Xerox contributes to Free Software

As part of his work with Xerox, Laurent Julliard participated in the installation of a worldwide internal source code-sharing infrastructure called CodeX (Code eXchange). CodeX is using the same code base as Savannah (SourceForge-2.0) and was constantly improved in the past year.

Under the impulse of Laurent Juillard, Xerox has recently taken the decision to contribute all their changes back to the Free Software community through Savannah. This allows Savannah to benefit from a revived code base and allows it to enable features that were previously deactivated because of the lack of resources. The new Bug Tracking System is the first significant contribution. Others will follow.

While Xerox is the copyright holder of the modifications of the SourceForge code base, the FSF received official documents stating that these modifications are released under the GNU GPL. Of course, Laurent Julliard, like any other volunteer contributing to Savannah may become less active in the future and someone else will have to continue the maintenance of the code base. But the important point is that the improvements integrated in Savannah when this happens will be available under the terms of the GNU GPL.

Some of you may remember that the creation of the Free Software Foundation partly lies in a discord between Xerox and RMS. Twenty years later, Xerox made a significant step to burry this historical disagreement.

The full BTS announcement

Loïc Dachary