Re: Please, no GitHub

[Richard Stallman]

[[[ 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. ]]]

  > > stating the license on the source files themselves), and don't mention
  > > the difference between GPL 3-or-later and GPL 3-only, this leading
  > > people to choose the latter without realizing they made a choice.
  > > This fails C5.

  > Nobody is as experienced as you are in such subtle differences.

We are trying to educate other people about this
through methods such as our repository criteria.

  > 99% of the GitHub contributors are developers and programming
  > specialist. And not legal/license specialists.

That's why it is important for the site to lead them in the right
direction.

  > And to be honest, instead of recommending not to use GitHub
  > at all because of IMHO subtle flaws, FSF should offer something
  > better.

We already do: savannah.gnu.org.  We don't have the staff to provide
fast service, but on the most important dimension -- the ethical one
-- it is far superior to GitHub.

Would you like to volunteer to help take care of Savannah?
That could make a practical improvement.

  > And if there are not enough contributors to improve Savannah,
  > FSF should look to make contributions to it more attractive.

I don't see a way to do that.  Do you have any suggestions?

                                                                 Or
  > talk directly to GitHub people.

I already did, starting about a year ago.  I even had dinner with one
of their executives.  It seems to be a promising conversation, but
they dropped it inexplicably.  So we developed our repo criteria
instead.

If they want to resume the conversation, I won't refuse.




-- 
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.