[Savannah-hackers] Re: Abandoned project (gSatellite).

[Mathieu Roy]

"Jaime E . Villate" <address@hidden> said:

> On Tue, Dec 10, 2002 at 12:04:34PM +0100, Mathieu Roy wrote:
> > "Jaime E. Villate" <address@hidden> a tapoté :
> > > That's our advice; but of course you have the last call since your the 
> > > project
> > > administrator. If you really want us to delete it, let us know and we 
> > > will do
> > > it for you (you cannot do it by yourself).
> > 
> > I personally disagree with this approach. Since a software is free, I
> > can, personally, redistribute it to people that find it
> > interesting. And so, savannah account shouldnt be remove in that way,
> > only the author should be remove from the project members list.
> > 
> > If the account is closed because the project is hosted somewhere else,
> > no problem, that's fine. But if it's closed definitively, it can be a
> > loss for the free software community and we should avoid it.
> 
> One of the things we've complaint about Sourceforge is precisely the fact that
> they do not let you remove a project. And it was my understanding that in
> Savannah we wanted users to be in control of their projects (of course, if the
> project becomes a community project with more than one developer that's a
> different case).
> 
> We cannot oppose someone's choice to remove his/her project. If we do, it
> will happen what a lot of us have done in Sourceforge: rather thatn asking for
> removal of our porjects we completely deleted the CVS repository and
> description for our projects, being left with an empty project.

It does not answer to my point.

A free software should remains available to users, whatever the fact
that the author may no longer show any interest in. Don't you agree?

If a project is moved to a new host, the account should be closed,
since it's just a broken link. If a project is just abandonned, the
account should remains here, with the source code already released,
since it can be interesting for someone.

If you do not agree with this point, so you do not agree with the
right to fork and the right to redistribute a free software, which is
kindly a problem here. :)

For example, RMS asked to create an unrtf project to host unrtf GPL
source code. But the author of unrft explicitely said that he does no
longer want to contribute to free software community and does no
longer bring source code of unrft (current and previous releases). But
we host unrtf, and that's opposing someone's choice to remove his/her
project. But we have this right since this person previously agreed to
publish his software as free software, understanding what it means
(permitting anyone to execute, read, modify, redistribute). It may
have as consequence to get people removing any files without telling
us. If fact, it already happens. I check for unexistant project on a
monthly basis. Generally, content remains in the CVS. Only us
can completely remove content from CVS. But anyway it does not seem a
valuable argument since it only means that we should remove it for
technical reasons.
One could tell that we stole their works but that's incorrect: we will
never distribute their software in a way they haven't choosed by
themselves: if they agreed to publish it under GNU GPL, what we do is just
what they permit us to do. 

That's simple. 

The savannah project account is created for "the expressed purpose of
advancing Free Software", as said during the registration. Removing
free software from the internet does not serve at all this purpose,
it's probably just the contrary. 

So we shouldn't remove project until we are sure that project are
still available somewhere else.



-- 
Mathieu Roy
 
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