On 04/30/2016 04:06 PM, Bradley M. Kuhn wrote:
Richard Fontana wrote today:
[...]
> On the other hand, I must admit that my personal views towards
GitHub have
> become if anything more positive over the years. Some of [the negative]
> reaction [to GitHub's good policies] has appropriated the rhetoric of
> proponents of free network services.
This specific argument seems flawed. IIUC, you're arguing that you're more
postive toward GitHub: GitHub tried to do something good on an issue
unrelated to net-service freedom, and that you became more tolerant of
GitHub's net-service freedom compromises because their enemies on the
unrelated issue coopted network service freedom rhetoric.
It was a quick essentially emotional assertion, I admit.
I should probably blog the rest of this email rather than merely post
it
here, but I started writing it here, and, well, it is relevant (albeit as a
META issue) to this project, so here goes:
IMO, the remaining central problem with GitHub is two-fold:
0. many of the features require local installation of proprietary software,
in the form of JavaScript.
1. Failure to comply with other principles in the Franklin Street Statement.
I'm trying to decide if these remaining problems morally demand me to limit
*my* use of GitHub. Notably, I suspect that (0) can be resolved with the
Free Software github CLI tool I mentioned earlier in this thread. If so, the
only moral argument under (0) is that focusing development of a project at
GitHub likely encourages others to use proprietary software (because they
will likely use the web interface, not the CLI tool).
With (1), the Gitoriopocalypse taught me that overzealous attention to
liberation of the entire server-side software in a SaaSS [0] situation might
cause users to miss more important netservice freedom issues. I do think
GitHub is SaaSS, but does the existence of
https://github.com/joeyh/github-backup mitigate that issue enough that enough
that a full-on boycott is overkill? As it turned out, I had to *hand paste*
pending merge requests from Gitorious over to Kallithea because there was no
export tool!
I'm pondering with these questions personally as well -- I'm currently using
github as "Git repository backup" for most of my projects, since I don't
have
"backup" for the Kallithea instances I'm personally in charge of.
I've not received a pull request on any of those projects on GitHub, but if I
did, would I close it with a message saying why to boycott it? Would I
accept the pull request, use github for that one workflow, and encourage the
contributor to use the Kallithea instance in future? I honestly don't know.
Again, these are meta-issues that I'm pondering, and I wonder if
copyleft-next would like to ponder them as well, and perhaps, given Fontana's
apparent increased liking of GitHub, pick a more "meet them in the middle"
tact about GitHub.
I wouldn't make too much of my essentially emotional comment. With
respect to copyleft-next and GitHub, here are the issues today:
1. I myself use GitHub and am sure I will continue to make some use of
GitHub even if copyleft-next ceases all official use of GitHub. So
there's an issue of possible personal hypocrisy or failure to
consistently apply principle.
2. I continue to think the strongest argument against use of GitHub for
copyleft-next is the one you originally made long ago:
https://github.com/richardfontana/copyleft-next/issues/6#issue-5447013
It is more acute today because I now believe that copyleft-next should
address the issue of network services freedom (which I did not believe
when I started the project).
3. Until recently I have had practical difficulties in setting up
self-hosted git-based web service things I've investigated (Kallithea,
Gitlab, Pagure, Gogs ...).
Richard