GNU Savannah

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,^[1] Bazaar, mailing list, web hosting, file hosting, and bug tracking services. Savannah runs Savane, which is based on the same software as that used to run the popular 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, 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 Macromedia 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.

In 2004, after a security compromise and resignations among the Savannah "hackers" (i.e. volunteers) team, FSF announced that it was going to move GNU Savannah from the Savannah (now Savane) software to GForge due to a mistaken perception that the codebase was now unmaintained. The Savannah hackers protested and the plan to migrate ceased.^{[citation needed]}

Savane

Savane is a free web-based software hosting system, best known as the hosting software for the GNU Project's Savannah websites.

The GNU Project's Savannah website started out using SourceForge as its hosting software. However, after Savannah was set up, SourceForge was changed into proprietary software by its authors. The site's administrators at the Free Software Foundation forked the software in order to maintain it.

This software fork was originally called simply Savannah, since it was the software running the GNU Project's Savannah website and had no other name. It was later renamed Savane, the French word for "savannah", to distinguish the software itself from the websites, such as the GNU Project's Savannah, that use the software.

The software is currently being rewritten using the programming language Python, the Django web framework and CSS.^[2]

See also

Free software portal

• Comparison of Free Software Hosting Facilities
• BerliOS – another software development hosting site
• GForge – another fork of SourceForge
• Gna.org – a software development hosting site: home site of Savane
• SourceForge – software used by GNU Savannah before fork
• Tigris.org – a software development hosting site for software hosting software itself

References

1. ^ Matt Lee: "On the savannah, where the gnu roam... "
2. ^ http://savannah.gnu.org/maintenance/SavaneRewrite

External links

• http://savannah.gnu.org/ and http://savannah.nongnu.org/ – Savannah main sites
• Savane – software home site
• "FSF Migrating From Savannah to Gforge". Slashdot. 2004-04-13. http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/04/13/150253.  Article and discussion about potential software change which didn't happen