Gna! was a centralized location where software developers could develop, distribute and maintain free software. [1] The service was shut down in 2017 after 13 years in service for dozens of software projects and millions of downloads served.
In August 2022, Gna! was relaunched by Loïc Dachary as a paid service for hosting Forgejo instances. [2]
In the beginning, GNA (recursively acronymed "Gna's Not Axis"), was an association formed by Loïc Dachary for the distribution of free software.
On the 12 April 2001, GNA turned into the French chapter of Free Software Foundation (FSF).
At the end of 2003, the GNU Savannah server was replaced by FSF after a security compromise. A dispute broke out between FSF, who owned Savannah, and Savannah's maintainers, including developers of the Savannah software over the levels of administration the FSF should be given. FSF announced that it was going to switch to GForge, leaving frayed tempers among the developers, as result of a conflict about Savannah maintainers' role.
In January 2004, [3] [4] Loïc Dachary (who also started GNU Savannah) and several former GNU Savannah maintainers set up "Gna!" as a continuation of the Savannah project, but hosted on servers owned by the Free Software Foundation France. Gna! is paradoxically recursively acronymed "Gna's Not an Acronym!". It is managed by a self-organized team, supported by Free Software Foundation France.
For the hosted projects, Gna! provides source code version control (CVS, and SVN), a download space, project monitoring facilities, etc.
A notable exception to other free software community portals is Gna's strict licensing restrictions: only GNU General Public License compatible projects may be developed on the server. This is one of the reasons why it is significantly smaller than other portals. Its small userbase is advertised as a positive because it generally aids in the quick resolution of problems; a process which can take weeks on the larger sites.
In November 2016, the Gna! project announced it would soon be closing down, [5] and explained "soon" to mean "within 3 months [of February 2017], or when the hardware dies." [6]
On 24 May 2017, Gna! servers were shut down. [7]
In April 2022, Loïc Dachary and Aravinth Manivannan launched a paid service for hosting Gitea (later Forgejo) instances, called Hostea. [8] In August 2022 Hostea was renamed to Gna!. [9]
Gna! project have been archived by Archive Team. Code repositories, sites, downloads, mailing lists from Gna! can be found at Gna! Archiveteam page.
Among other projects Gna! hosted the popular software MyPaint and the games Freeciv, The Battle for Wesnoth, Warzone 2100, Hedgewars, and Warmux; providing 100,000s of software downloads every month to the users. [10] [11]
Free software or libre software is computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute it and any adapted versions. Free software is a matter of liberty, not price; all users are legally free to do what they want with their copies of a free software regardless of how much is paid to obtain the program. Computer programs are deemed "free" if they give end-users ultimate control over the software and, subsequently, over their devices.
GNU is an extensive collection of free software, which can be used as an operating system or can be used in parts with other operating systems. The use of the completed GNU tools led to the family of operating systems popularly known as Linux. Most of GNU is licensed under the GNU Project's own General Public License (GPL).
GNU Hurd is a collection of microkernel servers written as part of GNU, for the GNU Mach microkernel. It has been under development since 1990 by the GNU Project of the Free Software Foundation, designed as a replacement for the Unix kernel, and released as free software under the GNU General Public License. When the Linux kernel proved to be a viable solution, development of GNU Hurd slowed, at times alternating between stasis and renewed activity and interest.
Apache Subversion is a software versioning and revision control system distributed as open source under the Apache License. Software developers use Subversion to maintain current and historical versions of files such as source code, web pages, and documentation. Its goal is to be a mostly compatible successor to the widely used Concurrent Versions System (CVS).
GNU Savannah is a project of the Free Software Foundation initiated by Loïc Dachary, which serves as a collaborative software development management system for free Software projects. Savannah currently offers CVS, GNU arch, Subversion, Git, Mercurial, Bazaar, mailing list, web hosting, file hosting, and bug tracking services. Savannah initially ran on the same SourceForge software that at the time was used to run the SourceForge portal.
The GNU Project is a free software, mass collaboration project announced by Richard Stallman on September 27, 1983. Its goal is to give computer users freedom and control in their use of their computers and computing devices by collaboratively developing and publishing software that gives everyone the rights to freely run the software, copy and distribute it, study it, and modify it. GNU software grants these rights in its license.
