[gcompris-devel] [GCompris] Project Study

[Dwaipayan Deb]

Hi Bruno,

I am a Masters Student at Australian National University in Canberra, Australia. The university has started a course on Free and Open Source Software Development (a first of its kind in the world). You may visit http://cs.anu.edu.au/students/comp8440/ for more information on this course.

We were very privileged to be taught by Andrew Tridgell aka Tridge (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Tridgell) and Bob Edwards. Tridge is well known in FOSS community as the author and core contributor to the Samba File Server and co-inventor of the rsync algorithm.

During this course, I stumbled upon your brilliant project GCompris and decided to study and contribute to this project and write up on it. My previous email with the draft version of the project study as attachment is currently waiting moderator's approval. I don't mind if anyone wants to enhance that document further and use it for any aspect of the GCompris project. I shall be able to provide a better version by this weekend.

I was able to learn a lot about the project from its official website (http://www.gcompris.net), archive of the mailing lists (http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?forum_name=gcompris-devel), the official wiki and the bugzilla. However, I would highly appreciate if these questions could be answered.

1. As per Wikipedia, GCompris was started in 2000. However, I could not find any documented history of the early days of the project. So when did GCompris start? Or is there any other source of information of the early days of the project?

2. The project moved to GIT from CVS. Was CVS used from the start?

3. How's the commit access granted to a contributor?

4. The project is licensed under GPL v3. But does the project follow any copyright policy or follows the copyright policy of Gnome projects?

5. GCompris is licensed under GPL v3. However, the windows and Mac OSX full versions need to be bought for 20 Euros. Under what licenses are those sold/distributed?

6. Is there any structure to manage releases?

I will greatly appreciate if you could answer these questions. It would help me in understanding the project better and document the project study better.

Also, I am in the process of doing some translation work for the UI. Also, please let me know how can I contribute in translation of the website and wiki.

Many thanks in advance!

Cheers,
Dwaipayan Deb (DD)