Re: Savannah vs. Gitlab

[Gregory Casamento]

Lubos,

On Mon, Dec 7, 2015 at 6:05 AM, Luboš Doležel <lubos@dolezel.info> wrote:
> Dne 4.12.2015 16:24, David Chisnall napsal:
>>
>> On 4 Dec 2015, at 09:55, Ivan Vučica <ivan@vucica.net> wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>> Primary hosting on Github? *shrug* there are no strong benefits, I think,
>>> and sufficient number of people would be happier if we hosted elsewhere.
>>
>>
>> I strongly disagree with this.  The benefits for collaboration from
>> being able to easily see who has forked your repo, to post comments on
>> their code asking about upstreaming, and so on are huge.
>>
>> GitHub is far more than just a hosting service (though one that has an
>> issue tracker that integrates tightly with the revision control
>> system, and a decent code review system), it’s also a social platform
>> and that’s where the majority of its value lies.
>>
>> David
>
>
> I concur. We're talking about a "number of people" who would prefer
> Savannah, but the amount of people actually submitting code is very low.
> Just going to Savannah's website makes me feel like this is a dead project.

I think there are really only one or two people who prefer Savannah
and yes Savannah just seems very dead to me.

> If - for whatever reason - you later come to the conclusion that GitHub was
> not the right choice, migrating elsewhere is a matter of hours.

yes, indeed, that's true.

> If I were Greg, I'd also consider moving the whole project away from FSF.
> While I recognize the importance FSF has (had) for open source, just the
> need to do a snail mail round-trip with FSF to be allowed to contribute is a
> great obstacle for any FSF project. And I can tell you, a legally worthless
> one in my case - the Czech law explicitly forbids reassigning copyright
> except in well-defined cases (employee to employer and inheritance after
> author's death).

To put this out front from the beginning... It's no secret that
splitting with the FSF is something that has been on my mind very much
over the last year.   While they do provide us a legal umbrella in
case of any actions from Apple, they do little else to help us in
general.   Taking a step back for a moment, however, I'm not sure this
legal protection is necessarily worth it since we have a number of
other projects which have no such protection and they seem to be
faring just fine:

1) Cocotron - Been around for a while and hasn't seen any issues from Apple
2) Apportable - created their own foundation (presumably based on
ours, though this is debatable)
3) libFoundation - Existed about the same time as GNUstep's foundation
and has elicited no action from them.

So, you see, there are others and there is no appreciable difference
between the threat they pose and the threat we do to Apple which, at
this point, is little to no threat at all.   So what are they really
protecting us from?

If I had some reasonable assurance that, if I forked the project, that
the major contributors (including both of you) would come with me, I
would do it.

> --
> Luboš Doležel

Thanks,
-- 
Gregory Casamento
GNUstep Lead Developer / OLC, Principal Consultant
http://www.gnustep.org - http://heronsperch.blogspot.com
http://ind.ie/phoenix/