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Posted by Cheng Soon Ong on April 2, 2009
We have been having a quite heated discussion among the organisers of mloss.org about whether we should encourage the submission of open source projects which are not their own.
We wanted (and still want to) follow the model of freshmeat where we are not actually hosting any projects at all, but really just providing links to project homepages. However, since a user can upload a tar or zip repository, in principle he or she can actually do some very "bare bones" hosting just on mloss.org. This is in contrast to a sourceforge or googlecode style project which gives you all the infrastructure necessary to host an open source project.
So our framework actually allows anybody to submit an mloss project, not only the authors of a package. However, as far as we can tell, only authors have submitted (their own) projects. The question is why haven't anyone submitted stuff that isn't their own? Are people afraid of the competition?
On the other hand, if we start encouraging people to list software they find, will there be problems with quality? Will the original authors of the projects be upset?
Comments
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- Soeren Sonnenburg (on April 2, 2009, 20:49:10)
Jack,
just for clarification, we never imposed a limit on who submits the software by design. However, in almost any case (I guess you are the only? exception) the author equals the submitter.
Soeren
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- Soeren Sonnenburg (on May 8, 2009, 11:31:24)
Following up on this one, I started uploading projects to mloss.org that I find potentially interesting for others. In case anyone wants to do the same, I suggest to send the main author a notifying email that his project is now listed at mloss.org and to offer him to take over the project page.
This brings back the ``shouldn't we do it like freshmeat'' question? On freshmeat anyone is allowed to update anyones software. Shouldn't we do the same?
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I submitted MALLET, and I've nothing to do with its development. Is your methodology flawed?