Tuesday, October 23, 2012

Vote for Your Favorite Apps to Become BitNami Packages

You may have noticed in the past that we had a simple voting mechanism on BitNami that would let you tell us which applications you wanted to see added to the BitNami library. This was a great way for us to gather user feedback and we packaged several applications as a result. We are excited to announce that we are taking this concept a step further and committing to package a new app every 2 weeks based solely on your votes. The app with the most votes at the end of each two week period will be added to the BitNami Library! That's right - vote for your favorite applications (and tell your friends to vote too!) and, if it is the winning app, within a month you will get free installers, virtual machines and Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) for it. At the end of each two week period, the votes will be reset to zero so that every app has a fair chance in every contest.

Here is how it works:

Step 1: Visit the BitNami Contest page. This page displays the current top-voted apps. Do you see your favorite app listed? Click on the 'vote' button to vote for it.


Step 2: To help your app climb to the top of the list, use the share buttons to tell your friends to vote via Facebook, Twitter, Google+, etc.


That's it! At the end of every two week period, we will take the app with the most votes and create a BitNami Stack for it. It will be added to our library, so we will keep the new BitNami Stack up to date as new versions of the application and dependencies are released.

If you don't see the app you want us to add on the list, visit our search page and either click on the app in the list or type the name into the search box. If the app is already in our catalog, you will be able to vote for it. It will be moved onto the Contest page when it has enough votes. You will also see a link to add a new app if the app you are looking for is not in our catalog.

Note that we are currently only offering the contest for PHP-based applications. In the near future, we will be providing support for Python, Rails and Java-based applications as well. To be considered, the application needs to be available under a suitable license such as the GPL or the Apache license. We encourage community-oriented open source projects to participate. If you are a commercial open source company we encourage to contact us directly if you want us to package your software. Any attempt to game the system or manipulate the polls (i.e. writing a bot) will result in disqualification.

Which app will be next to join the BitNami library? That is up to you!