First, I'd like to thank Joey, Noah and Jeremy for providing much needed feedback on a related blog post. Thanks guys. It really got me thinking. What if instead of a contest we figured out how to do community funded bounties? Wouldn't an open, continual system of free software bounties be much a better idea than doing another contest?

This blog post started out as a response to a private email discussion between me and contributing developer Eric (tssgery) whom recently developed TurnKey Observium, one of TurnKey's top ten downloads. Observium is very popular for a newly hatched appliance. It has the same number of downloads as Redmine, which we've supported for a few years now!

Eric wrote:

TKL has two big issues as I see it:

1. Marketing. You're the best kept secret of the internet.
2. Testing. Too many appliance/products to be supported.

Want to roll your own Debian Wheezy based images? You're in luck because we just finished upgrading TurnKey's build chain, including new versions of TKLDev and TurnKey Core ready for download.