Savannah has high project approval requirements and thus visitors can expect freedom-related qualities from projects hosted here (such as no proprietary dependencies). Moreover, there are no advertisements, thus you do not run the risk of getting an ad for a proprietary competitor on your project page.
Having fewer projects to deal with, we are able to provide, as far as we've been told, a quicker response time for most support requests. Thanks to the Savane software, we also provide a bug tracking system that we consider better.
By choosing Savannah, you show that you value your freedom, as all of Savannah is running exclusively with Free Software. Check SourceForge Drifting by Savannah founder Loic Dachary.
Technically, Savannah provides:
- A choice of VCSes (version control systems) for your source code:
- CVS (UsingCvs)
- GNU Arch (UsingGnuArch)
- Subversion (SubversionFAQs)
- Git (UsingGit)
- Mercurial (UsingHg)
- The Savane integrated bug tracking system, for bugs, support requests, tasks and patches
- Mailing lists at lists.gnu.org and lists.nongnu.org, managed via Mailman
- Webpages (at www.gnu.org or www.nongnu.org), managed through CVS.
- A download area, and its mirrors.
Links
Other sites that use Savane and offer free software hosting:
- Gna!: http://gna.org/ - philosophically compatible with Savannah, but run by other people; located in France
- Puszcza: http://puszcza.gnu.org.ua/ - also philosophically compatible, also run by other people (primarily Sergey Poznyakoff); located in Ukraine (and pronounced "push-cha")
Software projects for hosting projects, with their source code:
- Savane: http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/savane-cleanup and https://gna.org/projects/savane - what we use! (PHP, Perl)
- Trac: http://trac.edgewall.org/ - integrated SVN/wiki/tracker for a single project; variants for other VCS exists as non-official plugins
- InDefero: http://www.indefero.net/ - mimics Google Code with a clean and simple interface, git repos need to be created manually, Apache has write access on SVN so beware of security/isolation if you're hosting more than 10 projects (PHP)
- Redmine: http://www.redmine.org/ - multi-projects, integrated tracker/wiki/browser/gantt (Ruby [on Rails], GPLv2+)
- LibreSource: http://dev.libresource.org/
- FusionForge: http://fusionforge.org/ - forked from the same original code base than Savannah, a long time ago in 2001 (PHP, GPLv2+)
With hosting:
- Tuxfamily: http://tuxfamily.org/ - Savannah-like free software hosting facility - code
- http://repo.or.cz - first public Git hosting facility, runs a modified version of gitweb as the main interface + a minimum chroot'd environment + a few crons - code (Perl + shell)
- Gitorious: http://gitorious.org/ - Git hosting with another web viewer - code (Ruby on Rails)
- http://freeHg.org - code
- ShareSource: http://sharesource.org/ - code
- Alioth: http://alioth.debian.org/ - aimed at Debian projects - code
(Note that we do not list projects that advertise a proprietary version)