Sourceforge or Savannah or ...

[François Pinard]

[Stephen Ferg]

> Before making your decision, you should read this article at Free
> Software Magazine.  It describes a disturbing development for
> SourceForge...

> http://www.rons.net.cn/english/FSM/loic

An interesting article, indeed, thanks for the URL.  Loïc Dachary has been
involved in free software for many, many years, he owns my confidence, and
the fact he contributed to setting up Savannah is a good point for Savannah.

However, as a bit of counter-weight, I doubt Loïc alone is heavy enough to
protect Savannah users against FSF politics and administrators.  The fact is
that I've been avoiding FSF-administrated machines for years, for the sake
of my own freedom, after having suffered various abuses from administrators
there.  I got that the FSF is about free programs, not free programmers. :-)

To counter-weight my own counter-weight, this is also true that I'm overly
protective for my own freedom, and the FSF might have evolved over all
these years.  Also, I'm in contact with some GNU maintainers that became
my friends over the years, and if I except a few matters related to the FSF
Web site, no one ever complained against FSF administrators, for years now.
In particular, my friends seem to be fairly happy with Savannah.

The ideal, in my opinion, is to use your own Web site if you can, so freedom
stays distributed.  This is our best bet in the long run.  Freedom is more
easily threatened, when everybody agreed to put it in a few big bags.
Of course, you will not have all the bells and whistles that comes with
big sites like Sourceforge or Savannah, but in a way, you'll get a better
taste of simplicity, which is severely lacking in these times. :-)

-- 
François Pinard   http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~pinard