docman, free software, and fear of forks

Twitter:@MathiasVerraes

@Nooku@Joomlatools

http://joomladocman.orghttp://nooku.org/framework

JOOMLA DAY MALLORCA 2010

DOCmanMathias Verraes

DOCman Lead DeveloperNooku Framework Lead Developer

Our team is growing• Johan Janssens, Joomla Co-Founder, 1.5 Lead Architect

• Mathias Verraes, DOCman lead developer

• Pete Russell, Joomla Co-Founder

• Shayne Bartlett, Joomla Co-Founder

• Tom Janssens, brother of a Joomla Co-founder

• David Deutsch, AEC Subscription management

• Gergõ Erdõsi, Joomla 1.6 developer

• Krisstoffer Yelland, DOCman Support Engineer

Every time you install software, you sign a contract

Proprietary software

•Only allowed to install on 1 computer

•Not allowed to change the code

•Don’t do this, don’t do that...

Very restrictive!

Free Software is about Freedom

Free Software

• The freedom to use the software for any purpose

• The freedom to change the software to suit your needs

• The freedom to share the software with your friends and neighbors

• The freedom to share the changes you make

General Public License

The idea of Free Software has a major influence on society

Without Free Softwarethe internet would be a boring, expensive place

Without Free Software, there would be no Joomla

Miro open sourced Mambo in 2001

In 2005, Joomla forked from Mambo

Two years ago, the Joomla project decided

that all extensions should be GPL

•Philosophical reasons

•Legal reasons

Many developers are worried their extension

will be forked

Pidgin vs Funpidgin

The best protection against forks is a healthy project that inspires trust

DOCman was forked :-(

... but it didn’t affect DOCman

How DOCman inspires trust:

•Stability

•Good release cycle

•Great support

•Free Software philosophy

What is DOCman?•Manage documents

•Publish downloads

•Manage permissions

First published in 2003, one of the oldest Joomla extensions

Features• GPL

• Nested categories

• Group ACL

• Themes

• Plugin support

• MVC

• DOClink

• Custom fields

• Local or remote storage

• Logs & statistics

• Search

• Anti-leech

• ...

DOCman 1.5

•Stability

•Security

•Performance

Stability

• Make upgrades as painless as possible

• No database changes

• No behaviour changes

Lots of sites depend on DOCman.

We don’t take risks with your data.

Security

• Big complex projects have a higher risk factor

• Software that manages sensitive data is more attractive to hackers

• Yet not a single vulnerability was discovered in DOCman in the past two years

DOCman 1.4DOCman 1.5

0

2

4

6

8

10

12

8,5

10,45

Memory usage in Mb

20% gain0

105

210

315

420

376415

Page render in milliseconds

10% gain

Performance

What are the challenges for DOCman 1.6?

150 Feature requests for DOCmanMost of them are very specific to one single use case

http://ideas.joomlatools.eu/pages/docman

The real problem is extensibility

ACL WebDAV ...

DOCmanCore Document Management

Versioning Workflows Notifications

Tagging Box.net Google Docs

Themes Amazon S3 Indexing

(either official or 3PD plugins)

DOCMAN FUTURE ...

What should you remember?

• Free Software is about Freedom

• For DOCman 1.5, keeping your documents secure is our primary concern

• DOCman 1.6 is about increased flexibility (release date: unknown)

Thank you

QUESTIONS?

Twitter:@MathiasVerraes

@Nooku@Joomlatools

http://joomladocman.orghttp://nooku.org/framework