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

[Jaime E. Villate]

On Tue, Dec 10, 2002 at 04:06:52PM +0100, Mathieu Roy wrote:
> 
> 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?

Sure I agree. But if an author says he has not really created any free
software and asks us to delete his project should we trust him or not?
that's the point. If you want to take over the job of reviewing each project
and deciding yourself if there is some software in it or not, I do not have
anything against it. Just make sure we do not end up with a lot of trash in
Savannah. It would be nice that a high percentage of the projects in Savannah
would actually have some source code in them.

> 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.

Sure, I agree. But who decides whether a project has been moved somewhere
else, has been abandoned or never really took off. I was suggesting that we
trusted the author for that decision. But if you want to take over that task,
I do not have anything against.

> 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. :)
Of course I'm familiar with forking and the way free software is developed and
I'm completely in favor of it.

> 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).
> we host unrtf, and that's opposing someone's choice to remove his/her
> project.

GNU projects are a different story. There is an organization behind it
committed to the creation of a complete operating system. I was talking about
projects that do not belong to GNU and we do not even know if they ever passed
the planning stage. By the way, the situation with unrtf is not a good example
either, because it was not a case of an abandoned project but rather a case
where the maintainer of the project became hostile to the own GNU project.

> 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.

Sure, I was just alerting you to the fact that the maintainer of a project can
always completely remove a CVS repository if he wants to; are you suggesting
that we should move things out of the Attic and close the maintainers account
when he decides to abandon a project? There are also projects which are empty
or have just code taken from other projects, without any real new stuff. If
the author tells us that the case, should we trust his judgment?

Cheers,
Jaime