Re: Passive resistance [was: Re: Announcing GNOME's official GitHub mirror]

[fr33domlover <fr33domlover mailoo org>]

This is a great idea, but only if enough maintainers cooperate with it.
Otherwise, the "Gnome officially using GitHub" message is stronger than
a few small modules having your README.md file, while all other modules
have READMEs of the common kind.

Judging by replies here, I'm afraid there's no enough interest. All the
names I recognized here support the GitHub mirrors, while the voices
against them are people whose name I never saw, or are maintainers of
less popular modules.

Without major modules participating, I'm not sure it will work. We can
wait longer and see comments from more people. Right now I think a
per-module switch to disable mirroring sounds like better protest (maybe
unless I see maintainers of major modules disagree with the GitHub
mirroring).

On ו', 2013-08-16 at 10:00 +0200, Matteo Settenvini wrote:
> Il giorno gio, 15/08/2013 alle 12.07 +0200, Alexandre Franke ha scritto:
> > On Thu, Aug 15, 2013 at 11:49 AM, Alberto Ruiz <aruiz gnome org> wrote:
> >
> > I really don't care much about my code being mirrored anywhere. At
> > least gitorious would be ethically acceptable, so it wouldn't bother
> > me, but I won't invest time in this. I see the value of this as a
> > backup though, so if others want to work on this I say that's a good
> > thing.
> >
> > Anyway this is really not what was the most important point to me in
> > my previous email and you didn't answer the question I really cared
> > about, so I'm asking again: is there a way for maintainers to opt out
> > of the github mirroring?
>
> Hello, 
>
> I share the concerns already expressed that this move might be seen as
> an implicit support of a proprietary service (one for which the source
> code of the server-side website infrastructure is not available) by the
> GNOME project, part of the free software movement. 
>
> One of the great things about GNOME has usually been being not only
> "open source" -- good on technical grounds --, but also great in
> fighting for users' freedoms. Mirroring on github instead of gitorious
> is a signal in the wrong direction, as it helps in attracting more users
> to github (therefore directly helping a proprietary platform in terms of
> popularity), annoys some maintainers and contributors as can be seen in
> this discussion, and allows github to advertise the mirror of such a big
> project as GNOME in their press releases (it *will* happen, I'm fairly
> sure, as PR is important). Else, why were they eager to help with the
> mirroring, spending time and resources on it, if there was little or no
> return in investment? And that's fine on their part: they're just doing
> their job. The problem is on this side.
>
> Since PR is the important point for them, and the mirroring afaik was
> done without the explicit consent of maintainers, or a democratic voting
> process taking place on a relevant mailing list such as d-d-l, I suggest
> a passive-resistance stance (note that I am not a maintainer myself).
>
> github uses a file called "README.md" to display the main project
> information. A section against github can be put at the top of them by a
> module maintainer, explaining why it should not be used as it is
> proprietary, and suggesting users to move away from it. The module
> maintainer herself could then create a mirror on e.g. gitorious, and put
> the link in the same README.md file, inviting users to use that and to
> close their github account if they want to respect users' freedoms.
>
> Since this gives bad publicity to github, and encourages users to leave
> their service in favor of a competing one, I believe the github team
> will sooner or later get fed up and remove the modules themselves. Or
> even if they don't, we still get the effect of discouraging users in
> using their infrastructure, which is the point.
>
> This requires only actions from each interested module maintainer, it
> doesn't need approval or work by the sysadmin team (as they didn't ask
> for the module maintainers' approval).
>
> If there's interest, we could draft a paragraph or two, so that a bit of
> uniformity in communicating our ideals takes the form of a wider
> protest.
>
> Regards,
> -- 
> Matteo Settenvini
> FSF Associated Member
> Email : matteo member fsf org
>
>
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