We do ask for copyright assignments for single projects because this enables us to defend Free Software and keep it maintainable even if the original author is nowhere to be found, but at the same time we make it clear that these assignments will not be abused to further proprietary software.
Sorry, the catch-all nature of the sourceforge one had passed me by too, for some reason.
Does the FSF have something similar to the Debian Social Contract?
mr> If this request is unacceptable, why not create an alternative, mr> rather than publishing a criticism of sourceforge? This is what we did with savannah.
But Savannah is another island based on the sourceforge code. It is a clone, not an alternative and looks poor when compared to the original.
But besides working on providing new alternatives, we also criticise behaviour that is prone to take away the freedom we have earned ourselves in the past couple of years.
Please, if you must criticise, do it as part of promotion of alternatives, not promote alternatives as part of a criticism.
mr> Don't you think that rather a lot of bad feeling towards FSFE has mr> been created by this publication? Possible. But this is not the question that should govern our actions. Instead of asking ourselves "will people like us if we say something" we will ask ourselves "is it necessary to say this?"
If you cannot carry developers with you, what is the point? If the movement's leaders have no followers, is it truly a movement?
mr> Yes, Patrick seems to be a pragmatist and ignores all mr> philosophical/ ideological questions. (Some of you know that I mr> view pragmatists as extremely dangerous.) This is not an issue of pragmatism although Mr McGovern would like to make you believe it was.
Sorry, perhaps I have not been clear in this forum, although I thought I posted something like this here before: pragmatist is my description of the people who will use whatever means to get their jobs done, including selling their freedoms. Usually, today's users of the term "open source" are pragmatists. My other labels are realists and fundamentalists. As an organisation, I think that the FSF is a realist, although it contains some fundamentalists.
In this case we realized that the legal base and future plans of SourceForge had become so unclear that we could only recommend to use alternative services.
mr> What alternatives? Even if alternatives like savannah, tigris.org, tuxfamily.org and others do not offer quite the same functionality that SourceForge offers, they are usable and exist.
They are all mere clones of a broken model. In reality, a project needs to have information about it spread between many sites in order to be most efficient, but few of the current sites appear to be participating in making that happen, at least not publicly. They seem content to try to do a sourceforge-style landgrab instead of working for the good of the community.
mr> I ask again: will FSFE support, even if only by name and deeds, a mr> project like CoopX? I believe it offers the best hope for a mr> smooth transition from the current reality of sourceforge-based mr> sites to the next generation of hosting services. CoopX does indeed look like a very useful project. I believe that is why the GNU Project is one of the protagonists working on it. In fact I believe it may be possible that Loic is already involved in it (I'd have to search through my archives to make sure).
If Loic is involved, he appears to be very quiet right now. The only active participants at the moment are from SNAFU.de and OSDir.org, who are both good, but hosting provider participation is essential.
The Savannah NG document is a positive move on many of the objectives, but it has been developed in splendid isolation, as far as I can see. Please, ask GNU to bring it to the table and help do the groundwork of the XML schema first. It is a "priority 0" item there, after all.
[OT: I'm bemused by the claim that the SNG doc "is in the public domain". I thought Loic was French and that they have no legal concept of public domain publication?]
What kind of help beyond this do you want or need?
I think it would be rather more useful to recommend tools developed by CoopX participants rather than just savannah. If there is anything FSFE can do to help beyond mentioning it in future press excursions, please feel free to approach them.
MJ Ray writes:
But Savannah is another island based on the sourceforge code. It is a clone, not an alternative and looks poor when compared to the original.
Then go and help improving it. Using guile as scripting language for Savannah extensions would be particularly cool. :)
Klaus Schilling
|| On Wed, 14 Nov 2001 12:14:24 +0000 || MJ Ray markj@cloaked.freeserve.co.uk wrote:
mr> Does the FSF have something similar to the Debian Social mr> Contract?
Other than in its work and documents? I'm not aware of anything beyond the GNU manifesto or the basic documents about Free Software that would read comparably to the Debian Social Contract.
But it is important to keep in mind that the Debian project and the FSF are rather different organizational models - other than the FSF, Debian is more or less a loose bunch of people getting together for a single project.
Being a registered charitable organization for Free Software, the FSF Europe must only do things that further Free Software. Should we somehow violate this policy, the German (or other local) authorities would come down on us. Control for these things is actually rather strict.
I don't know the details for the FSF in the U.S. as I'm not involved in the administrative work, but I would assume things are similar there.
Also since the U.S. copyright assignment is not valid in most European countries, we are working on writing a copyright assignment that will be valid in Europe.
As copyright assignments are essentially contracts, there is a certain amount of freedom involved in their creation, so we included a part that the FSF Europe guarantees the author that it will never abuse the assigned copyright for proprietary software.
We haven't published it as it isn't completed yet, but as soon as I find some time to finalize it together with our lawyers, we will do so.
This is what we did with savannah.
mr> But Savannah is another island based on the sourceforge code. It mr> is a clone, not an alternative and looks poor when compared to mr> the original.
Technically speaking it may be a clone, but it is an alternative in terms of freedom as it was carefully set up to only use and host Free Software.
Of course the technical issues can and should be improved, but that is another issue.
mr> Please, if you must criticise, do it as part of promotion of mr> alternatives, not promote alternatives as part of a criticism.
You are right, it might have been better to end the document with a more postitive outlook on alternatives.
mr> Sorry, perhaps I have not been clear in this forum, although I mr> ... mr> organisation, I think that the FSF is a realist, although it mr> contains some fundamentalists.
Okay, I now understand your statement better. I believe this is not how the majority would use the term "pragmatist," though, so communication problems are to be expected. I'll try to keep your definition in mind for the next time we have a discussion.
Regards, Georg