Sylvain Beucler <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> tapota : > Hello, > > I recently heard of GForge. Both projects are similars (since they are > SF forks) and I would like to know what are their positions. > Could they get merged and benefit from each other's improvements? Or is > there some schism in the way they are designed / used?
There is an historical schism in the fact that Tim Perdue, leader of GForge, an employee of SourceForge that wrote big part of the original SourceForge, was unable to cooperate with Loic Dachary (and vice versa), when SourceForge was free software. Later, SourceForge has been relicensed by VA Linux (now renamed VA Software) as proprietary software. Tim Perdue was apparently still working there. GForge started when Tim Perdue decided to quit (or were fired, I do not know) VA Software, recently, while Savannah already existed since a while. Tim Perdue never asked Savannah if it was possible to try to work together. Instead, he choosed to collaborate with Debian-SF, a project that had for purpose to make Debian package of SF. I have to say that it would have been much better to work with Perdue on what we've done and to have Debian-SF being Debian-SV. We should have brought the issue, but the truth is we were not really aware of what was going on. On the other hand, as Savannah was (is still?) the host of Debian-SF, Debian-SF and Tim Perdue knew we were still working on Savannah, but did not sent one mail to propose working together: so I assume this was not of their interest. So it does not looks like they want a merge, and I doubt we still have real common code. Also, Tim Perdue relicensed parts of his work in LGPL. Apparently (this is what it seems to me) in order to make proprietary developments for his customers, and I do not want to contribute in that spirit. Savannah has always been developped by people valuing the copyleft, considering themselves in the Free Software spirit and not the Open Source one, that's maybe the most important issue. -- Mathieu Roy +---------------------------------------------------------------------+ | General Homepage: http://yeupou.coleumes.org/ | | Computing Homepage: http://alberich.coleumes.org/ | | Not a native english speaker: | | http://stock.coleumes.org/doc.php?i=/misc-files/flawed-english | +---------------------------------------------------------------------+
