The Open Source Zone ’s aim is to create a storefront for access to Open Source projects. The storefront will have the same level of participation that users give back to Amazon or iTunes by providing their personal feedback in form of reviews, ratings, comments, "developers who liked this project also liked this other one".

In its present version, The Open Source Zone allows everyone to create a page about their favorite Open Source projects, post reviews and rate projects, associate books to projects using Amazon.com's database and tag projects a-la de.icio.us.

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds for projects, project categories, companies and conferences are provided, so you can keep up to date on new entries using your favorite news aggregator.

Following Wikipedia's approach, there are no barriers to entry. Registration is not required in order to contribute information.

On the technical side, The Open Source Zone is a web application that exploits a large number of Open Source libraries, frameworks and services, namely:

- Apache HTTPD 2.0 (http://httpd.apache.org)

- PostgreSQL 8.0 (http://postgresql.org)

- Jetty (http://jetty.mortbay.org/jetty/)

- Apache Cocoon (http://cocoon.apache.org)

- The Spring Framework (http://www.springframework.org)

- Hibernate (http://hibernate.org)

- Apache Lucene (http://lucene.apache.org)

It would have been impossible to create The Open Source Zone in such a short amount of time if all this great code had not been contributed to the Open Source community. Our most sincere thanks go to the people who created these packages.

Presently, The Open Source Zone is inviting everyone to contribute information and help build a vast database of knowledge about Open Source projects. We also need you to help us in testing the system under load, squash the remaining bugs and design new features.