[Savannah-hackers] IMPORTANT: Becoming a GNU project

[Jaime E. Villate]

On Wed, Jan 01, 2003 at 10:45:21PM +0100, Mathieu Roy wrote:
> Mikael Djurfeldt <address@hidden> said:

> > > Project System Name: guile-fftw
> > This project seems to have been classified as a nongnu project.  But
> > the source is copylefted and I've assigned copyrights to the FSF for
> > all Guile extensions, so it should be a gnu project.
> > Can you please change this?
> 
> Done.

Hi,
I do not think this is a GNU project. I have not seen any message from RMS
dubing it a GNU project and I've failed to find Mikael Djurfeldt in the
"maintainers" file in fencepost.

Just because it is an extension of a GNU package, I do not think that makes it
a GNU package itself. And it seems to me that the author has two common
misconceptions which we should try to clear up with him:

 1- An author cannot simply write down the FSF as the copyright holder
    of his/her program unless he/she has signed a copyright assignment
    form sent by the FSF (from his message it is not clear he did that, so
    he should be inquired about it)

 2- Assigning copyright to the FSF does not make a package part of the GNU
    project. Currently, the only person who can decide whether a package
    becomes part of GNU is RMS.

The author should be contacted to clear up those two items before marking his
project as GNU. And notice that the correct way to move a project from non-GNU
into GNU is:

  /usr/local/sourceforge/bin/sv_non-gnu2gnu.sh <project-name>

This will move the CVS web repository to the correct place. If that step is
skipped, we will receive error messages from the cron job such as the ones
we're getting today (I have not run sv_non-gnu2gnu.sh on this project
because I doubt it is a GNU project).

There are other projects which are also marked as GNU in Savannah and which I
doubt they are (for instance guile-matrix)

Cheers,
Jaime