"Martin v. Löwis" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > That, in principle, could happen to any other free software as well. > What is critical here is that SF *hosted* the installation. If we would > use a tracker that is free software, yet hosted it elsewhere, the same > thing could happen: the hoster could make modifications to it which > are non-free. Not even the GPL could protect from this case: the > hoster would be required to publish source only if he publishes > binaries, but he wouldn't publish any binaries, so he wouldn't need > to release the source changes, either.
True, though GPL 3 tries to address that. Most important is to figure out the underlying attitude of the host. I realize it's the same crufty software (or worse) as SF and therefore maybe not so attractive on those grounds already, but did you think about migrating to Savannah? > Also, even if it the software is open source and unmodified, there > still wouldn't be a guarantee that you can get the data out of it > if you want to. You *only* get the advantages of free software if > you also run it yourself. Unfortunately, there is a significant > cost associated with running the software yourself. Well, if the cash is available, there's always the possibility of using free software and paying someone to host it. Anyway, I wouldn't have expected running a tracker to be that significant a task compared with the rest of the web site, the mailing lists, the Subversion server, the codebase itself, etc. etc. But Paul Boddie explained some of the issues pretty well. > Despite what other people say, this *is* an issue. On python.org, > things that should get done don't, just because there is no > volunteer doing them. Hosting such a service elsewhere has the > clear advantage that you don't have to worry about most routine > maintenance jobs. I have to wonder too why Jira is so sure to be more reliable than SF. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list