Knowledge Base: What does ownership of a freshmeat project record mean?

When a person owns a project record in freshmeat's database, it primarily means that the owner claims the responsibility of keeping this database record up-to-date with correct and timely information. It does not grant any privileges except for one: If the owner so wishes, a project record can be restricted such that requests to change or add information to that project can only be made by an owner of the project. By default, anyone with a freshmeat account is allowed to request changes in a project or submit new release announcements for a project. But all change requests and release announcements must be edited and approved by freshmeat's staff before taking effect, no matter whether the submission came from a project owner or not.

The owner of a project's freshmeat record is not necessarily the project's author or otherwise associated with the project in any official way. However, it is customary for authors to wish to own the freshmeat records for the projects that they have written, and it is generally granted to them upon request. Some software authors are too busy to care about keeping a freshmeat database record up-to-date and would be quite happy to let some stranger shoulder this burden, while others care deeply about controlling this information.

When a project's information is submitted to freshmeat for the first time, the person who submitted the project information is automatically assigned primary ownership. It is possible for the project owner to grant supplementary ownership to one or more other freshmeat account holders. Each owner can be assigned a different "role" (which doesn't function differently on freshmeat, but is just a title within the context of the project's development or maintenance). If you get an email message from us saying that another person has asked for ownership of a project you own, it means that the requestor is seeking primary ownership (which only the freshmeat staff can grant), not supplementary ownership (which the project's owner can grant through the interface for managing project roles). If primary ownership is granted to a new person, the old primary owner will lose ownership.

If a transfer of primary ownership is requested by someone who is not obviously the project's author, we generally do not make any ownership changes without giving the current owner a full week to tell us whether she or he agrees that ownership should be transferred. But if we don't get any response from the current owner even after waiting a week, then we will usually just grant the new ownership request. We do this because, without any feedback, we have to assume that the current owner is unable to deal with issues arising with regard to the project's freshmeat record and that the person requesting ownership is interested in taking this responsibility.