[Savannah-hackers] Re: Time to bail from Sourceforge.net?

[Loic Dachary]

Dan Kuykendall (Seek3r) writes:
 > I have been watching VA Linux and SourceForge closely as far as the
 > business is concerned. The main reasion, other than general interest in
 > GNU/Linux is that if VA Linux goes out of business, there is nothing
 > keeping SourceForge.net online.
 > Fortunatly the GNU project has a version of the SourceForge software
 > running at http://savannah.gnu.org
 > Many of you will be familiar with Loic who hangs out in our IRC channel,
 > and he is the one who runs Savannah.
 > I also get request from the FSF asking me to move to Savannah because we
 > are such a large project, that we would be able to help in making more
 > developers awareness of it.
 > 
 > Well I just read the latest news about VA Linux 
 > 
 > http://linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=2001-08-24-004-20-NW-CY
 > 
 > and I am having a REALLY bad feeling, and think it may finally be time
 > to make the jump.
 > The news I am talking about is that VA Linux is going to start selling
 > proprietary extensions to the SourceForge software because they are
 > loosing money at an amazing rate. They lost $290 *million* in the last
 > quarter. I really dont see that they have many sells of the SourceForge
 > Onsite solution, and they also are the only ones that I know of selling
 > the install and support of that software, so what they expect to gain
 > from the proprietary extensions escapes me.
 > 
 > Lets see, you have no competition sessling your software, and its too
 > hard for many to be able to install themselves, and you still have only
 > a handful of customers. So now you think that you can add proprietary
 > extensions, which your non-existant competitors cant offer, then charge
 > more for the new extensions. Somehow I dont see them making a success of
 > this plan. Im also concerned that some key developers who are there
 > because they wanted to work for an open source company, will leave in
 > protest.
 > 
 > I really think we need to look at moving over to savannah while we still
 > have a chance to do it on our own terms, and not when Sourceforge.net
 > disappears on us and make our lives miserable.

        The plan for savannah.gnu.org is to use phpGroupWare as a
codebase.  The current code base is everything but
upgradable/workable. The development code of phpGroupWare is installed
on savannah.gnu.org. I was slowed down by some php3 compatibility
issues (cf my bug/patches reports). Now the AddressBook application is
not working properly and I did not figure out why yet (see
http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=451864&group_id=7305&atid=107305).

 > Loic: A couple questions for you
 > 1) Are you able to bring over our data (cvs, forum records, and tracker
 > records)? 

        cvs yes, forum + tracker no. Because the 1) the code base for
the current Savannah is 2.0 and tables for 2.6 are not exactly
compatible, 2) how do you extract the content of your forum/tracker from
SourceForge (maybe someone can figure that out from
http://sourceforge.net/docman/?group_id=1), 3) We can't upgrade
from 2.0 to 2.6 (no way) therefore even if you had the data the best
we could do is to migrate them to another bug tracking system.

 > 2) Have you upgraded and gotten the new tracker support yet?

        We will not continue on the SourceForge code base,
phpGroupWare is the future ;-)

 > 3) Do you think we can get some custom CVS setup which would allow us to
 > secure our API module in CVS so that only a specific group has rights to
 > commit to it? This is something sourceforge.net wouldnt do for us, and
 > it would be a nice selling point for the rest of the developers to move
 > to savannah.

        Savannah.gnu.org is what you decide it to be provided you keep
other users happy. In other words if you want something done and can
devote time to implement it you have it. Savannah this is a project
made by the people and for the people (I heard that somewhere
:-}). This is a Free Software project.

        The drawbacks of Savannah.gnu.org ? It's not as powerfull as
SourceForge is but there is no trick and no chance for it to go down.

        Something really usefull you could do is write to Tim Perdue
and ask him to write a small thing that provides a full database dump
of *all* data related to a given project, with the only exception of
encrypted user passwords (available at the same place as the nightly
tarbal of the CVS tree for instance). From this data we will be able to
work something out. Tim is one guy probably pissed by what happen and
certainly powerful enough to make that happen. And phpGroupWare being
the most active project is probably the only one having enough weight
to *require* this from SourceForge.

        Cheers,

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