[Savannah-register-public] [task #3833] Sub mission of Goutte à goutte

[Sylvain Beucler]

Update of task #3833 (project administration):

         Should Start On:                         => Sat 03/05/2005 at 00:00
   Should be Finished on:                         => Sat 03/05/2005 at 00:00
                  Status:                    None => Cancelled              
             Assigned to:                    None => Beuc                   
             Open/Closed:                    Open => Closed                 

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Follow-up Comment #1:

Hi,

I'm evaluating the project you submitted for approval in Savannah.

(English is the only language that the whole Savannah team understand and
needed for transparency and archival. I will therefore reply in English,
although you can send me a private mail in French for precisions)


The first problem is that your project relies on proprietary technlogies,
Visual Basic and the .Net Framework.

It cannot be hosted on Savannah in its current state for this reason.

Savannah is willing to provide resources and time to developers writing Free
Software that can be used without the need to ask permission from proprietary
software vendor.


The second problem is portability.

First, we only host projects that can run on a free operating system (such as
GNU/Linux).

(Incidentally, "Linux" is just a kernel of a more complex system that we like
to refer to as GNU/Linux, to emphasize the ideals of the Free Software
movement. For more information, see
http://www.gnu.org/gnu/linux-and-gnu.html.)

We have adopted this policy because now that completely free operating
systems exist, we do not want to encourage users of those systems to start
using proprietary operating systems so that they can use your program.

If you are willing to maintain a version for free operating systems, which
work as well as or better than other ports, you can then provide versions for
non-free systems as well.  The idea is that at no point should only-free users
be at a disadvantage compared to users of proprietary software.

Your project should always work equally well in free systems as in any other
version you provide; if you have some modules for non-free systems, you can
delay their release until you have released the free operating system
version.

Moreover, the fact you use Visual Basic makes it nearly impossible to make a
port to GNU/Linux. Visual Basic is meant to be used only for MS Windows, no
matter how you code with it, and there is no free replacement for it that
could be ported to GNU/Linux (although there are .Net framework free
replacements, such as DotGNU and Mono, there is no ways to compile VB under
GNU/Linux). The only thing that could happen is rather a complete rewrite for
GNU/Linux, making it a double effort to maintain the application eventually.

>From my experience, I also can tell that Visual Basic is so much unportable
that usually you could not even take a VB4, 5 or 6 application and use it in
any other version of VB.

It is better, especially when starting a new development, to use free,
non-proprietary technologies from the start, even if you are not familiar
with them yet - it will save time after.

Free software development environments do exist.
"Glade" is a graphical environment to build applications that works with the
"Gtk+" graphical toolkit. Glade can only be used under GNU/Linux, but
applications created with it, such as Gaim (gaim.sf.net), run under both
GNU/Linux and MS Windows. Gtk+ is meant to be used with the C programming
languages, but can be used by other more higher level languages such as
Python.

wxWindows is another portable graphical toolkit, although I'm not sure it has
a GUI builder.

I am not an expert on GUI builders, so maybe you should ask on forums to get
more advices on free software portable GUI builders.


Last, there are also some problems with your license.

The most important issue in your license is that it doesn't allow commercial
use. Check http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html#Commercial and
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html for more information.

It is almost always better to use an existing license, than to write your
own. By using your own license, you take the risk to run into legal issues,
whereas exsisting where written or validated by lawyers.

Your license is also in French. For a project distributed on the Internet, it
makes sense to write a license in English. If think you do need a license
written in French, you may want to have a look at the CeCILL license, which
was written to be conform to the French laws, and is compatible with the GNU
GPL.

Requiring to provide a binary along with any distribution of the source code
can be inconvenient as well.

There is also some details about sections that cannot be modified in the
documentation. In this case, we recommand to give the documentation a special
license, such as the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL). This is not a free
software license, is incompatible with the GNU GPL, but is perfectly ok for
free documentation. Among others, it offers to declare invariants
non-technical sections. Check http://www.gnu.org/licenses/licenses.html#FDL


So we cannot host your project at Savannah for now. If however you can base
your project on free portable technologies and switch to existing licenses
such as the GNU GPL or any GPL-compatible licenses such as the GNU LGPL or
the Expat license, then please resubmit your project and we will reconsider
it for inclusion at Savannah.

Regards.


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