Re: getting FSF Europe, Chatper UK going (was Re: Thanks)

[MJ Ray]

Raphael Rousseau <address@hidden> writes:

> First of all, remember that SourceForge is the first worldwide (and
> successful) initiative which managed to gather so quickly so many people 
> around one tool.
> How did they manage to do it ? [...]

You give valid reasons, but you ignore the effect of the "you're
hosted by us, or you don't exist for us" policy which its project
catalogues currently adopt.  I'm not aware of the sourceforge index
being provided back to a more general software index, although I hope
I've just missed it.

The actual overlap between the information required for many of the
functions you mention is minimal, although a software project usually
wants some subset of them, which is why these hosting providers are
working.  Many of the functions are available without central
registration, though, so where's your consistency now?

Personally, I dislike these systems because many functions *aren't*
available without registering on Savannah (or whatever) and I don't
really like giving away my details left, right and centre, especially
not to legislative environments with practically no privacy laws.  I
also think that they are solving the co-operation problem the wrong
way, by centralising, rather than defining protocols and tools for
different projects or parts of projects to talk to each other between
hosting providers.  Freedom to associate, perhaps.

There are already many more installations of the basic tools for
electronic project management than there are of these
sourceforge-based behemoths, so being able to associate a number of
these into a project would be a very useful achievement.  It would
also allow greater distribution of risk and resources, as well as
making valuable donations "in kind" possible rather than demanding
money to support savannah's potentially infinite resource consumption.
I believe SourceForge today has to pay a considerable amount of money
to Akamai for network caches to solve a problem which shouldn't have
occurred.

I'm aware of the migration efforts, but I see them as solving another
problem which wouldn't exist if this suboptimal solution wasn't
generally accepted as a good idea by so many people.  If people can
define the protocols for cvs server x to collaborate with mailing list
server y, and provide admin systems for these projects formed of
collections, then I'll be impressed and we will really have achieved
something worthwhile.

At the end of the day, if ukfsfe moves to Savannah, I'll reluctantly
follow it and watch as resources are wasted and donations rejected.
I'm really just trying to stir up people's unquestioning acceptance of
the centralised sourceforge hosting model.

> APRIL (one of the French associate organizations of the FSFE) is
> currently actively planning to make such a site.
> At the moment, discussions are debated in French, but it could perhaps 
> change if such an effort has other contributors...

Personally, I have no problem with it being in French and I hope you
will inform the main fsfe list when it becomes available.  Then a
translation effort is probably a good idea if it is to be globally
useful, sadly.

-- 
MJR
-
FSFE discussions U.K
address@hidden
http://www.x31.com/~ukfsfe/