Re: Announcing GNOME's official GitHub mirror

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

On Thu, Aug 15, 2013 at 9:56 AM, fr33domlover <fr33domlover mailoo org> wrote:

If someone takes my code and puts it on Github, it's their right to do
so. I won't like it, but I won't stop them. It's their freedom.

But in this case it's not someone randomly copying my work: It's
*direct* mirroring of all my code, directly to Github, in an official
manner.

So, as I understand it, your issue is the official and endorsed use of proprietary technologies in GNOME.

Do you know we have official Twitter, Facebook and Google+ accounts that are updated regularly?

Were you at GUADEC 2013? Beside the slides in every presentation was a public wall that displayed all tweets with the hashtag #guadec. It may have been hooked up to Identi.ca or one of the free software clones, but I didn't notice anybody using those. The design of the wall used Twitter's bird logo and theme.

 

If you want the features of Github, copy its code and run your own
instance. Using it officially means endorsing it and making it more
popular. If you want to endorse it, I won't stop you. But I don't want
to be part of this because of the Github issues I mentioned.


Convenience is not everything. Some people don't use a smartphone
because they want privacy. Or they don't use GMail, for the same reason.
In a similar manner, people should be able not to have any formal
connection to Github.

I am not a member of the board, but I think that we use proprietary software as a way of competition and collaboration. In my opinion, standing in our own little corner of the world and pretending that the rest of the world doesn't exist is not a way to spread our message and get people using free software.

Yes, we would prefer if Twitter and Facebook and Google+ and GitHub were all open and free, but our road is a long one, and we're still in the early stages of computing, and we need to make peace and collaborate with proprietary software makers, not war.

 

I'll repeat: You can mirror anything you want to Github, just let module
maintainers decide on their modules. Cloning a git repo and uploading to
Github is very easy, we both know that. It's not like people can't
upload code to Github without the mirrors.

On ה', 2013-08-15 at 09:47 -0400, Jasper St. Pierre wrote:
>
>
>
> 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
>

--
  Jasper