Life, the Universe and Everything


This is that time of year again. The wonderful folks at Google have announced (http://code.google.com/soc/2008/) that they were running their Summer of Code program again. We at the Scribus Team are quite excited about it in part as one of the two newest additions to our group Hermann Kraus has made his way in through the excellent work he did for us during GSoC 2007 and in part because we had such a great time of it last year. This is a terrific program that brings innumerable benefits to the Open Source ecosystem. We are hoping to be a part of this process this year as well, so we are working on our application and are soliciting ideas for potential GSoC 2008 Scribus Team projects from the larger Scribus Community in our wiki at http://wiki.scribus.net/index.php/GsoC_2008_Ideas. Let the summer of fun and learning begin!

Storing documents in text, in XML, in Scribus to be exact, is a really cool thing. Let me show you a real life example.

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During the release party for 1.3.3.10 Jean Ghali one of our quietest but steadiest developers (he’s slaughtered a mountain of bugs in 1.3.3.x), noticed that we were about to pass our millionth download on Sourceforge. Which got me thinking…

A million downloads for a project like Scribus. What is the significance ? What does that tell us ?

The technical part: Just shy of 20TB of data. Or looking at the rough averages currently, one person downloading a copy of Scribus every two minutes or so. Two years ago when we started hosting our downloads on Sourceforge we averaged 4.5Gb of data. Now we’re getting close to 2TB some months and the trend is steadily upward.

Moreover, those numbers are actually lower than reality when you consider it only counts downloads of Scribus after 1.2.something and we host a lot of binaries on the OpenSuse Build Server and we also have a separate Debian/Ubuntu repository. Lastly, almost every Linux distro includes Scribus by default.

So, where does that leave us ? What does it tell us ? The plain numbers are kind of dull and boring, but what it represents in the bigger scheme of things is that a complete and very healthy ecosystem has evolved in the area of Free and Open Source graphics applications. You can do serious professional grade publishing reliably using only open source tools.

When Scribus was started there was GIMP and a then sometimes rough on the edges Ghostscript, but not much else. No Inkscape, no Krita, no Fontforge, a dearth of decent professional grade fonts and very few which were really capable beyond Latin and CJK languages. Font managment plain sucked. Keith P. will go to heaven if only for making fontconfig and thus font installation sane on *nix. Early Scribus had all kinds of hacks and code just to find fonts, not any kind of sanity checking or other goodness we can now do with Freetype2.

Which leads us to today, where we can see GIMP getting GEGL and its long promised deep color spaces. Krita2 in a short few months will have a lot of goodness Scribus users will really groove on (and it might be really running stable on Windows.) Inkscape is making its first baby steps in adding color managment and they are really trying to make it work perfectly for Scribus downstream. Lprof, the color profile maker now is cross platform and is getting hardware support for pro grade colorometers.

Even better is the community of people who have emerged around Scribus and other FLOSS graphics apps. We have things like Fontmatrix which I ranted about earlier popping up out of nowhere to complete the scenery. LGM 1 and 2 were great and I fully expect LGM3 to meet or exceed them.

What that million means is are now enjoying what was just something we could only dream of when Scribus 0.2 (~ 150 downloads) was so modestly launched in 2001.

You know how it is, idly chatting in #scribus, compiling a little, surfing here and there… and suddenly you want to know the distance from Montreal (site of LGM2 ) to Victoria (site of FOSS4G 2007 ). Nothing as easy as that, just ask Google Maps for directions and it’ll give you the km number for free. Unfortunately there are quite a lot of Victorias around the world, so you have to choose the correct one (in British Columbia). But seeing other locations listed, from Texas to Australia, you obviously try some more, just for the fun of it (maps.google.com sadly only offers destinations on the North-American continent). Ok, no route to Victoria, Australia, nor to Victora, Seychellen — not really surprising.
The distance to Victoria, Texas is even shorter than to Victoria, BC, that’s a (small) surprise. But now: Google Maps Deutschland does have a route to Victoria, UK. Yippee!

google-map-montreal-victoria.png(click to enlarge)

Of course you wonder how to take the longer, middle leg of this journey, but — don’t fear! — Google Maps Deutschland has a solution in its itinerary for that, too. Read for yourself. :-D

/Andreas

P.S. And here’s what we really need: the route from Lyon to Montreal (this time in English language):
http://maps.google.fr/maps?f=d&hl=en&saddr=Lyon&daddr=Montreal

One of our translators and contributors mentioned to me that they had comments to the effect that Scribus is a “closed shop”. In other words, the team is really not open to adding new developers and contributors. So let’s dispel that rumour right now.

It is not true. Not now, not before, never.

To an outsider, it might appear that way, but not by intent. The Scribus Team is probably a bit different than most in that we are a bit older, perhaps than the average OSS team. Several of us have a few grey hairs on top – but that is a Good Thing for many reasons. :-)

Our experience in various parts of graphics and pre-press has given us a sense of direction about what not only Scribus needs, but what to avoid like faux bold and italic . Sometimes avoiding the same architectural and “feature” errors we’ve suffered as users in the past is just as important as ultra coding foo.

One other thing which is important to understand that we do work very harmoniously as a team. We share the same core values of respecting our users and each other’s unique talents and capabilities. We choose, compliments before criticism, cooperation instead of flaming and division. This, I think, is transmitted through in the way the community surrounding Scribus has grown. Note the lack of flame wars on our mail list. That is something I think we can be proud of and if we are protective of that – so be it.

However, get closer and you will see that Scribus is far from a “closed shop”. Surrounding the core team is a larger circle of folks whose contributions are not only valuable, but necessary. One look at Help > About, the mailing list or a look at the Wiki is evidence enough for me.

To the contrary, we do want more coders, more translators, more packagers and folks to help with testing bugs. Jump in! The water is just fine.