Gna! was a centralized location where

software developers A computer programmer, sometimes referred to as a software developer, a software engineer, a programmer or a coder, is a person who creates computer programs — often for larger computer software. A programmer is someone who writes/creates ...

could develop, distribute and maintain

free software 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, no ...

. The service was shut down in 2017 after 13 years in service for dozens of software projects and millions of downloads served. Since May 2022, Gna! was relaunched as a paid service for hosting

Gitea Gitea () is a forge software package for hosting software development version control using Git as well as other collaborative features like bug tracking, code review, kanban boards, tickets, and wikis. It supports self-hosting but also provide ...

instances.

History

In the beginning, GNA ( recursively acronymed "''Gna's Not Axis''"), was an association formed by Loïc Dachary for the distribution of

. On the 12 April 2001, GNA turned into the French chapter of

Free Software Foundation The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is a 501(c)#501(c)(3), 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 ...

(FSF). At the end of 2003, the

GNU Savannah 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, M ...

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 GForge is a commercial service originally based on the Alexandria software behind SourceForge, a web-based project management and collaboration system which was licensed under the GPL. Open source versions of the GForge code were released from 20 ...

, leaving frayed tempers among the developers, as result of a conflict about Savannah maintainers' role. In January 2004, Loïc Dachary (who also started

) and several former

maintainers set up "Gna!" as a continuation of the Savannah project, but hosted on servers owned by the

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 CVS may refer to: Organizations * CVS Health, a US pharmacy chain ** CVS Pharmacy ** CVS Caremark, a prescription benefit management subsidiary * Council for Voluntary Service, England * Cable Video Store, former US pay-per-view service * CVS F ...

, and SVN), a download space, project monitoring facilities, etc. A notable exception to other

free software community The free software movement is a social movement with the goal of obtaining and guaranteeing certain freedoms for software users, namely the freedoms to run the software, to study the software, to modify the software, and to share copies of the ...

portals is Gna's strict

licensing A license (or licence) is an official permission or permit to do, use, or own something (as well as the document of that permission or permit). A license is granted by a party (licensor) to another party (licensee) as an element of an agreeme ...

restrictions: only

GNU General Public License The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end users the Four Freedoms (Free software), four freedoms to run, study, share, and modify the software. The license was th ...

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, and explained "soon" to mean "within 3 months f February 2017 or when the hardware dies." On 24 May, 2017 Gna! servers were shut down.

Impact and reception

Among other projects Gna! hosted the popular software

MyPaint MyPaint is a free and open-source raster graphics editor for digital painting. It is available for Windows, macOS, and Unix-like operating systems. History MyPaint versions up to 1.00 and bug/issue tracking were hosted by Gna!. MyPaint uses gra ...

and the games

Freeciv ''Freeciv'' is a single- and multiplayer turn-based strategy game for workstations and personal computers inspired by the proprietary ''Sid Meier's Civilization'' series. It is available for most desktop computer operating systems and available ...

The Battle for Wesnoth ''The Battle for Wesnoth'' is a free and open-source turn-based strategy video game with a high fantasy setting, designed by Australian-American developer David White and first released in June 2003. In ''Wesnoth'', the player attempts to build ...

Warzone 2100 ''Warzone 2100'' is an Open-source video game, open-source real-time strategy and real-time tactics hybrid PC game, computer game, originally developed by Pumpkin Studios and published by Eidos Interactive. It was originally released in 1999 fo ...

, Hedgewars, and Warmux; providing 100,000s of software downloads every month to the users. Gna monthly downloads 2017-02
(archived)

References

External links

* {{Webarchive, url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170516193536/http://gna.org/, date=2017-05-16, title=Welcome to Gna!
Gna! project archived by Archiveteam
Discontinued open-source software hosting facilities

History

Archive

Impact and reception

See also

References

External links