[Savannah-hackers] Analysis of non-GNU projects activity

[Loic Dachary]

        Hi,

        Only 5 of the non-GNU projects did something in the last two weeks.

emacsdoc-fr, dbmanual: two documentations projects by the same person. 
           He applied for inclusion (dbmanual) in the gnu project today.
           I told him to get in touch with the emacs maintainers for the
           emacsdoc-fr project. While doing this Savannah provides him with
           the technical tools he needs to work.
        
gdbc: Generic Database Connector
           The author is actively working on his project but did not apply
           for inclusion in the GNU project, yet. 

rss2mail: a software to send RSS news channel by mail. This is the software
           in use on *.fsfeurope.org web sites and designed by Olivier Berger.
           It's a small piece of software custom made for the GNU project.
           It's like a lot of small scripts written by various people on the
           GNU machines, except Olivier Berger took some of his time to 
           create a project so that other people could re-use it.

minorfish: Minorfish is a light-weight mailing list manager complete
           with its own web interface. It seems to be fairly mature and
           the author is actively working on it.

        I think it shows how the situation will be when there will be
many Free Software projects hosted on Savannah that are not part of
the GNU project. 

        1) Some packages will be empty and they will be many. People say
           they will work on something, have an idea but never find time
           or energy to actually do it.

        2) Some packages will develop and never apply to GNU. Yet, by
           being on the GNU machines they will use a GNU GPL compatible 
           licence.

        3) Some packages will apply to the GNU project.

        4) Some packages will be internal to GNU.

        I think this is a healthy situation and highly desirable for
the GNU project. It offers an alternative to SourceForge for Free
Software projects that belong to the Free Software Movement and prefer
to use Savannah because they don't want to be seen as Open Source
projects by applying to SourceForge.net.

        IMHO, this reason alone is a motive to allow Free Software
projects that are not part of the GNU project to use Savannah. 

        Can we do it or should we wait for something else ? I think
we should not advertise it widely until it's technicaly finished but
it would be good to accept packages that apply now, warning them that
there is work in progress.

        Cheers,

-- 
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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