Re: Announcing GNOME's official GitHub mirror

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Thu, 2013-08-15 at 21:20 -0400, Richard Stallman wrote:
> [ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider
>         [ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,
>         [ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example.
>
>     Is it advisable to use nonfree GitHub as a secondary mirror for GNOME's free 
>     software?
>
> When you say that GitHub is "nonfree", what do you mean by that?
> We do not have any definition for calling a service free or nonfree.
>
> See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/network-services-arent-free-or-nonfree.html.

Hi Richard,

GitHub provides a number of services around the Git repositories it
provides. Git, of course, is free software, and you can interact with
your repository as with any other Git repository.

The extra services GitHub provides require quite a bit of server-side
software, much of which is not released as free software. That, however,
is a network service, not software running on your computer.

The normal way of interacting with the extra services is using the web
site, and the web site does require non-free JavaScript to work. But
GitHub does provide an HTTP-based API that allows you to write entirely
free software yourself to interact with these services.

GitHub is clearly not as aligned with our mission as something like
Gitorious, which uses 100% free software. But GitHub does not require
you to run non-free software on your own computer for anything, as far
as I can tell.

--
Shaun