Re: [Savannah-hackers] submission of VSTa Operating System - savannah.nongnu.org

[ajv-onfatinete]

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[Alaska Subedi <address@hidden> writes:]

>> Ok, so a GPL operating system using GPL (or BSD, or some public domain)
>> tools and programs violates this in what way?
>...
> Free Software movement's 
>primary goal is to fight for the ideal that information and knowledge -- 
>in this case source code -- should be allowed to move and shared freely. 
>Savannah tries to provide a place and useful tools for development of 
>free software for people who support this cause.

Since my OS is GPL (and I'm one of those rare engineers who has actually
read the license), there should have been no conflict here.  My source was
both open and (by way of the GPL) free.

Understand that my hosting is settled; I'm now merely trying to become
informed so that any other open source/free software activities I may
influence in the future can reflect some lack of understanding I fear I may
still labor under on this philosophical front.

>> By "suite of programs" I guess you mean the ports of the various commands
>> and utilities?  For instance, GNU fileutils, gcc, etc.?  Yes, I guess so.
>We think that it is easy to manage a project if it be split into small 
>projects divided according to components. For example, you could have a 
>project VSTa-kernel focusing on the kernel, VSTa-utilities focusing on 
>various system utilities, etc. But it's upto you and it may not be 
>difficult to manage if the size of the source code is not too big.

Ok, I understand.  My project is monolithic simply because it reflects the
average number of core developers (think very low single digit).  I
understand the consideration, and will keep it in mind.

>> Note that closing projects at SF is more a problem of SF than otherwise;
>> they do not appear to answer support requests any more.  VSTa was hosted
>> there until--without warning--my web contents disappeared.  Queries were
>> never answered, so I'm guessing that projects which want their SF presence
>> to go away might have a hard time finding somebody who'll do it.  You might
>> be putting would-be projects in a Catch-22.
>I did not realize that your queries were never answered. If they don't 
>respond, that's their problem.

Right, I'm just sensitizing you that somebody might need for you to
understand that just because SF is claiming to "serve" his project, that
behavior may reflect stale and uncorrectable administrative state.

>> In any case, I hadn't heard from you for long enough that I trudged onward,
>> discovering that my personal hosting company will host my open source
>> projects, charging me only their own cost for rackspace and bandwidth.  I've
>> always been dumb, but now I'm fat and happy, too. :->
>We are sorry that we could not act promptly to your submission. We are 
>woefully understaffed and each of us review the projects and answer the 
>support questions in our sparetime, usually during the evening or night.

No problem.  I actually am just as happy spending a little $$$ out of pocket
and getting the VSTa server situation stabilized immediately.  I certainly
am not trying to beef about an altruistic organization (and whatever
services it may choose to offer over time).

>If you still want to utilize Savannah, please reply to this email and I 
>will go over the issues again.

I'm currently OK, thanks.  The only remaining thing which nags me is a
distinction where a project is GPL and yet not acceptable.  I'm guessing
that you're concerned that although the core system was all written by me
and GPL'ed, there's a critical mass of, say, BSD-style licensed stuff riding
along which skews the overall applicability of the project to the GPL style
of software freedom.  I really don't feel this is the case (most BSD stuff
is along the lines of byacc, which I actually had to choose back when bison
was claiming copyright ownership over generated parsers--VSTa has been
around a while), but I'm admittedly ignorant of most details of open source
project management.  It's not important for VSTa's current situation, but it
might be worthwhile pointing me at some document which can increase my clue
level so that I can apply that clue to future projects.

Sincerely,
Andy Valencia