[atlas] Survey results on Atlas open-sourcing

On Wed, Jan 04, 2012 at 04:45:03PM +0100,
 Philip Homburg <philip.homburg at ripe.net> wrote 
 a message of 33 lines which said:

> Dumping the source just as a tar file on a web site is easy. But
> that will be one way communication. And most likely fork the
> project. Not good.

That's a very strange argument. Nobody asked the RIPE-NCC to spend
money and time on doing a perfect tarball, complete with correct
README, INSTALL and Makefile (or configure.ac). Yes, just dump the
source, it will be a good step in the right direction and it will help
in at least one use case (learn how the box works).

One of the alternatives, Grenouille <http://git.grenouille.com/>, is
currently at this step (code, zero doc).

The argument about the fork is also very 20th century. The entire
point of free software is the ability to use it... freely and of
course this freedom implies the right to fork (whether it is a good
idea or not is a separate topic).

> If you want to turn it into an open source project, then a lot of
> stuff has to happen. 

No.

> In particular, the project has to be mature enough that it can
> actually be installed without too much pain.

No. Nobody requested a perfect system.