GNU Savannah

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GNU Savannah is a project of the Free Software Foundation, which serves as a collaborative software development management system for Free Software projects. Savannah currently offers CVS, GNU arch, mailing list, web hosting, file hosting, and bug tracking services. Savannah runs Savane, which is based on the same software as that used by VA Software to run their 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 owned by the Free Software Foundation, 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 nonfree 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, FSF annouced that it was going to move GNU Savannah from the Savane software to GForge due to a perception that Savane was unmaintained. The Savane maintainers protested this and the move was eventually called off. As of September 2006 Savannah is still running Savane.

[edit] See also

• Comparison of Free Software Hosting Facilities
• GForge
• BerliOS
• Gna.org: a hosting platform compatible with Savannah's philosophy

[edit] External links

• Savane: new version of the Savannah software
• Savannah home page
• "FSF Migrating From Savannah to Gforge", Slashdot, Apr. 13, 2004. Article and discussion about potential software change - the change didn't happen.