:כתב Olav Vitters, 2013-08-18 13:05 בתאריך
On Fri, Aug 16, 2013 at 10:20:31PM +0300, fr33domlover wrote:Therefore, by turning off mirroring for a module, you don't block anything or stop anything - you just avoid pointing to a proprietary service, which is legitimate in my opinion.git.gnome.org is also available on Google. It indexes the entire website, which has the entire code. It is also available on various other search engines. I find it rather strange that there is such a focus on something which will spread the idea of free software. Gitorious existence doesn't make it automatically viable btw.
There's always the Act Globally VS Act Locally debate. Clearly you can't fix everything at once (even GNU was being written using proprietary UNIX when there was no choice), so why not start locally? Fix the world one step at a time.
Right now, we have several proprietary-software centralized services, usually of high quality. And we have decentralized free ones, but they're usually less popular (unfortunately, our economy is based on greed, not good will, but that's off-topic).
If GNOME makes the GitHub mirrors a standard feature it supports, it will make people get used to it and depend on it, just like people are used to Windows. Since GitHub is centralized, there's no way for people to change the rules or run their clone. It's also proprietary, so they can't use the code and need to write alternatives from scratch.
Why is adding an on\off switch such an issue? GNOME is not a product, not a service, not a company (IIRC). Centralization can be a big problem (see MediaGoblin promotion video / FSF website main page). Adding a switch would avoid contributors from being discouraged by this kind of official GNOME policy, and being worried about these centralization issues.
I believe this is called "coupling" in SE. Maybe the lowest level of coupling, since it's just a mirror used by GitHub users, but still too much IMHO (considering the centralization issue).