Introducing Open Solutions Alliance

[Mark Wielaard]

On Sun, 2007-02-18 at 21:26 -0800, Chris DiBona wrote:
> 
>         That's simply not true.  For example MP321OGG
>         (https://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/mp321ogg/) is under the
>         BSD
>         license.  I believe they accept most free software licenses, a
>         set which
>         overlaps substantially with that of open source licenses.
> 
> 
> Interesting, I guess they've expanded to include gpl-compatible
> licenses. I couldn't find any apaches. Originally they were lgpl and
> gpl only. 
>
>         I can't speak to this completely, but I've never found it
>         down.
> 
> Well, I hope it has gotten a lot better.

Savannah is indeed pretty good and reliable in my experience (and I do
use it daily for some of our projects). They might not offer all the
fancy wizzbang new scm, cms or wiki stuff, but what they provide is
always up and does support a huge amount of projects and people. And
their support engineers are always helpful and quick to resolve anything
I have thrown at them when I needed something different for some
project.

They have also expanded in what they accept to be hosted. It is not just
Free Software anymore, but can also be used for things like Free
Documentation Projects, Free Educational Textbook Projects, GNU/Linux
User Groups, etc. See http://savannah.gnu.org/register/

The do have some quality control on what is accepted though. To make
sure there are no proprietary dependencies and that the projects are
mutually compatible (so for now no apache software licensed projects,
but GPLv3 will fix that incompatibility), have a minimum of
documentation, etc. See the checklist at:
https://savannah.gnu.org/faq/?group_id=5802&question=Project_-_How_to_get_it_approved_quickly.txt

Savannah is great for what it provides. And if you get a project from
savannah you can be sure that it really is Free Software, compatible
with the rest of the GNU system and will compile and bootstrap on free
systems. So if that is your thing then it does provide a valuable
service.

Cheers,

Mark