Hosting requirements

Site Wide

Please read these usage terms carefully. If you don't follow them, we will not accept your project; if we don't have enough information determine whether your project follows these terms, we will have to ask you for more details. Once your project is accepted, you are expected to continue following these terms.

Our intent is to provide a permanent home for all versions of your project. We do reserve the right, however, to discontinue hosting a project.

Use of project account

The space given to you on this server is given for the expressed purpose of advancing free software that can run in free operating systems, documenting such software, or creating free educational textbooks. Using it to host or advertise nonfree software is considered harmful to free software. For more information, please read the Philosophy of the GNU Project.

In order to preserve history and complete transparency, we will not remove projects with substantive content.

No dependencies on nonfree software

To be hosted on Savannah, your project must be free software, and it must be kept independent of any nonfree software. The package must not refer the user to any nonfree software; in other words, it must not say anything that in our judgment is likely to lead or steer users towards any nonfree software. In particular, it must not automatically download or install any nonfree software. For more info, see References to Non-Free Software and Documentation in the GNU Coding Standards.

The program should deliver its full functionality and convenience on a completely free platform based on a free operating system, such as GNU/Linux, working entirely with other free software. Otherwise, it would be an inducement to install nonfree operating systems or other nonfree software.

It is ok for the program to run on nonfree platforms or nonfree operating systems, and to work with well-known nonfree applications, in addition to working with free software, provided it gives the free software at least as good support as it gives to nonfree counterparts. In other words, at no time, in no way, should your program put free software users at a disadvantage compared to those willing to use proprietary software.

Regarding Android phones

Projects running on Replicant may be hosted on Savannah. Projects having dependencies on nonfree software, such as proprietary software drivers or AndroidOS, are not permissible.

No nonfree formats

Using a format such as Flash, RealPlayer and QuickTime, that can in practice only be created or played using nonfree software is, in effect, to recommend use of that nonfree player software. When the free software implementation is not as technically good as the proprietary one, using such a format is also implicitly recommending the nonfree version. Therefore, your package shouldn't contain or recommend materials in these nonfree formats.

In general, you may not advertise anything commercial on a site hosted here. However, as exceptions, you can point people to commercial support offerings for your free software project, and you can mention fan items about your free software project that you sell directly to the users.

Speaking about free software

Savannah is a free software hosting site: we host projects such as yours for the sake of the ideals of freedom and community that the free software movement stands for. We offer Savannah hosting to free software packages, as free software packages; therefore, please describe your package clearly as a free software package. Please label it as “free software” rather than as “open source”.

Savannah is part of the GNU Project, developer of the free software operating system GNU. The GNU/Linux system (GNU with Linux as the kernel) runs Savannah now. While using our hosting services, please acknowledge our work by referring to this system as “GNU/Linux,” not just “Linux,” when you mention it in connection with this package.

If you'd like to help correct other confusions, you can find some suggestions in Words to Use with Care.

Project naming

Project identifiers should be reasonably descriptive, rather than terse abbreviations or confusingly general. If we believe this to be an issue, we will discuss it with you.

Free software licenses

You will be presented with a choice of free software licenses for your project. For hosting on Savannah, you must use one of these licenses, which give the freedom to anyone to use, study, copy, and distribute the source code and distribute modified versions of it, and which are compatible with the GNU GPL version 3 and any later versions. We recommend GPLv3-or-later; in any case, we require the “or any later version” formulation for the GNU GPL, GNU AGPL, and GNU LGPL. You will remain the copyright holder of whatever you create for your project.

For manuals, we recommend GNU FDL version X-or-later, where X is the latest released version of the FDL; other licensing compatible with that is acceptable.

Proper license notices should be applied to, at least, each source (non-derived) file in your project. For example, for the GPL, see the page on How to Use GNU Licenses. In the case of binary source files, such as images, it is ok for the license to be stated in a companion README or similar file. It is desirable for derived files to also include license notices. A copy of the full text of all applicable licenses should also be included in the project.

If you need to use another license that is not listed, let us know and we, or most likely the FSF licensing group, will review these requests on a case-by-case basis. Software licenses must be GPL-compatible.