LWN: Comments on "GForge: possible renaissance for open-source SourceForge"

GForge: possible renaissance for open-source SourceForge

Steve_Mallett — 2002-12-06T21:58:22+00:00

Anyone interested in GForge may wish to ask Tim some questions here.

It's a teazer of an interview I've just completed with Tim, but thought it would be cool to get some questions from the field too.

Tata.

GForge: possible renaissance (hah!) for open-source SourceForge

rickmoen — 2002-12-06T21:14:12+00:00

Roland, I'm not a "reporter", but thank you for considering me one.

I'm just a sympathetic observer who has been sad to see the multi-way split among development teams, following the numerous confusing and non-helpful moves from VA Software Corp., when it took its codebase proprietary and then sent out the mixed signals alluded to earlier. I was also saddened to see people like Tim, among others, being prevented from assisting any of the open-source successors to alexandria, until legal obligations to their prior employers expired.

I'm sorry you feel slighted: The letter (not "article") could only cover a bit of territory within the space LWN could be reasonably expected to grant, and I had to rush to complete it before LWN's publication deadline. I'd love to have spent a week getting to know all of the existing forks better, but that would have conflicted with timeliness.

What I do know is Tim, the contribution he can make now that lawyers aren't obliging him to sit on his hands, and the junked-up VA codebase he has already subjected to some much-needed pruning as his first step. I'm therefore delighted that Debian-SF will be working with him -- and equally, that he will be working with you.

It is indeed true that Debian's package is based on 2.5. I checked the package listings. The fact that Debian-SF does most of its development on 2.6 (which I knew and alluded to briefly in my letter) doesn't make my statement inaccurate.

I'll also point out that my letter, in pointing to a possible "renaissance" of open-source development, did _not_ assert that it had "died".

And the "A key piece of open-source infrastructure is back" meant "back" as a thriving, unified project. Which I hope and expect will be happening, with the help of (among other things) mindshare, a matter I'll return to below.

You choke on "lost momentum"? Here, have a virtual glass of water. Yes, lost momentum. This was inevitable in the multi-way split that occurred, is a fact regardless of how long your changelog is, and mentioning it is in now way a slight on those who've been keeping Debian-SF, Savannah, and the others going for the last couple of years. I'm hoping that publicity and reunifying work will help regain that momentum -- publicity that I've been trying to help you get. You may be unaware that VA Software rejected Slashdot story submissions about the launch of GForge. I have been attempting to compensate for that by attempting to get the word out.

Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com

GForge: possible renaissance (hah!) for open-source SourceForge

lolando — 2002-12-06T19:08:05+00:00

While I may not talk in his name, I know

Bah. Friday evening. Should have re-read this comment an eleventh time. before posting.

While I may not talk in his name, I know that I'm expressing more or less his feelings as well as mine. As for the facts, well, they are facts.

GForge: possible renaissance (hah!) for open-source SourceForge

lolando — 2002-12-06T19:05:14+00:00

Actually, I'm going to re-comment on that article. I'm trying to restrain myself, but it really made me sad for the reporter. I've also talked a lot with Christian Bayle, the "better half" of the Debian-SF team. While I may not talk in his name, I know

GForge: possible renaissance for open-source SourceForge

The Free Sourceforge never died. Debian-SF started *before* VA turned non-Free, and it's still alive (more than ever). Same comment about "A key piece of open-source infrastructure is back".

Further and more significantly, Tim is cooperating with the other leading open-source fork, Debian-SF (http://www.nongnu.org/debian-sf/): Future releases of Debian's package will be GForge-based.[2]

I felt quite hurt by the "other" in "the other leading open-source fork". There's no belittling of Tim's work, but it's very recent and shouldn't be called "leading" before it has matured (or we finished integrating his changes into Debian-SF, which is under way).

Short list of *public* sites using Debian-SF:

There are also numerous non-public instances, some of which we have heard about: the MITRE corporation (somewhere at the US Air Force), the Icelandic NIC, my own company, Christian's. Probably many more.

With reasonable luck, the end result is that open-source development of SourceForge will regain the momentum lost since 2001.

Allow me to choke here. Lost momentum? You want our 1000-lines changelog? You want our diff? Have a look at the Debian-SF developers and users mailing-lists and their archives (devel and users).

[1] The Debian project's Debian-SF package is based on alexandria 2.5, the last full release before VA Software withdrew development code and removed the CVS repository.

Not true. We have both 2.5 and 2.6. The 2.5 package is included in Debian stable (and you know what they say about Debian being out of date with software). It's solid, it installs with a simple apt-get install sourceforge, and it works out of the box. The 2.6 packages, based on the latest (2.6.1pre4) snapshot, are where we do most of our development. We have cleaned up the themes system (and stolen most of the themes from Savannah :-) along the way), made the package able to work on multiple servers, made it modular (and theoretically able to run on different MTAs or LDAP servers), we made a nice plugin system allowing external features to be easily added (a calendar is under development), we also cleaned up the VA-specific code and links and docs and stuff...

Again, I am not in any way trying to make Tim's work worthless of praise or anything. His Jabber thingy is a good idea, his new interface is nice, and he seems to be much better than us at public relations ;-). We'll integrate his changes (possibly turning his new interface into a new theme and his Jabber support into a new plugin) and make sure that Gforge is easy to install, thus providing You, the User, with the best of both worlds.

As for the other forks, I'm too lazy to answer Carl in yet another post, but the situation is as follows: whilc it might be very hard to merge back with forks started as early as SF 2.0 or 1.5, we might be able to make their changes enter Debian-SF/Gforge, possibly via the plugins system.

There. I think I've said all I wanted to say concerning the actual information. Now for the last bits of bitterness I have to let out: Rick Moen, would you *please* try and check your information before sending it to LWN? Chistian and I spent two years working on Debian-SF, and not in secret at all. Maybe contacting us about our status would have been nice, polite, and needed? And Rebecca Sobol, since you're a journalist, maybe you should have checked your sources too before posting that to the headlines. I love LWN. Please don't let it turn into Slashdot.

I'm done with this post. Please don't take it as aggressive, I'm just trying to point out where the initial article was wrong. Credit would be nice too, but accuracy is important.

GForge: possible renaissance for open-source SourceForge

Carl — 2002-12-06T15:46:41+00:00

So what are the changes of combining/merging the different Alexandria forks again?

GForge: possible renaissance for open-source SourceForge

gmorin — 2002-12-06T10:15:45+00:00

The mention of Savannah is rather misleading. Savannah also maintains a very modified fork which has some original features such as multi-domains support and a very complete bug tracking system maintained by the Xerox folks. While the codebase has not (yet) reached the ease of the installation of Debian-Sf, efforts have been made to improve that situation.

GForge: possible renaissance for open-source SourceForge

lolando — 2002-12-06T09:37:52+00:00

development slowed for a number of reasons, including [...] VA Software's unfulfilled promise of a GPLed alexandria 2.7 release (announced for August 2002 release, but then silently dropped).

For the sake of completion: this promise followed the promise or a GPLed "Sourceforge Open Edition 3.0", which was announced for the summer of 2001 and silently dropped too.

Future releases of Debian's package will be GForge-based

Well, sort of. We (Debian-SF + Gforge people) are indeed currently merging the Debian-SF work into Gforge, and we'll try to merge some things back, but there's no clear "switching" planned. We currently have two packages that can run in parallel. And for the sake of adding links: Debian-SF development is currently hosted on Savannah, here.