NUnit (unit testing)
Notepad2 (notepad replacement)
NLog and log4Net (logging frameworks)
Reflector (.Net analyzer/decompiler)
OpenOffice (word processing, spreadsheets, etc.)
Multiple IEs (different IE versions on one OS)
Sandcastle Help File Builder
Subversion (source control)
TortoiseSVN (Explorer integration for Subversion)
AnkhSVN (Visual Studio integration for Subversion)
WinMerge (visual diff . . .
→ Read More: Supporting free software: My drive to donate
Posted on April 16th, 2007%
CSSFriendly, the ASP.Net CSS Friendly Control Adapters, is an open source project I contribute to. Source code, issue tracking, and other services are provided using CodePlex, Microsoft’s alternative to SourceForge. Since last week, our source control server (Team Foundation Server, or TFS) has been down.
The reason for the downtime, as reported by someone on the CodePlex team:
At 3pm PDT on April 11th an operator error occurred that caused source control and issue tracker data on one of the Microsoft CodePlex servers to be accidentally overwritten. During the standard data recovery effort, a recovery backup configuration oversight was discovered in the routine backup process for this CodePlex server which is currently impacting immediate restoration of the data.
Fortunately, thanks to my years of experience in medium and large organizations, I can translate this into layman terms:
At 3pm PDT on April 11th someone screwed up and accidentally blew out one of the CodePlex servers. When we looked . . .
→ Read More: CodePlex: Did they forget to back up a server?
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