Re: Announcing GNOME's official GitHub mirror

[Richard Stallman <rms gnu org>]

        [ 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.

    I believe the mentioned article answers your question: GitHub is
    essentially SaaS. A proprietary one.

Hosting services in general are not SaaSS.  Maybe some specific thing
about GitHub is SaaSS; if so, can you explain the details?

And what do you mean when you say it is "proprietary"?  We don't have
a definition of "proprietary" for services.  Apparently the JavaScript
programs it sends to the user are proprietary, and that is a real
issue, but these programs are not the same as the service per se.

    Your git
    workflow becomes dependent on GitHub's features and infrastructure,

Could you explain concretely (to me, maybe not to the list) what this
means?  I have never used GitHub, and I could not easily try.

    hence you're denied your freedom (e.g. GitHub could send account details
    to a 3rd party, etc. just like many other services, or vendor-lock you
    from easily migrating your workflow to other git hosting services).

Any service can give information about you to big brother.  It is a
common drawback of all services, so it does not make GitHub worse than
any other service.

What specific sort of vendor-lock do you see as a danger in regard
to GitHub?

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman
President, Free Software Foundation
51 Franklin St
Boston MA 02110
USA
www.fsf.org  www.gnu.org
Skype: No way! That's nonfree (freedom-denying) software.
  Use Ekiga or an ordinary phone call.