Re: [Savannah-hackers] Time for a news item?

[Alexander (Sasha) Wait]

On Wed, 14 Jul 2004 19:10:42 +0200, Sylvain Beucler <address@hidden>
wrote:
> Note that we do not consider that moving to GForge is decided. We may
> also upgrade to Savane instead (we'll discuss that soon again).
> 
I leave for Germany Tuesday and I'll be back at the end of the month. 
In the meantime I spoke very briefly with Bradley Kuhn.  He told me that
Paul Fisher is the lead on this project and would get back to me.  In
Paul's post of June 14th GForge is clearly still in the picture.  See: 

http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/savannah-hackers/2004-06/msg00101.html

At this point, as a user and a potential contributer, I think it would
be OK if the FSF USA's Savannah became a "smaller", out-of-the-box
install of GForge and FSF France's GNA was the site of choice for people
that want to use Savane.   I'm thinking that the important thing for a 
new Savannah-- that can accept new projects-- is that the Savannah
community become an example to the world of software "best practices".  

People here should be willing to use SSH/GPG and know why they are
important.  Savannah community members should know the difference
between the GPL and the FDL. They should know there is a difference
between technical and non-technical/political speech.  People here
should understand for themselves why we say GNU/Linux and not simply
Linux.  People here should use GNU Arch.   Bradley made an announcement
of what he had in mind early on: 

        The GPG-signing features that we plan to add in the coming 
        months will (at least at first) be unique among project hosting
        sites, and ensure the integrity of your software to the greatest
        degree that is humanly possible.
        
        https://savannah.gnu.org/forum/forum.php?forum_id=2752

These GPG-signing features are already available in GNU arch; as I've
already said I believe that new users should use them.  We do not allow
GIFs at Savannah.  New projects should not be able to use unsigned
archives! (Or upload unsigned files.)   

I have made commercial use of free software since 1993.  I wasn't always
calling the GNU system -- GNU linux.   For many years I bought into the
idea that open-source was a reasonable way to "sell" freedom.   Lots of
my friends and colleagues patent software, use/develop/fund proprietary 
software, and don't know or care to know why it's important to remind
people of FSF & GNU.  Open-source is enough for most people and if this
site is going to revive after so many months of down-time I think it
makes sense we come to an agreement of who we are as a community. 

One problem with all this is money.  Who pays for the servers, the
system administrator(s), the bandwidth?  Philip Greenspun found a way to
make money from free software by building on top of Oracle; he lost his
company and is legally barred from writing his story.  Eve, an insider,
wrote about it here: http://www.eveandersson.com/arsdigita-history  The
Yahoo culture was destroyed by the IPO (according to one millionaire
X-insider).  Google is trying to get it right by giving management stock
"preferred" voting rights but who knows what will happen there?  Maybe
we can help them get it right; I'm serious, read-on. 

For the most part Free communities are poor, private or both: 
 
      * http://wikipedia.com 
      * http://livejournal.com 
      * http://openacs.org  

Going forward, it might help a new Savannah if its "Terms of Service"
were codified in a GNU Free Community Social Contract ("FCSC?").  I
think users participating in an on-line community should be assured:

     1. they can get their data out at any time; 
     2. they can import their data into an exclusively free software
        system running on hardware they own or control; and, (optional) 
     3. to the extent possible, private data is encrypted so that it is
        inaccessible to even the administrators of the service. 
  
I haven't spoken about this carefully with Bradley or Richard or even
thought about it myself enough; I have spoken with people close to
them.   I just want you to think about the possibility that Savannah
could be smaller but "meaner".  GForge or Savane is almost irrelevant in
the bigger context.   

GForge is already available as a Debian package and my impression is
that it's becoming dead-simple to administer; the business run by its
author appears to be successful.  I have _NOT_ spoken with the relevant
people at FSF so I cannot say "why" they have made a decision to switch
to GForge but unless you have been told something privately by Paul,
Bradley or RMS then your conclusions should be that the decision was
made by the people paying the money for this service.  There is exactly
zero evidence the decision is still under debate (based on publicly
available information.)   

