Re: SourceForge vs Savannah

[Stephen Leake <Stephe.Leake@nasa.gov>]

chris <spamoff.danx@ntlworld.com> writes:

> Stephen Leake wrote:
> > Could you expand on this? What's "T&C". Hmm - Terms & Conditions?
> 
> Yeah, Terms and Conditions.  (I forget what it's really called!  Is it
> ToU (terms of use), tos (terms of service) or ...?),  I have a slot on
> there for a really old dead project, but about every two months I get
> an email saying SF haved changed the conditions.  About a year ago I
> heard sf.net where trying to benefit from others code by trying to
> take ownership of it in the T&C's.  I don't know if it's true, but
> given that they keep changing the T&C's and it's hard to keep up, I've
> been avoiding them.

That was my impression; they were moving towards being more
"commercial" and less "open".

> True. Savannah is less well known than sf.net. Do a bit of research
> before picking one. You might get bitten by sf or savannah and be
> better off on your own.

Savannah is run by the Gnu project, which is pretty fanatical about
Free Software (as in the GPL), so I would expect them to be better in
that area than SourceForge. But I do need to read their T&C :).

> If you do pick one of these and have some
> kind of version control (CVS?) I'd be interested in how to transfer
> everything up there so people can access the entire history of the
> project (most of my code is in CVS from the beginning).

Savannah uses CVS. You can import source into a CVS repository. I'm
not sure you can import a current CVS repository as a whole, but I
vaguely remember reading that you could.

> >>I would be willing to submit some of my work provided I got the
> >>ability to work on it and extend it.  I would even be willing to hand
> >>over my copyright, again providing I got the ability to play with it
> >>(also some credit) and it was some kind of group.
> > That's what licensing is all about. The GPL, or the GMGPL, gives you
> > what you are asking for.
> 
> Yes, but I think Frank was suggesting a unified distribution of
> things. What happens if people own different bits of something that is
> distributed?  There are all sorts of complications arising from
> differences in license for various bits.  A copyright owner can
> usually change the license, but the person who puts all the bits
> together cannot change the license of the separate bits to a single
> license.

Right. The simplest thing for the library managers and users is to
have one license for all code in the library (I vote for the GMGPL).
Yet another impediment to getting started.

Boost does not have a single license, but has some requirements on
what the license must say
(http://www.boost.org/more/lib_guide.htm#License); we could try
something like that.

-- 
-- Stephe