[Savannah-hackers] is my proposed project a candidate for Savannah?

[Gough, Chris]

Hello Savannah-Hackers,

I want to know if a software project that I am contemplating will be
suitable for Savannah.nonGNU.org. I seek your feedback on this, and any more
general advice you might have.

My favourite neural network simulator (SNNS,
http://www-ra.informatik.uni-tuebingen.de/SNNS/) has become a little
dilapidated over the years. The copyright owners no longer supports or
develops it, although developers do pop up on the mailing list from time to
time. The web site has not changed in years (nor has it updated it's mailing
list archives in 5 years). As I understand it the licence is a kind of
corrupt GPL, somewhat free
(http://www-ra.informatik.uni-tuebingen.de/SNNS/licence.html), source code
is available but does not permit distribution of copyright material in the
form of derived works.

There are various 'unofficial' patches in circulation. What I really want is
a GNU-like build system that combines 'legally distributed unmodified' SNNS
sources with a 'new-official' patch set. My short term goal would be to
aggregate (and GPL) existing bug fix patches, and set up a bug tracking
database. A medium term goal might a better test suite (leading to more and
better patches going forward). Best case long term goal would be to
encourage the development of significantly different derived works, such as
a new version or even new tools. Worst case long term goal would be to let
the software remain as useful as possible for as long as possible. I believe
the possibility of persuading the copyright owners to free the code might
increase with an active project attached to it.

>From my reading of the Savannah docs, i'm not sure this qualifies, because
it would reference non-free code. Am I right about this? If i fall back to
sourceforge, have you any hints or advice - i'm not an experienced project
manager or software packager.

TIA

Chris Gough
Department of Software Development
Canberra Institute of Technology
ph: +61 (2) 6207 4078

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