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FSF Migrating From Savannah to Gforge
bluestrain writes "It's been almost 4 months since Savannah was hacked. The site is still not completely functional, no new projects have been accepted since December 2003. Now it seems that the FSF is abandoning Savannah in favor of Gforge. RMS himself has
confirmed the plans. A few developers are questioning the change. Hopefully the dust will settle and savannah can start accepting projects again."
I consider SourceForge to be representative of Open Source Software, and Savannah to be representative of Free Software.
It's amazing how accurately they seem to portray their respective ideologies.
May we never see th
This is probably uneducated on the matter, but I can understand why they want to move.
Frankly 4 months is way too long for the site to be "not completely functional" and it can't help but make you doubt the quality of the administration of the site if there weren't sufficient provisions in place for this eventuality. Any website is a target so any webadmin should have a plan in place.
When there are seemingly more secure options out there, more reliable anyway, then you'd go with them. Being faithful is one thing, but you can only do that for so long.
or he's starting to show signs of being realistic.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
Lately? I groan every time I see a project is hosted at sf - it means 20-minute mailing list searches, regular downtime, and the whole download-roulette game where you try to deal with the klunky interface and find a not-completely-dead mirror.
Let everyone hope that Richard Stallman gets well soon.
It sounds like a total of two people are questioning this decision, which is a small number given how many people use savannah. I have rarely seen a controversy about GNU end so quickly - there were a total of about ten messages in the thread. There is always someone for whom any change is a big tragedy.
As to losing track of roots, maybe RMS is getting a little bit more pragmatic in his old age. It's all very well and good to say "we should do X" when you have the resources to do X, but if you don't have the resources to do X, then saying "we should do X" is just stupid.
and now PBS-style appeals for money on the front page.
God Im gonna get flamed for this.
Anyways, maybe its not such a bad idea if Sourceforge required paid membership (like $50 a year) for file and cvs access. Seriously, I'd pay if the moneys right for better service and quicker file and cvs access.
Savannah is lesser used -- there are fewer adherents of Free Software than Open Source.
The Open Source stance (as exemplified by ESR) is a more pragmatic one than an ideological one -- that people should use Open Source rather than Free Software because it *works better* than closed source, not because of a moral or philosophical mandate. The primary issue that SourceForge detractors bring up is that the current codebase is not available; this is an issue to a number of people strongly ideologically aligned with Free software, who want to interact with nothing but Free software. There is a parallel here. Since SF costs nothing, works well, and helps spread and facilitate open source software, there are few pragmatic issues with SourceForge that Savannah solves. Thus, the issues with Open Source that Free advocates have are mostly the same complaints that are raised about SourceForge.
Savannah's main issues are caused by a lack of people working on it, and it is currently less ready-to-go than SourceForge. It's HURD and Linux in a mirror.
Savannah makes its feelings on the importance of Free software very clear with the nongnu and gnu names. The SF people don't particularly place a lot of emphasis on someone being associated with a project or having a particular license -- there's no sourceforge.sortaopen.net for BSD-licensed projects, for instance.
Finally, while this is more germane to this story than to SF in general, the politics in the linked-to story remind me a good deal of the complex and never-ending debates about Free software purity that come up more frequently in the Free Software world.
I suppose that a lot of Free advocates are going to view this as a bit flamish -- I guess it's a bit cutting in that it identifies that Savannah hasn't been operating as well as SourceForge, but I don't feel that it's particularly false or misleading.
I use the GNU utilities as well as Apache every day -- I like both chunks of software.
I also, as people who read my posts frequently know, tend to often feel a bit frusterated with Free advocates. I do, not infrequently, think that Free folks can come off as a bit too rabid to the general public -- this mainly becomes an issue when media, desperate for some kind of figurehead for the open source world, settle on RMS, and he propagates his (intimidating to a CTO) views on intellectual property. I also remember when the Crystal Space team (an excellent LGPLed 3d engine), wanted to be absolutely correct WRT the GPL and valuing Stallman's input, wrote him to ask for a bit of clarification on a licensing detail. Stallman's response, an enlightening read, highlights a good deal of what I consider the difference between Open Source folks like Jorrit and Free folks like Stallman.
May we never see th
I understand your point. I too don't like it when somebody complains about a good or service that is provided free or at below cost.
However, the post to which you are responding may also have a point. The free rider problem and the tragedy of the commons (or, perhaps more precisely, tragedy of the net-commons) are inherent and endemic problems with Open Source software and projects.