I have read your posts about how angry the GForge decision made you;
it's not worth it.  To be honest we are better off talking about it over
the phone and I'm happy to call you directly at your convenience.  

[Email me.]  

Neither Savane nor GForge are very important in the big picture.  The
rebirth of Savannah as a truly Free community is the opportunity in
front of us.  I don't know why I'm so sure we can change the world for
the better by working on this project but I think we can. 

If we succeed it's because we lead by example.   


> > >   - Mailing list management (creating, changing password,
deleting,
> > etc)
> > I recommend -- http://groups-beta.google.com/
> 
> I am not sure we can use this. We support support GNU Mailman, abeilt
> we have to provide some web interface for common administration tasks.
> 
> 
My point was that Google already offers dead-simple, searchable mailing
lists.  I am using myself as a guinea pig-- they work.  Why increase the
server loads on Savannah for no reason?  Why increase the administrator
load?  The obvious reason is that http://groups-beta.google.com/ do not
conform to the "FCSC" I was talking about.  But I know many people at
Google; if we want something we should ask! 

The important thing is not that Google runs GNU Mailman but that Google
respects its users' freedom.  (And with a company this is especially
tricky which is why I've raised this idea of the "FCSC"). 

We are only a couple of guys working in our spare time.  We can't do
everything and if Google can help us we should let them! 


> > If you (or the powers at be) give me permission, I could contact the
> > people that had ARCH working before, get to the bottom of the pros
and
> > cons of the previous attempt and implement something new without
> > interfering with any existing system.
> >
> > I don't want to get in your way while you are working on more urgent
> > priorities but I can offer some new blood to work independently on a
> > more future minded goal.  What do you say?
> 
> This parallel work would be a good idea.
> 
> I guess the best would be to do the job on a test Savannah 
> installation.

Honestly, once I have unequivocal confirmation-- and I expect that
confirmation when I return from Germany-- that Savannah has adopted
GForge then I will install GForge on a test system (somewhere) and go
from there.   

> I began to wrote a little guide to do such a test installation,
however
> it is very terse and incomplete (I focuses on installing the Savannah
> software, not the CVS/FTP/etc services). I/We could first work on
> finishing this and see how Arch can fit in the system.
> 
Why don't you send me a copy of the terse/incomplete document you have
now and I can spend a little time understanding the system AS IT IS.  

NB: I am not endorsing a theory of an ongoing GForge vs. Savane debate. 

> Also, who is the "people that had ARCH working before"?
-You- were one of the people, no? =^) 

Commits to an Arch archive need write access to a file system but there
is NO server side software. So I believe this was working before with
SFTP; that's how it is now on GNA.  

> Incidentally, Gna! has a partial Arch support, as far as I know it is
> for the download area purposes.
> 
Development is done differently in Arch than in CVS because there is no
central repository in Arch.  Each developer can commit to their own
repository!  The main thing that Savannah can offer people using Arch is
a "Patch (aka Changeset) Queue Manager".   I don't think Tom Lord
himself knows what an "ideal" PQM should do yet so our timing is pretty
good. I've barely started using Arch for my own project(s) but since I
managed a fairly productive group of developers using CVS and
auto-build/test I have a good idea of what can be done with that.  

> What do you think?
> If you are still interested, feel free to reply and give us our
> comments.
> 
> --
> Sylvain
> 
I think I've written a very, very long reply.  And you probably think
I'm insane.   I'm (mostly) sane, I promise.  =^) 

I have been extremely interested in helping Savannah accept new projects
since I submitted a project in January and explicitly offered to help in
February.  If you or anybody else would like to talk about this further
on the list (or by telephone) I'd be very happy to oblige you.  

Thanks,
Sasha   


-- 
GnuPG (ID 4153C516) http://non.fiction.org/~await/gpg.txt
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