[Savannah-register-public] [task #14529] Submission of Real Time Application Interface (for Linux)

[Marco Morandini]

Follow-up Comment #14, task #14529 (project administration):

I made an account here to comment on this, because I fear that there is some
misunderstanding, possibly on both sides. What I'm writing do represent my
point of view.

1) RTAI is an old project, whose CVS was hosted on GNA. It is led by Paolo
Mantegazza.
Unfortunately, due to sloppiness on our side, we did not plan to move
everything before GNA's shutdown. Thus, we lost some CVS history, because the
last GNA backup predates some of our commits.
2) We do strongly believe in free software. 
3) RTAI has an own website ( www.rtai.org ) and mailing list, and the tarballs
are distributed from there.
4) We understand the requirement to add Copyright notice to the CVS files. I
read http://savannah.gnu.org/maintenance/ValidNotices/ and understand the
motivations behind it. We can commit ourselves to do that, in the CVS, for all
the files for which we can trace back the contributors. As a matter of fact,
RTAI does not ask nor copyright assignment, especially for files that were not
considered (By RTAI's developers) as "code", such as Makfiles. Thus, I'm not
100% sure we can correctly list all the copyright holders, especially because
for some years RTAI was developed without a CVS.
5) I don't think that Paolo, or anyone else, can commit to change the already
distributed tarball. Nor to change the old, pre-existing CVS history, where
the first commit of some files was without copyright notices.
6) Right now we would rather avoid messing with the backup CVS copy we have.
We think it would be much safer to have a new CVS home, import there the CVS
history, and _then_ add the missing Copyright notices and the License file.
7) Of course, as you say, RTAI could go elsewhere. However, we (I) would
prefer to stay here, or on a service like this. Mainly because we dislike the
motivations behind alternatives such as github, sourceforge, and the likes.
Not to talk about the confusion between free and open source software they do
not help to clarify. As Paolo wrote in the initial project submission, "we
have decided to pass it over to SAVANNAH, because they have so much in common,
especially in relation to what free software is ..."

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