In search of support for open-source projects

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By David Rubinstein

August 14, 2008 — One of the biggest benefits of open source is that if something goes wrong with an application, there are many people in the community who can offer you some help. This is also one of the biggest drawbacks of open source—there isn't just one point of contact to get a problem solved.

SourceLabs, a company focused on search and support technology for open-source software, released yesterday Self-Support Tools to help developers discover issues and find solutions for open-source software. The key extensions to the company's Support Suite technologies are hardware recognition and advanced tagging, according to a news release issued by the company.

"The biggest challenge for open source, or any other kind of software development for that matter, is finding the right information to solve a problem," said Byron Sebastian, CEO and co-founder of SourceLabs, in a statement. "Adding automatic hardware tagging to our search data not only improves the relevance of our support, but also gives IT developers the most reliable information faster, and with the analytical tools to make the right decision based on their exact environment. No phone calls into support. No trouble tickets. Just search on your desktop."

SourceLabs' Intelligence Engine collects the most current data regarding open-source software projects into a repository, and then indexes, tags and manages that information for each individual user. The engine employs pattern matching and natural language recognition to match data in a search against the information stored in the repository. The engine now collects and sorts data regarding known hardware defects and dependencies, and the repository now stores more than 19 million objects.

Most developers use Google first when trying to find a way to resolve a code issue, according to industry research cited by SourceLabs, but the company's search technology is built specifically to provide a higher level of support to Java and Linux developers.

Related Search Term(s): open source, testing & troubleshooting, SourceLabs

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