jducoeur: (Default)
jducoeur ([personal profile] jducoeur) wrote2007-08-23 10:49 am
Entry tags:

CVS or Subversion? (Also, hosting sites and licenses)

So I'm prepping to get the Querki project up and running -- the next couple of weeks are going to be heavily focused on laying the groundwork. I'd promised myself that I would get the project started this summer, and I'm running out of that, so it's time to deal. Which means that I need to make a lot of decisions that I've been putting off. One of these is: what do I use to do the versioning, publishing and management of this project?

The first part of this is which package I use to manage the files. There are really only two contenders here, CVS and Subversion: I'm not going to use a commercial option to manage an open-source project, and those are the two "brand name" open-source choices. I know CVS moderately well, and am familiar with its quirks and failings -- in particular, the fact that it doesn't do atomic checkins, which has annoyed me for many years. I don't know Subversion nearly as well, but it generally seems to be the choice for newer projects, so it's probably the default choice. Do folks here have experience and opinions? I'm particularly interested in hearing from people who have experience with both, about whether they see any gotchas in Subversion that might be an issue for me.

The second part is where to host the project. For something like this, using an open project host seems like a good idea -- it means I don't have to wrestle with the management, backups, and so on. SourceForge is the obvious choice, but I know there are others. Anyone have any reason to believe one of the alternatives would be superior?

Any input here would be greatly welcomed, so long as it's soon. Sometime soon (possibly as soon as late this afternoon) I'm likely to sign the project up on SourceForge under Subversion, unless I find reason to do otherwise.

Also of interest is the question of which open source license to use. If anyone has passionate opinions, I'd be interested to hear them, but I have pretty strong views on this topic myself.

Oh, and I also had better park the domain for the project -- someone's already squatted the .com version, so I think I need to claim the .org, even though it'll be some months before I'm ready to use it. Any opinions about good web hosts for parking? It's fairly likely that I'll eventually host the site out of my living room (if Comcast is allowing HTTP traffic out of my node, which I'm not sure about), so I'm mainly interested in an easy-to-deal-with site that I can put a parking page up on, and later swap away from. (Edit: actually, looking into this a little more, I suspect that simply putting the parking page on SourceForge itself may be the easiest option...)
dsrtao: dsr as a LEGO minifig (Default)

[personal profile] dsrtao 2007-08-23 04:08 pm (UTC)(link)
Whatever license you pick, you will pretty much need to stick with it forever for this project.

What are your goals?
dsrtao: dsr as a LEGO minifig (Default)

[personal profile] dsrtao 2007-08-23 06:20 pm (UTC)(link)
MPL seems like a good choice, then. It's certainly respectable enough.

GPL compatibility

[identity profile] metageek.livejournal.com 2007-08-23 06:30 pm (UTC)(link)
Even if you don't pick the GPL, I strongly recommend picking one that's compatible with the GPL, so that, if need be, you can link in GPL code from other projects. There's just so much of it out there.

[identity profile] yakshaver.livejournal.com 2007-08-24 09:45 pm (UTC)(link)
Having watched a lot of people go through a lot of hair-pulling over the license for their project, here's my advice: Pick one of "popular and widely used" licenses (http://www.opensource.org/licenses/category). To some extent it doesn't matter which one, but for christ's sake don't roll your own. In addition to scaring off nine out of ten prospective paying customers, it just adds to the general confusion around open source.

[identity profile] yakshaver.livejournal.com 2007-08-26 03:02 am (UTC)(link)
Wow, the Mozilla License (http://www.opensource.org/licenses/mozilla1.0.php) sure looks like it was written by a lawyer being paid by the word. The MIT and BSD licenses (the current BSD license is essentially the same as the MIT license) are a lot more comprehensible, and have served well enough for some of the most significant open source projects out there. One argument I've heard friends make for the MIT/BSD license — quietly, and out of earshot of open source zealots — is that so long as you get clean paperwork from all your contributors, if there's a business case for branching and keeping the branch closed, you can do so without any legal hassles. All other things being equal, keeping your options open sure seems like a better plan to me.