Let's face it, Open Source projects are classically Marxist -- i.e., To each according to their needs, from each according to their ability. I'm not saying that to red-bait. On the contrary, I think it is kind of nice.
Which I guess is my way of saying that, given these problems, I'm always surprised when people are surprised when an Open Source or Free Software project is over-burdenend and/or under-supported.
Only Women Bleed (Sex, Sharia remix)
This would seem to be more a function of how *PHP* on the gforge server is setup. If register_globals is on, this will happen, if register_globals is off, which it is by default in the recent (read at least 1 year or more) stock php tarballs, this would not occur.
P.S. I am not in the outsourcing business right now,quit it 2 years ago, but it is still setting the compensation levels for software engineers here.
I have always felt that, rather than having a single mass community site, like a master sourceforge or Savannah site, where most projects congregate, it would be much better to have a lot of little "xforge" sites scattered about and that can then be more specialized to the needs of different groups and projects over time; that individual universities, companies, and even individual project maintainers, could easily setup and deploy locally or through common hosting services; and then to have specialized master search or index sites that could locate and aggregate projects easily from remote xforge's...
The problem of the single Sourceforge site or Savannah site is that it is a single point of failure. Many projects will be down if sourceforge or Savannah, for example, are down for extended periods of time. Having smaller project sites will at least mean failures will be far more localized and far less disruptive to the community as a whole.
The problem in the original sourceforge code is that it was impossible to easily customize or deploy, and this remained fairly true even after the heavy hacking done on the Savannah branch. If gforge has finally solved this problem, and makes it relatively easy to deploy xforge-like sites, then I see this as a very promising development indeed.
I wouldn't work on an Open Source project that required me to pay to work on it. It's just not reasonable.
I can understand them providing additional services, like POP3 email access @sourceforge rather than just email forwarding, or something like that, for money. However, if SF tries doing something like this, they are, simply and plainly, going to go away.
May we never see th
Wouldn't be to MySQL per-se, would be more porting to an abstraction layer like PEAR or ADODB (ADODB fan myself for speed).
The ability to support MySQL or Sqllite or whatever would just be an side benefit of the abstraction layer, the real benefit is now you can hook into oracle or IBM dbs.
Just have to give up those in the DB functions.
-Electrawn
Since when has the "community" been restricted to citizens of the USA only? In case you missed it, the USA has been siphoning jobs and people away from the rest of the world for DECADES now. But I guess when it is India losing people to the USA everything is fine, hmm?
From the gforge faq, on why it doesn't support Mysql (see http://gforge.org/docman/view.php/1/24/faq.html)
"You could do it, but why bother? To quote Tim Perdue - "GForge could not be made to run on the primitive MySQL database without serious hacking, and I won't accept those kinds of changes back into the system. For the amount of work involved in such a project, you'd be better off taking an hour to learn postgres. It's a superior database in every way, with the only point of debate being speed on simple 'hello world' type applications".
It'd be a lot of work because:
1. GForge uses Postgres stored procedures, so you'd have to convert those into PHP functions
2. GForge uses Postgres functions like pg_connect, so you'd have to replace those with the MySQL equivalents
3. GForge uses subselects, so you'd have to rewrite those to use temporary tables or whatever (MySQL 4.1 supports subselects, so once it becomes production-ready, this won't be a barrier anymore)
"
So what they are telling me is that this thing is hard coded around PG specific routines..... That's NOT a good thing, I don't care what they think about Mysql (ditto applies to DB2, SapDB (Now MaxDB), Informix or Sybase).
Someone call me when these guys get a clue.
Bugs Bunny was right.
I can't address your "other reasons" because you don't specify what they are. I can, however, address the issue of "scarcity."
Scarcity still exists. With regard to Source Forge, bandwidth is limited and still costs money. With regard to Open Source and Free Software projects, the great and continuing scacity is that of time.
How do you want to spend your time? Playing with your children? Helping them with their homework? With you wife? Working for money?
Or working on an Open Source or Free software project that many people will download and use without making compensation or making a contribution? If the latter, I thank you, and I mean that sincerely. However, the problem of scarcity -- the scarcity of your time -- remains.
Only Women Bleed (Sex, Sharia remix)
I might take that as a valid comparison if either gcc or the Internet were proprietary products explicitly advertised as being tools for shipping work overseas.
DNA just wants to be free...