Dear Savannah hackers, My name is Ivan Zaigralin, and my email is melik...@melikamp.com. I am using this gmail account because messages sent to this list from my own domain seem to disappear into a black hole.
I am currently in the process of submitting a project to the non-GNU part of Savannah. I seem to have hit an unexpected barrier: unexpected to me, but may be that's just because my expectations were out of line with reality, so I hope you can help me to resolve this issue. What I submitted was ~ 120 KiB of bash code + licensing information. To my surprise, my submission is not being accepted, and the reasons stated I will simply quote: "These are person-specific scripts" "It doesn't seem to me that they could be generally useful." "Yes, this is my opinion that doesn't coincide with yours." "All this makes sense for personal scripts, but not for general use. They are just not written with such use in mind." "I don't think there are real objective criteria for things like e.g. simplistic package. We have to use our judgement." I want to draw your attention specifically to the fact that the reviewer is using nothing but his subjective judgment in order to decide whether my submission is "generally useful". I also want to make it absolutely clear, I have no complaints about this particular reviewer, and nothing in this post should be interpreted as a criticism of that person or any of his actions so far. The reason I find this surprising is this: FSF endorses Savannah as a "hosting service": "There are many services that will host your project's source code" "Savannah is a community project, providing code hosting for your free software project" This endorsement is explicit in claiming that Savannah will host *my* project, which I understand as me preserving the creative control over the code I submit. To contrast, the GNU project does and should make subjective calls as to what constitutes useful GNU software, just as the KDE project members make subjective calls as to what constitutes contributions useful to KDE. This makes sense because these are software projects, and when I submit code to them from the outside, it is implied that they have the creative control (or at least a greater share of it), and will make subjective calls in line with their unique and subjective vision of what their project should be and how it should get there. Most such projects also have very detailed descriptions of their subjective visions; for example, KDE is defined as "advanced graphical desktop, a wide variety of applications for communication, work, education and entertainment and a platform to easily build new applications upon", and much much much more, which really narrows down the scope of the project, and makes it perfectly clear that only the code implementing that vision will be accepted. There is also absolutely no surprise when senior members of the KDE team, who share the creative control over their project, reject code based on their personal and subjective notions of quality and/or usability. So I was taken aback, to be frank, when I was told by the reviewer that my project is not accepted based on nothing but personal and subjective criteria having to do with general usefulness. After a lengthy inquiry, I still cannot locate any official Savannah description of any usefulness tests applied to submissions. I was fully expecting objective criteria (besides licensing), such minimal & maximal size in bytes, but I cannot find any listed anywhere. Indeed, I cannot even find any official subjective criteria, which would make sense if Savannah was in fact a software project. So it looks to me like my submission is being held up based on a personal subjective usefulness test which was applied to my project only, effectively singling it out. So with the information I have now, the only way to interpret what is happening is that Savannah is de facto a software project, whereas Savannah hackers assume a share of creative control right from the start, from the moment of submission. Just like any community project, Savannah is fully entitled to make the rules, but as an FSF member I see an issue with endorsing Savannah as a "hosting service", unless it actually is a hosting service in a manner I described above, which brings me to my questions for the Savannah community: Does or does not the Savannah project demand, allow, or abide by filtering/censoring/rejecting projects based solely on subjective opinions of its members (Savannah hackers)? If yes, what is the goal for such practice? If no, does the Savannah project expressly forbid such practices internally? Thanks for your time :) References: FSF endorsement: https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/savannah My Savannah submission: https://savannah.gnu.org/task/?14370
