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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."
...already. Savannah moving over is certainly a big one, though.
Stuff like this is why we're continuing to optimize GForge's SQL...
The Army reading list
If you just need a good (and free) public CVS server, what other options are there besides sf and gforge?
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
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.
Gforge may be great for high traffic sites like Savanaah, but for low traffic 1-10 project sites I use Xoops+MyXoopsForge or Novell Forge. I think Savanahh made a good choice here, but they are stuck once they port. Novell Forge is the other choice.
GForge uses some highly optimized transaction stuff and database functions inside postgres that probably should be in the PHP layer.
Reminds me to port MyXoopsForge to postnuke to take advantage of ADODB! Compatibility or speed?
-Electrawn
I don't have time to discuss this further. I am in the hospital and falling behind on my other work.
He's in hospital? Nothing serious, I hope.
SpamNet - a spam blocker that really works
or he's starting to show signs of being realistic.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
Let everyone hope that Richard Stallman gets well soon.
Go look for yourself. VA is pimping SourceForge off as a tool to help companies ship jobs overseas. They don't even hide the fact.
Have a look for yourself: VA Software
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.
GForge doesn't actually host projects (besides its own). It is simply a software package used to maintain and coordinate development efforts. If/when the FSF switches to GForge, it will be up to them to provide the resources necessary to handle the large amounts of traffic and projects. That responsibility does not fall on GForge.
-- Fighting mediocrity one bad post at a time.
Sourceforge, also code named Alexandria. Original concept of a public development and collaboration for Open Source Projects. Last code base available was about 2000 before VA took the project Closed source for commercial purposes.
Savannah: Fork of Alexandria code for GNU projects. I evaluated it but it was too kludgy to understand.
GForge: Fork of Alexandria code by former Sourceforge developer. Rips out foundries and is for optimized PHP and Postgresql and Apache. Patches for Oracle in beta, refuses mysql patches.
Novell Forge: Fork of XoopsForge that uses LDAP and Novell directory server. Needs Xoops 2.0 to run.
XoopsForge: Fork of Alexandria that runs as a module in Xoops. Not much Dev activity, most dev in Novell Forge.
MyXoopsForge: Fork of XoopsForge that has some active development. Used for forge.xoops.org
The only thing that may compete in the same space that is somewhat similar is PHPGroupWare.
-Electrawn
Many of the previous savannah contributors have already moved to gna.org, which is sometimes referred to as savannah's successor.
I have already moved all my projects to gna a month ago. Gna is way more stable and way faster than savannah. I love it.
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)
There are two reasons this decision is somewhat controversial for those of us maintaining FSF-related projects:
For example, GCC is under constant pressure by RMS to move from its own server (that happens to be hosted at Red Hat) and onto Savannah. But this pressure has been resisted for the same reasons, and it will continue to be resisted regardless of what "packaged development environment" Savannah is using.
With regard to the pair above, (1) the GCC maintainers have never been invited to share their concerns with the Savannah maintainers; when they speak up, they're ignored, and (2) Savannah gets fscked up on a regular basis, and complaints are ignored. For example, Savannah is supposed to be mirroring the GCC CVS repository, but it falls over constantly, leading to even higher load on the GCC servers as users switch over. The Savannah team has a long long way to go if they want to hold themselves up as a reliable open development site.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
It's unfortunate, because the code is insecure as hell.
u e& file=source.php
For instance, 'source.php' lets you view the source of files, but only if 'sys_view_source' (a global) is set in the config.
Of course, they don't check to see HOW it is set, but rather, allow you to pass it on the _GET global, which overrides the config, which, of course, lets you view the source of any file:
Compare:
http://gforge.org/source.php?file=source.php
http://gforge.org/source.php?sys_show_source=tr
Nice, eh?
--
Use Vobbo for Video Blogs
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.
The PostgreSQL community is also migrating to GForge from GBorg. I'm pretty excited to see the outcome. There are some things I'd like to see in GForge, which can easily happen if enough people take the time to submit patches, such as modular support for revision control systems. Remember GForge is a fork of Sourceforge, maintained by one of the original architects and authors of Sourceforge.