[Savannah-hackers] [ 100359 ] Requirements clarification

[nobody]

Support Request #100359, was updated on 2002-Jan-28 12:44
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http://savannah.gnu.org/support/?func=detailsupport&support_id=100359&group_id=11

Category: None
Status: Open
Priority: 5
Summary: Requirements clarification

By: mattbehrens
Date: 2002-Jan-28 12:44

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Hi,

The following paragraph was just brought to my
attention, on
https://savannah.gnu.org/register/requirements.php:

Your software may not depend on non free software. In
order to be available to people who cannot use non free
software, it has to be fully usable with the existing
Free Software operating systems and programs.

I thought I had read the savannah requirements
documents completely, and I don't recall this
paragraph.  It's probably always been there, and if so,
please accept my sincere apologies.  Regardless, this
may leave the status of my project "solpkg" in question.

"solpkg" is written for Solaris, a non-free operating
system.  It is currently written against Solaris make,
though I see no reason it could not be altered or even
run as-is against GNU make.  It also uses Solaris
packaging tools to create the software packages.

"solpkg" could certainly be ported fairly easily to a
free operating system and free tools, but I doubt it
would be all that useful in that context as systems
already exist for those operating systems that are much
more tuned to them.  I certainly do not intend to ever
intentionally create barriers to the use of "solpkg"
code with any other system, including free operating
systems and tools.

Now, all that said, I think "solpkg" is certainly in
the spirit of free software, as it was written to make
free software easier to use for Solaris users.  Right
now, most Solaris users who want to use free software
must either do the ./configure;make;make install dance
and get no packaging benefits, or they may install a
binary package and not be able to make changes to it.

If I could just get a "yea" or "nay" as to whether
savannah was really the right place to put this in the
first place, I'd appreciate it.  Thanks, and again, I'm
very sorry if I missed the dependency paragraph in the
first place.

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