GNU Wget is a computer program that retrieves content from web servers. It is part of the GNU Project. Its name derives from "World Wide Web" and "get". It supports downloading via HTTP, HTTPS, and FTP.
Bradley M. Kuhn is a free software activist from the United States.
A source-code-hosting facility is a file archive and web hosting facility for source code of software, documentation, web pages, and other works, accessible either publicly or privately. They are often used by open-source software projects and other multi-developer projects to maintain revision and version history, or version control. Many repositories provide a bug tracking system, and offer release management, mailing lists, and wiki-based project documentation. Software authors generally retain their copyright when software is posted to a code hosting facilities.
Alternative terms for free software, such as open source, FOSS, and FLOSS, have been a controversial issue among free and open-source software users from the late 1990s onwards. These terms share almost identical licence criteria and development practices.
Richard Matthew Stallman, also known by his initials, rms, is an American free software movement activist and programmer. He campaigns for software to be distributed in such a manner that its users have the freedom to use, study, distribute, and modify that software. Software that ensures these freedoms is termed free software. Stallman launched the GNU Project, founded the Free Software Foundation (FSF) in October 1985, developed the GNU Compiler Collection and GNU Emacs, and wrote all versions of the GNU General Public License.
April is an association for the promotion of free software in the French-speaking world. Since its inception in 1996, April has maintained a close relationship with the Free Software Foundation, establishing a working group to undertake a French-language exposition of the GNU project's philosophy.
In FOSS development communities, a forge is a web-based collaborative software platform for both developing and sharing computer applications. The term forge refers to a common prefix or suffix adopted by various platforms created after the example of SourceForge. This usage of the word stems from the metalworking forge, used for shaping metal parts.
The GNU General Public License is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end users the four freedoms to run, study, share, and modify the software. The license was the first copyleft for general use and was originally written by the founder of the Free Software Foundation (FSF), Richard Stallman, for the GNU Project. The license grants the recipients of a computer program the rights of the Free Software Definition. These GPL series are all copyleft licenses, which means that any derivative work must be distributed under the same or equivalent license terms. It is more restrictive than the Lesser General Public License and even further distinct from the more widely used permissive software licenses BSD, MIT, and Apache.
The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization founded by Richard Stallman on October 4, 1985, to support the free software movement, with the organization's preference for software being distributed under copyleft terms, such as with its own GNU General Public License. The FSF was incorporated in Boston, Massachusetts, US, where it is also based.
Alexandre "Alex" Oliva, is a Brazilian free software activist, developer, former vice president of the board of directors of the Free Software Foundation (FSF) and founding member of Free Software Foundation Latin America (FSFLA). He is currently on-hold from his PhD studies at the Institute of Computing of the State University of Campinas, Brazil whilst working as a compiler engineer at Red Hat, contributing in the GCC compiler. He is the maintainer of Linux-libre, a fork of the Linux kernel which removes non-free software components, such as binary blobs from the kernel. The Linux-libre kernels are used in Linux distributions such as Parabola GNU/Linux-libre, gNewSense, and Trisquel, all of which are recommended by the Free Software Foundation and the GNU Project.
Linux-libre is a modified version of the Linux kernel that contains no binary blobs, obfuscated code, or code released under proprietary licenses. In the Linux kernel, they are mostly used for proprietary firmware images. While generally redistributable, binary blobs do not give the user the freedom to audit, modify, or, consequently, redistribute their modified versions. The GNU Project keeps Linux-libre in synchronization with the mainline Linux kernel.
Savane is a free web-based software hosting system. It includes issue tracking, project member management by roles and individual account maintenance.
LibreCMC is a Linux-libre distribution for computers with minimal resources, such as the Ben NanoNote, ath9k-based Wi-Fi routers, and other hardware with emphasis on free software. Based on OpenWrt, the project's goal is to aim for compliance with the GNU Free System Distribution Guidelines and ensure that the project continues to meet these requirements set forth by the Free Software Foundation (FSF). LibreCMC does not support ac or ax due to a lack of free chipsets.
GNU LibreJS, or simply LibreJS, is a free software web browser extension for Mozilla Firefox-based browsers, written by the GNU Project. Its purpose is to block nonfree nontrivial JavaScript programs and allow free or trivial JS in a user's web browser. The add-on was written to address the so-called "JavaScript Trap" first described by Richard Stallman in 2009, a situation in which many users unknowingly run proprietary software in their web browsers.
