Re: [Savannah-hackers] Re: Savannah & non GNU projects

[Olivier Berger]

Richard Stallman a écrit :
> 
> There have been occasions when people asked us for hosting, and I said
> "We can provide that if your program is a GNU package", and they
> responded by deciding to make it a GNU package.  It could be that if
> we offer hosting to non-GNU packages, developers in such a position
> would decide there is no reason to make it a GNU package.
> 
> But there could also be an influence in the other direction: using FSF
> facilities could put people in the state of mind to want to contribute
> to GNU.
> 
> Could you tell me what you have seen in these ten cases?  How did
> these projects end up as non-GNU?  What did their developers think of
> the possibility of making the package a GNU package?
> 

FYI, and since I submitted one of these projects
(http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/rss2mail/), I think I can provide an
example of the reason why I didn't apply for including it in the GNU
project. 

My idea was only to be able to host this small project (actually some
kind of peripheral hack, and no real important application) somewhere
rather quickly and conviniently. This way, I could for instance be able
to transfer responsability of maintaining it to someone else without
difficulty if I can no longer do it some day. 

The program is partly under GPL and BSD licences, and might be included
in the GNU project, but I do not intend to invest a lot into it, and I'm
afraid it would not make a really useful step forward for the GNU
project to have it inside... If someone would think the contrary, I
wouldn't object including it in GNU... but does it deserve to be ?

So, for projects like this one which are small tools not really usefull
for others, developers might not wish to apply for inclusion in the GNU
project since they do not consider their programs important enough,
although they want to have them hosted the best way possible, and of
course really make them Free ;)

Just my 2 cents,
-- 
Olivier BERGER - Secrétaire de l'association APRIL 
APRIL (http://www.april.org) - Vive python (http://www.python.org)
Pétition contre les brevets logiciels : http://petition.eurolinux.org