Community surprise

Whazzup?

A few factors took me away from Open Source in the last months. In a way, these months have been a “bus factor test”: looking back, they show how the project would endure without the constant hand of the principal developer.

And the summary is: Surprise!

• year 2010 saw 6 SSHGuard releases, year 2011 saw one
• website traffic in 2011 increased 30%
• several packages appeared for new OSes/distributions spontaneously (we solicited hard for them in 2010)
• download count conserved for source package, despite spreading binary distros supposedly taking a bigger bite off
• submissions of patterns conserved (at about 60/year), still more than our processing rate
• code contributions on the mailing list grew significantly

So, development falls, and popularity rises? Apparently so, and the magic behind is called “community”.

If I have to name a few concrete factors that might have aided this:

• Federico’s new and awesome website
• Maturity of the codebase
• Time. The project has been around long enough to catch up with older massively-ranked projects on Search Engines

What can you do, as a user, to help SSHGuard build upon a stronger community? Give back with a few minutes of your time!
Here’s some ideas:

• always speak out for stuff you like. Ideas: your blog (yes!), alternative.to, ohloh, twitter, stackoverflow, webhostingtalk, freshmeat, sourceforge
• mention SSHGuard when someone asks for advice on mailing lists: help people find alternatives to choose from
• help other users by replying on sshguard’s mailing list. The less posts the team has to reply, the more we can work on code

Version 1.5 and timing

Today we release version 1.5rc4. Dijkstra used to say that the aim of testing is to prove the presence of bugs, not their absence. If so, we managed to be successful with 1.5rc3 too! :)
Thanks Florian for reporting the problems on recent Solaris, and working them out along with us. And thanks Dago from opencsw.org, which provides Solaris shells (and support) for developers to ensure maintenance of Solaris portability with ease. OpenCSW is definitely worth praise and notice for any project that cares about portability.

In the meantime, we keep receiving proposals for the addition of patterns on http://www.sshguard.net/support/attacks/submit/. At the rate of one submission a week, this is a great way to reminds us how big and lively our community is out there. Plus, users start wanting to apply SSHGuard to tasks beyond its original portfolio. Awesome!
If anyone wonders what’s happening to such submissions (the background: we’re taking on average 3 months from submission to commit), the explanation is that by policy we prioritize fixes to outstanding bugs before addition of new features. As soon as we’re over with 1.5, the bulk of outstanding submission will be processed.

So, what can you do to speed this whole process up? Go test sshguard 1.5rc4 now, and report merciless any defect you might find. If we see we’re done with it, 1.5 stable is on its way in just a few weeks.