This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by Gábor Szabó
I am working on several projects monitoring recent uploads PyPI, RubyGems, and CPAN and analyzing them.
One of the most basic items I am looking for is a link to their public VCS on GitHub, GitLab, or elsewhere.
It turns out that a large percentage of them do NOT link to their public VCS.
When I have time I try to track down the repository and either open an issue or send a Pull-Request to change the meta-data of the project to include the link.
Sometimes I even send an e-mail to the authors asking if they have public VCS.
Some tell me they either don't have a public VCS (or no VCS at all). For some I find out that the repository is not up-to-date. eg. in this project I was told the project is internal to some organization.
Are they Open Source?
I wonder, are such project still open source? They might have an OSI approved license, but can someone really access the source code and make changes to the project in a reasonable way?
See point 2. in the Open Source definition
Strictly speaking there is no requirement to have a public VCS, but there is a requirement to have easy access to the source code and to make it possible to change the source code. Do these distribute packages satisfy this requirement?
This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by Gábor Szabó
Gábor Szabó | Sciencx (2023-05-18T19:22:31+00:00) Is a project really Open Source without a public VCS?. Retrieved from https://www.scien.cx/2023/05/18/is-a-project-really-open-source-without-a-public-vcs/
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