Gna!

» see gna.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

At the end of 2003 somebody broke into GNU Savannah, the Free Software Foundation's own project hosting service. The cleanup that followed turned into a dispute between the FSF and the volunteers who had been administering the place, over how much control those volunteers should have and what software should run underneath. The FSF said it was moving to GForge. Several maintainers said no.

In January 2004 Loïc Dachary, who had helped start Savannah in the first place, set up Gna! with a number of those maintainers. It was a continuation of the same project by people who had lost the argument about running it. The hardware belonged to Free Software Foundation France and the administration was handled by a self-organized team, which is a polite way of describing volunteers with root.

What made Gna! specific was the admission rule. Only GPL-compatible projects were allowed on the server, with no exceptions carved out for convenience. SourceForge would take anything. Savannah had its own rules and its own arguments about them. Gna! drew the line where the people who left thought it belonged, and then held that line for thirteen years without much drama.

The projects were not obscure. Freeciv, The Battle for Wesnoth, Warzone 2100, Hedgewars, WarMUX and MyPaint all developed there, pushing hundreds of thousands of downloads a month.

If you played free software games on Linux in the late 2000s you were downloading from Gna! whether or not you ever registered the name of the host. The forge is the least memorable part of any project that uses one.

~ the case file ~

~ the fork after the break-in ~

The version control on offer was CVS and Subversion, plus download space and project trackers. That inventory dates the place precisely. Gna! was built in the last moment when centralized version control was the obvious default, and it never really moved past it, which is a large part of why the ending arrived when it did.

Git happened in 2005, a year after Gna! opened. GitHub happened in 2008. By the mid-2010s a forge that offered you CVS was not competing for new projects, it was maintaining the ones already there.

~ six months of notice ~

The closure was announced in November 2016 with a stated six months for projects to move themselves elsewhere. The servers went off on 24 May 2017.

Most projects went to Savannah, which is a tidy piece of circularity: the fork outlived its own reason to exist and then handed its projects back to the thing it had forked away from.

Archive Team took a copy. The tarballs are still findable.

~ the domain's second life ~

gna.org did not stay empty. In August 2022 it came back as a paid hosting service, and by 2024 the archived captures show it serving a forgefriends instance running Forgejo, which is a Gitea fork, which is roughly what a forge looks like now. Different software, different funding model, same domain, same person behind a good deal of it.

That second life is over too. As of September 2026 gna.org does not resolve at all: no DNS record, no holding page, nothing to curl. The last capture the Internet Archive holds for the domain is dated November 2024.

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