Re: Please, no GitHub

[Maxthon Chan]

Richard:

This selection criterion is almost synonymous as forbidding free project 
contributors to use any tool that may even have, or depend on, any trace amount 
of non-free-ness in it - no contribution should be made using Xcode or Visual 
Studio or IntelliJ or any computer using an Intel processor or a motherboard 
that does not run SeaBIOS. If so you might as well as block me right now on the 
grounds that my tools are non-free. If a non-free development tool is 
tolerated, isn’t Github front end yet another development tool?

If you want people to use tools that defend their freedom such tools need to 
provide a similar level of quality. Linux’s success is because it can deliver a 
similar performance as HP-UX or AIX or iOS and beat out Windows. For GNUstep, 
the competition is Hackintosh (OSx86 project) but they are far ahead of us. 
Ever thought why?

Have you considered that fact that defending users’ freedom (which is a good 
thing on its own) too aggressively in the current economy (that is, economy in 
2015, not 1991, not 2007, definitely not 2050) means people will lose their pay 
checks and starve to death, among which are the world’s best developers who are 
currently hired by some of the biggest companies in the world? You may want to 
get a reality check here.

> On Dec 13, 2015, at 14:54, Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> 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. ]]]
> 
>>> The unfortunate part of this is that GitHub has been successful at
>>> achieving a great deal of notoriety and going anywhere else would be
>>> considered "obscure.”
> 
>> My point is that the website you see at https://github.com URL is
>> not the actual component of Github that handles the business. It
>> is https://api.github.com/ that does all the heavylifting.
> 
> The criterion in question is about the usual interface, which is
> github.com.  How that is implemented -- what parts there are, and
> which one does "heavylifting" -- is beside the point.
> 
>> The Linux kernel, probably the single biggest GPL-licensed
>> codebase, is GPLv2-only.
> 
> The existence of opposition to GPL v3 is why we need to push back.
> For instance, Apple (a company that never valued the users' freedom)
> opposes GPLv3 _because_ it defends the users' freedom better.
> 
> Repo criterion C5 is one of the things we are doing to push back.
> 
> 
> Your arguments are based on goals that don't fit the GNU Project.
> 
> -- 
> Dr Richard Stallman
> President, Free Software Foundation (gnu.org, fsf.org)
> Internet Hall-of-Famer (internethalloffame.org)
> Skype: No way! See stallman.org/skype.html.
>

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