I have put off responding to this message because I think it deserves
careful consideration. I have read the article in question. I also read
a similar article by the same author on advogato.org and other similar
commentaries. The article makes me consider several questions, which are
not necessarily the those raised by the author:
1) Are we, the Maxima project, getting good service from SourceForge? I
would say yes, absolutely. I have been very happy with the service
overall.
2) Are we too reliant on SourceForge? This is a more complicated
question. Obviously, we could move somewhere else. The mere fact that we
could is an argument that we are not too reliant on SF. However, if
SourceForge were to shut down all its servers tomorrow, we would not
have an adequate backup of the project. Unfortunately, I don't have any
bright ideas about how to do periodic backups. I am open to suggestions.
3) Are we compromising our open source ideals by using SourceForge?
Before I go any further, let me say this:
I DO NOT WANT TO START A DEBATE ABOUT OPEN SOURCE
IDEALS ON THIS MAILING LIST.
Having said (even shouted) that, I think it is clear that we are not
compromising the ideological purity (whatever that is) of our project by
using SourceForge. If we were to make such an argument, I think we would
also have to stop helping people support Maxima on Windows. I don't want
to do that.
To sum up, I think we should stick with SourceForge, but we should make
sure we have an external backup.
--Jim
On Mon, 2002-01-28 at 14:10, Raymond Toy wrote:
>
> The following link was posted on the CMUCL mailing list.
>
> http://www.rons.net.cn/english/FSM/loic
>
> Perhaps this is relevant to maxima users (as well as other SourceForge
> projects).
>
> Ray
> _______________________________________________
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> Maxima@www.math.utexas.edu
> http://www.math.utexas.edu/mailman/listinfo/maxima