Hosting by Savannah is not a right [LWN.net]

Hosting by Savannah is not a right

Posted Mar 22, 2006 19:21 UTC (Wed) by mmarsh (subscriber, #17029)
In reply to: Hosting by Savannah is not a right by JoeBuck
Parent article: No GPLv2-only projects on Savannah

What surprises me is that they seem to let submitters specify the license. If they really want to ensure that all projects hosted on savannah have compatible licenses, they should just have a statement along the lines of, "This project is licensed according to the GNU General Public License version 2 or later," with a checkbox for the submitter to ACK.

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Hosting by Savannah is not a right

Posted Mar 22, 2006 20:22 UTC (Wed) by xtifr (subscriber, #143) [Link]

"GPL v2 or later" is not the only GPL-compatible, GNU-compatible license. BSD and MIT licenses (just to take the most obvious examples) are also GPL compatible, and many parts of the GNU project (such as X11) have such licenses.

I have to agree that this seems like a non-story. There are numerous other Sourceforge clones around, including Sourceforge itself, the GNU Project's Savannah, the Debian Project's Alioth and "Gna!" (gna.org). Savannah and Alioth are primarily (if not exclusively) intended for the use of their respective projects. If that bothers you, use another one.

Hosting by Savannah is not a right

Posted Mar 22, 2006 23:48 UTC (Wed) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link]

X11 isn't part of the GNU project; the OS uses it, but it isn't part of the project. I would sort of expect the FSF, if they were taking over maintainership of a BSD/MIT-licensed project, to relicense it as LGPL or GPL. At present, according to their directory, there is only one BSD/MIT-style-licensed GNU package: ncurses. They seem to have a few other licenses represented, but very few, and few packages using them.

Hosting by Savannah is not a right

Posted Mar 23, 2006 6:21 UTC (Thu) by xtifr (subscriber, #143) [Link]

Yes, X11 is part of the GNU project. It is not GNU software, but it is part of the GNU project. They may not have written it, but they adopted it as part of their system, just as (e.g.) Debian did.

From http://www.gnu.org/gnu/thegnuproject.html

"Developing a whole system is a very large project. To bring it into reach, I decided to adapt and use existing pieces of free software wherever that was possible. For example, I decided at the very beginning to use TeX as the principal text formatter; a few years later, I decided to use the X Window System rather than writing another window system for GNU."

Hosting by Savannah is not a right

Posted Mar 24, 2007 20:43 UTC (Sat) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]

how nice of them to clain other people's work.

you can choose to use other people's software in your distribution, but doing so doesn't make the development of that software 'part of your project'

if it was possible to do this then there would be _NO_ justification for trying to say GNU/Linux, the linux distribution (say Ubuntu) is just 'adopting' glibc, gcc, emacs, etc as part of their project and can now can ignore the people who develop the software.

if a distro were to do this the FSF would be up in arms, however, from the post about X11 they seem to feel that they operate under different rules and can do the same thing to the xfree86 project.