Re: Announcing GNOME's official GitHub mirror

["Jasper St. Pierre" <jstpierre mecheye net>]

On Thu, Aug 15, 2013 at 9:40 AM, fr33domlover <fr33domlover mailoo org> wrote:

On ה', 2013-08-15 at 14:29 +0000, Marco Scannadinari wrote:
> On Thu, 2013-08-15 at 16:13 +0300, fr33domlover wrote:
> > Allow me to clarify:
> >
> > You're free to use github mirrors, it's your right to do so. But I have
> > the right not to cooperate with this. All Gnome maintainers have this
> > right.
> >
> > If you're going to enable those github mirrors, make sure any maintainer
> > can easily turn off mirroring for their module.
>
> why?

Because Github is centralized, and partially proprietary. And it has
great alternatives like Gitorious and Gitlab, which don't suffer from
these problems.

Having used both of these tools, they aren't anywhere near what GitHub does.

Gitorious is slow, hard to navigate, and tends to spit out error messages when trying to load files from anything other than master. It's also impossible to view any binary file (icons, images) without downloading.

GitLab is an attempt at emulating GitHub, but it feels like the standard "open-source clone of closed software" in that it's years behind and doesn't really have its own design or identity.

 

>
> By releasing your code under a Free license such as the GPL, you are
> allowing others to take your code, and essentially, do what they want
> with it. Free licenses by design are made to allow this, and if your app
> is part of the Gnome project, then Gnome are free to "do what they want
> with it", in this case, to create a *read-only* mirror on GitHub in the
> intrest of convenience.

Software freedom is more important for me than convenience. If you're
interested in convenience you can use MS Windows, Dropbox, Facebook,
Skype and Github. Stop developing Gnome and just watch TV all day.
That's convenience.

I feel that some decisions taken in the name of Gnome don't consider
software freedom. That's not fair, especially because many people here
are volunteers, and some of them volunteer in the name of software
freedom, not convenience or profit.

I'm curious how this is different than somebody taking your code repository and putting a personal fork of it on GitHub. Is it because GNOME's mirrors are called "official", and that you feel that having a presence on any proprietary infrastructure feels detrimental to GNOME's philosophy and mission?

 

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--
  Jasper