encourage other developers

[hendrik]

Dear Time Tracker Project Admins,

I love anuko's time tracker and I use it every day to keep track of my personal and professional projects. I am freelancing and so I'm even using it to bill my customers and show them what I've done during project time.

However, as an ambitious software developer I find it very hard to deal with time tracker as an open source project. Yes, the source code is freely available and yes the license is liberal, but apart from that it seems to me (this is my personal opinion) that nothing more is done to encourage other developers to extend time tracker's functionality (or generally maintain the software).

Please don't take this as some form of personal criticism, I just think it'd be a good idea to make this piece of great software easily available to more people.

In my eyes, the following things should be considered. Again, this is not some form of demand, it's more of an advice:

• Provide easier access to the source code. In my eyes a git/github repository, googlecode or a sourceforge project should do this job very well. You also could maintain certain versions and branches (stable, unstable, etc.). I see that you guys are constantly updating the source code to fix issues and add functionality but there's nowhere a version number found on the web site, so I never see if my installation could/should be updated or not. Enable us developers to provide patches and fork the code base to work on bigger adjustments. I see that this is basically possible right now, but it's just terribly hard to maintain.
• It seems to me, that the time tracker has no bug tracker? github/sourceforge/etc could manage this very well, too.
• You could adjust your Liberal Freeware License to something more "common". In my eyes your license model is compatible to any BSD-License!
• Also it would make sense to put the user and installation guides into a wiki, so it could be translated and extended by us users.

I see that anuko itself is making its money from supporting time tracker installations. You could definitely benefit from a broader developer community as they will could improve code quality and add features. You are not loosing control over the source code itself, as it is already freely available.

You might consider this.

Greetings from Berlin, Germany.
-Hendrik-

[Nik]

What can I say?

There is room for improvement for sure, process-wise and in other areas. Hopefully, some of your suggestions will be addressed eventually, one way or another...

I don't see any problems with the current open source license though. What's wrong with it?

[hendrik]

Hey Nik,

thanks for your support. Basically, I guess nothing is actually wrong with the license. I just wanted to mention that providing something that sounds familiar (e.g. "BSD License") probably attracts more people than some license that (at a first glance) looks new to me, that I have to actually read and understand the implications. Just sayin'.

Regards

[walter@kasparek.org]

Sali zäme,

based on time tracker I have developped a report and bill form generator: You can generate them for each co-worker by project for a variable time period. Customer project links and per date blocking of data entry is provided by means of additional relations in the database. Each bill can amended with incremental bill number. Currency can be changed. VAT is calculated. Up to 2 additional bill elements can be added.

Walter

link:http://revendex.kasparek.org or description (german) http://old.kasparek.org/Laden/l/R.html

[tkie]

The first link seems to require a password. Is the link correct?

What's wrong with the built-in invoicing feature? It's available on the report page, after creating a report.

[walter@kasparek.org]

This is the entry to my bill generator instance. Access needs a password because the addon relations to timeTracker are administered here.
The invoice option in timeTracker does not support template bill forms. Further regularly bill generation needs too much handwork.

Walter