[Savannah-hackers] [Fwd: SourceForge turning proprietary]

[Frank Schulte]

Hi Loic,

I'm back from my vacation.

I want to ask if there are people working on your "vision" for a
GNU/Linux reimplementation of Sourceforge.net.

Cheers
Frank


-------- Original Message --------
Subject: SourceForge turning proprietary
Date: Fri, 24 Aug 2001 11:28:01 +0200
From: Loic Dachary <address@hidden>
Reply-To: address@hidden
To: address@hidden
CC: address@hidden



        Hi,

        Regarding your SF Generic Development project, could you launch
a thread with your announcement (the text you attached as a description
of
the project) on address@hidden ? It's time for all of us to
join
forces. The
http://sourceforge.net/docman/display_doc.php?docid=6267&group_id=1
announcement threaten the Free Software community beyond what is
acceptable.

        The GNU project provide hardware, maintainance and some
development effort with the Savannah project. Roland Mas and people
behind debian-sf are doing a packaging effort. coopx.eu.org aim at
providing an exchange format to migrate projects. All together we can
provide an alternative to sf.net and compensate their political and
philosophical shift.

        This requires dedication and a lot of time. Simply upgrading
to SourceForge-2.6 will not be enough. The software is not fit for our
needs for many reasons. The first of which is the fact that it was
never meant to be packagable and upgradable. Modifying it in order to
achieve this will be more work that starting everything from scratch.
Another major problem for the Free Software community is that it was
designed to be used on a central point, with full time employees and
large hardware base. This costs hundreds of thousands of dollars every
*month* to VA Linux. We cannot replicate this scheme. We have to do it
in a distributed way.

        My vision of the possible solution is the following:

        - A new software based on phpGroupWare and php3 with
          the exact same layout and semantic as the SourceForge
          software

        - A package of this software for GNU/Linux distributions

        - A communication protocol to migrate/replicate projects
          from one platform to the other

        - A large base of SourceForge style platforms based on this
          software all around the world

        savannah.gnu.org would be the first platform to implement this
scheme.

        How does it sound ?

-- 
Loic   Dachary         http://www.dachary.org/  address@hidden
24 av Secretan         http://www.senga.org/      address@hidden
75019    Paris         Tel: 33 1 42 45 09 16        address@hidden
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