[Savannah-hackers] [ 100359 ] Requirements clarification

[nobody]

Support Request #100359, was updated on 2002-Jan-28 12:44
You can respond by visiting: 
http://savannah.gnu.org/support/?func=detailsupport&support_id=100359&group_id=11

Category: None
Status: Closed
Priority: 5
Summary: Requirements clarification

By: villate
Date: 2002-Jan-28 13:58

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Oops. Sorry we missed the fact that your project depends 
on non-free software when we approved it. We've always had 
this requirement in Savannah, and we've always checked for 
that requirement when we approve new projects.
We used to explain the requirement personally to people 
who registered non-free dependent projects. On December 
17th, the requirement was written explicitely, just a few 
hours before your project was approved, as you can see in
https://savannah.gnu.org/cgi-bin/viewcvs/savannah/savannah/www/register/requirements.php

Of course, your project submission was sent before the 
17th, when the text was not explicitely written there and 
it escaped us to tell you that.

There is no doubt that your project has been written in 
the spirit of the Free Software movement and that it will 
help enormously this movement by allowing people who have 
to work in the Solaris platform to use Free Software. But
since we want to keep Savannah as a repository of software 
that can be used without any non-free software, your 
project should not be hosted here.
It can be argued that your project can be useful even for 
GNU/Linux users (one can compile something and even use 
the sourcedcode as a good programming example), but those 
users could not use your software for the purpose it was 
intended (unless you made it a general, multi-platform 
software installer).

Please find another hosting platform, and when your 
project can be removed let us know.
(address@hidden)


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By: mattbehrens
Date: 2002-Jan-28 12:44

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Hi,

The following paragraph was just brought to my
attention, on
https://savannah.gnu.org/register/requirements.php:

Your software may not depend on non free software. In
order to be available to people who cannot use non free
software, it has to be fully usable with the existing
Free Software operating systems and programs.

I thought I had read the savannah requirements
documents completely, and I don't recall this
paragraph.  It's probably always been there, and if so,
please accept my sincere apologies.  Regardless, this
may leave the status of my project "solpkg" in question.

"solpkg" is written for Solaris, a non-free operating
system.  It is currently written against Solaris make,
though I see no reason it could not be altered or even
run as-is against GNU make.  It also uses Solaris
packaging tools to create the software packages.

"solpkg" could certainly be ported fairly easily to a
free operating system and free tools, but I doubt it
would be all that useful in that context as systems
already exist for those operating systems that are much
more tuned to them.  I certainly do not intend to ever
intentionally create barriers to the use of "solpkg"
code with any other system, including free operating
systems and tools.

Now, all that said, I think "solpkg" is certainly in
the spirit of free software, as it was written to make
free software easier to use for Solaris users.  Right
now, most Solaris users who want to use free software
must either do the ./configure;make;make install dance
and get no packaging benefits, or they may install a
binary package and not be able to make changes to it.

If I could just get a "yea" or "nay" as to whether
savannah was really the right place to put this in the
first place, I'd appreciate it.  Thanks, and again, I'm
very sorry if I missed the dependency paragraph in the
first place.

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You can respond by visiting: 
http://savannah.gnu.org/support/?func=detailsupport&support_id=100359&group_id=11