Abstract
This site provides various Open Source software to anyone who find it useful. The projects were written from scratch by Matthew Mondor and publically released under a modified BSD (Berkeley Source Distribution) license.
Contributing
Although we attempt to encourage contributors and donators, we try to keep this site as free from commercial advertizing as possible as a convenience to our users. However, you can get your name, organization, company or Web site listed in the Contributors area if you wish, after making a donation. Those who want to anonymously donate are also always welcome. Because this is free software, and that developing and maintaining software takes a lot of time, money donations consist of the easiest way to support the project. This encourages developpers to continue to provide quality work, while helping to pay for the main site bandwidth and hardware fees, as well as administration time.
Other appreciated ways to contribute include:
- Provide packages for various platforms, for users to be able to easily install our software on their systems;
- Submit bug reports the most verbose as possible;
- Develop user-friendly administration frontend solutions;
- Help completing and updating documentation in manual or FAQ formats;
- Translate the site or software documentation in other languages;
- Host a mirror of the site with a vhost and FTP administration account.
Software in use
Here follows a list of some of the software in use by the main site. We are proud to mention that these are all Open Source:
- The NetBSD 3.1_STABLE Operating System platform
- ViM (Vi iMproved) editor used to write software and pages
- The Apache HTTP server, running unprivileged
- BIND (Berkeley Internet Name Domain) used as DNS server within a restricted chroot(2) environment, running unprivileged
- CVS (Concurrent Versions System) used along with mmanoncvs and mmspawnd to provide the anonymous CVS pserver through a restricted chroot(2) environment, running unprivileged
- PostgreSQL A very powerful and efficient ORDBMS (Object-Relational Database Management System) with SQL support, released under BSD license
- mmftpd used as FTP server under a chroot(2) environment and running unprivileged
- mmmail used for mail handling under a chroot(2) enviroment and running unprivileged
- apache-mmstat and mmstatd providing instant statistics, running unprivileged.
- httpd-js test site currently running under an unprivileged HTTP server written in JavaScript using SpiderMonkey (no kidding, see http://chat.pulsar-zone.net :)
Our emphasis on Open Standards
The W3C resources were used to ensure that this site conforms with standards. It thus should validate as using Valid HTML 4.01 and Valid CSS.
Where possible, C code conforms to ANSI C ISO/IEC 9899:1990 ("ISO C90") norms. It also attempts to utilize POSIX IEEE Std 1003.1-1988 ("POSIX.1"), X/Open System Interfaces and Headers Issue 5 ("XSH5") and BSD standard functions as far as platform specifics are concerned. We avoid to to use certain platform-specific extensions such as GNU, Linux or Windows particulars. When using BSD specific extensions, we attempt to make the code sections compile-time optional to allow easier porting to other UNIX platforms.