[Fsfe-france] Re: [Savannah-hackers] savannah.gnu.org: submission of The Jtrix Project]

[Loic Dachary]

Martin A. Brooks writes:
 > 
 > >
 > >    It's a "please don't apply" ;-)
 > 
 > Heh.
 > 
 > We had an offsite meeting last week at our chairman's farm in Devon.  One
 > interesting decision that came out of it was that, if we couldn't get the
 > open source community to help us, feedback, bug reports etc, then we may as
 > well close-souce the entire project as, in the long run, if Jtrix works out
 > as well as we hope, we'd have a higher potential for return.


        On Savannah usage:

        There is misunderstanding. I tried to explain that every
project that applies to Savannah for purposes other than developping
software or documentation induces a workload that we can't currently 
afford because Savannah is run by volunteers. Apparently I failed to
make myself clear and I apologize for this.

        We are as distressed as you are because we can't help Jtrix at
present. Not only Jtrix but also non profit organisations dedicated to
Free Software that ask us to use Savannah as a platform to organize
their activities, Free Software exhibitions who would like to host
their web and member lists on Savannah, GNU/Linux distributions who
would like to organize and store their packages using Savannah and, of
course, projects like Jtrix who would like to advertise their development
project thru Savannah, using it as a redundant ftp/rsync storage and/or
redundant read-only cvs tree.

        We simply don't have the manpower for this at present. I hope
it will change in the future. You may think that what you ask does not
require manpower of any kind or represents a workload that is absolutely
insignificant. That may be true for Jtrix alone but if you sum all the
projects who have similar requests (and they are many) it counts for 
more than half the project requests on Savannah. We could not make an
exception for Jtrix and keep telling the other projects that Savannah
is only for projects developping documentation and software.

        We are not absolutely rigid and this policy is somewhat
flexible.  We tend to accept projects that do not strictly fit in
these categories, if they are proposed by people who spend time
maintaining the Savannah facility. In this case it is their
responsibility to provide the necessary manpower. They maintain their
projects and some others and there is an equilibrum, there is a match
between the number of projects and the available manpower.

        If you think you can provide manpower to help maintain Savannah,
then you could register Jtrix and deal with a share of the other projects.
I thought I mentionned this in a previous mail but I was certainly not 
clear enough.

        On Free Software:

        During conferences I often tell people that if the main
incentive to produce Free Software is to get help, support, press
relay, bug fixes, bug reports, contributions, translations, security
patches etc. from the community; it will most certainly be a
disapointing experience.

        If the main incentive is to live in a world of freedom, help
yourself and help your neighbourgh because you think it's the right thing
to do, there can hardly be a disapointment. By being careful to only deal
with software that is properly licensed to protect your freedoms, you make
sure your company won't be denied the freedom to use a software, study it
for business purposes, distribute it to your clients or modify it to adapt
your customer needs.

        In short, what Free Software gives you is freedom. If you expect
it to provide help that requires actions from other people, you'll be
very disapointed. In fact you already are ;-) Free Software should not
be confused with the community of people, companies and governements that
evolve around it. 

        Unfortunately the Open Source movement promoted a view that
can only lead to the disapointments described above. We, in the Free
Software movement, promote the sole and honest idea that matters:
freedom for everyone. The consequences of living in a Free Software
world may, in some rare cases, exactly match what is described by the
Open Source movement (a community of people, helping each other in a
very successfull way). The Open Source movement fooled everyone by
transmitting the idea that it was automatic.

        You could make a parallel with the Start System and
Movies. The Star System tells you that by being an actor in Movies
you'll be a star, everybody will love you, a fortune will be granted
to you etc. However most people know that to live a happy life by being
an actor in Movies you should, first and foremost, love what you do 
because you see this as an interesting and rich experience, because it
allows you to become someone else, because you transmit feelings to other
people, because you want to entertain other people or because you want
to transmit a message.

        I hope this looooong message was not too boring and casted a
different light on the Free Software world ;-)

 > It's /amazing/ the number of so called open source forums that have refused,
 > or simply ignored, a request to publish our modest two paragraph press
 > release.

        Free Software forums are no different than any other
forum. They relay part of what they receive. The real question is :
what led you to think that Free Software forums would behave otherwise
?  Printed newspapers sometime discard news that I find uterly
important and favor stupid events. You know that already. 

 > That aside, good luck with savannah, I shall be watching your
 > progress with great interest.

        Thanks for your moral support. This is a contribution we
appreciate. When doing volunteer work, it counts a lot.

        Cheers,

-- 
Loic   Dachary         http://www.dachary.org/  address@hidden
24 av Secretan         http://www.senga.org/      address@hidden
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