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 -----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK----- Version: 3.12 GCS/E d--(-) s+: a- C+++ UL+++ P+ L++++>$ E++>+++ W+++ N+ o? w--- O M- V- PS++ PE- Y+>++ PGP+++ t++ 5 X- R+ !tv b+++ DI++ D++ G++ e++ h+ r++ y+ ------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------
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