[Savannah-hackers] Re: Download area/hosting on freesoftware.fsf.org

[Georg C. F. Greve]

 || On Tue, 5 Mar 2002 10:08:12 -0700 (MST)
 || Richard Stallman <address@hidden> wrote: 

 rs>     Which (to me) means we should try to prevent such
 rs>     misunderstandings in the future. Maybe it would be better to
 rs>     find some alternative TLD to host this? Is there anything
 rs>     else we could do?

 rs> Using another TLD would mean that the FSF doesn't get credit for
 rs> hosting these projects.  We would lose a lot, and gain very
 rs> little.  In this case, we would have gained only a slight savings
 rs> in time, the time it took you to explain that these are not
 rs> official FSF projects.

Experience shows that many people will not ask before assuming
something even if it is wrong and it is quite easy to jump to the
(mistaken) conclusion that something hosted under

           freesoftware.fsf.org

would be an official FSF project. I don't think we can blame anyone
for jumping to that conclusion.

That means the FSF will potentially be held responsible and liable by
the public for every project hosted on savannah.

Of course this won't hold up legally or in court, but that is not
necessarily much help since the potential damage in terms of public
image and trust will most likely have been done before we can explain
the situation any better.


I see why we would want to host it under the FSF TLD to make sure
people realize the FSF provides this service, but I think we should
make sure people can easily distinguish between official FSF Projects,
official GNU Projects and projects that are merely hosted on savannah.

Right now they obviously can not.


 rs> The real cause of his anger seems to be that we are hosting a
 rs> forked version of his program.

Although Jörg Schilling tends to overreact, seeing how it looks from
his side, I can somewhat understand why he would be upset. It
apparently looks to him that someone takes 6 years of his work,
applies a patch by someone else that didn't make it into the main
version because it was poorly written and broke hardware support on
many CD writers and then asks for donations to keep up the work. All
of this without ever contacting him once.

I'm not saying this is the complete picture, but it was the one Jörg
had and I can somewhat understand his anger although I of course told
him that this was perfectly legal and that he should be glad about the
freedom to fork because it will help him in the long run.

However: I'm trying to get the complete picture and believe it'll be
resolved somehow, so there is no point in discussing the specific
case. Of course we all believe in the freedom to fork, so does Jörg,
afaik, but that was not the question.


To me it seems like pure happenstance that his anger had to do with
forking in this case. I can think of many other situations where
people would be upset at another project or developer that have
nothing to do with forks. And sometimes people actually do behave very
undiplomatic and leave hurt feelings behind.

I think we should not encourage people to address all those bad
feelings to the FSF.


The suggestion by MJR seemed reasonable. Why not make it

    http://www.hosted-by.fsf.org ?


Then we make sure the FSF gets proper credit and people will know that
something is not an official FSF Project at the same time.

Regards,
Georg

-- 
Georg C. F. Greve                                 <address@hidden>
Free Software Foundation Europe                  (http://fsfeurope.org)
GNU Business Network                        (http://mailman.gnubiz.org)
Brave GNU World                            (http://brave-gnu-world.org)

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