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GNU Savannah

Software forge, website, and associated engine

Field	Value
name	GNU Savannah
logo	Gnu meditate levitate.png
logo_caption	The levitating, meditating, flute-playing gnu logo used by GNU Savannah
collapsible
collapsetext
type	Forge
founded
area_served	Worldwide
owner	Free Software Foundation
author
url
advertising	No
commercial	No
registration	Optional
num_users
launch_date
current_status	Active
content_license
programming_language	PHP

GNU Savannah is a project of the Free Software Foundation initiated by Loïc Dachary, which serves as a collaborative software development management system for free software projects. Savannah currently offers CVS, GNU arch, Subversion, Git, Mercurial,{{cite web | access-date=2017-07-11}} Bazaar, mailing list, web hosting, file hosting, and bug tracking services. Savannah initially ran on the same SourceForge software that at the time was used to run the SourceForge portal.

Savannah's website is split into two domain names: savannah.gnu.org for software that is officially part of the GNU Project, and savannah.nongnu.org for all other software.

Unlike SourceForge or GitHub, Savannah's focus is for hosting free software projects and has very strict hosting policies, including a ban against the use of non-free formats (such as Adobe Flash) to ensure that only free software is hosted. When registering a project, project submitters have to state which free software license the project uses.

Project owners do not have the freedom of deleting their submitted projects on their own wish and the staff has a policy of refusing all deletion requests, unless the project was approved by mistake or has always been empty.

History

Loïc Dachary installed SourceForge on a server located in Boston for the benefit of the GNU Project (specifically, to power the GNU Savannah's website). When, as contributor to SourceForge, he found out it was to be turned into proprietary software, he forked it and named it Savannah (since it was the software running the GNU Project's Savannah website and had no other name). People contributing to GNU Savannah were called savannah-hackers from this day, as it was at first more a quick hack than anything else.

CERN took interest in the source code and hired Mathieu Roy, a savannah-hacker, to work in Geneva. It led to the development of Savane (software) starting in 2003.

In 2003, Vincent Caron, friend to Loïc Dachary, found out the security of the server located was compromised. A new server was bought by the Free Software Foundation to provide a clean reinstall of the software. When this server was put in place, after a four-month outage without any public news, only Free Software Foundation employees had access to it. Notably savannah-hackers had no access{{cite web | access-date=2017-07-11}} and found out that Richard M. Stallman decided to move GNU Savannah to GForge because it was "seriously maintained".{{cite web | access-date=2017-07-11}} In response, Vincent Caron, Loïc Dachary and Mathieu Roy put up an alternative instance of the software called Gna!, with a specific constitution inspired by the Debian Social Contract designed to prevent any unexpected take over.{{cite web |access-date = 2016-07-18 |url-status = dead |archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20120314181627/http://about.gna.org/ |archive-date = 2012-03-14

GNU Savannah was totally or partly offline for months and, ultimately, did not move to GForge, which itself turned into proprietary software.

References

"Why Choose Savannah?".
"Savannah: Welcome".
"Hosting requirements - site wide". Free Software Foundation, Inc..
"Savannah documentation/RemovingProject". Free Software Foundation, Inc..

Info: Wikipedia Source

This article was imported from Wikipedia and is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Content has been adapted to SurfDoc format. Original contributors can be found on the article history page.

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