Re: Savannah vs. Gitlab

[Maxthon Chan]

Svetlana:

As what we have established before, you can contribute to a repo hosted on 
Github without ever touching the Github.com website at all if you so detest it 
for its “proprietary” Javascript (which may be just minified open source code 
after all). Just ask a trusted friend to create an account for you and put your 
SSH public key into it, and you will be able to start contributing using 
whatever free and libre distribution of Git software you are using on your 
machine. And all Github features are still available if you read up their 
documentations (with LibreJS on if you so desire) and call the underlying API 
directly (I think you will accept the use of cURL) Or if you are worried that 
the “non-free” code may hide nasties, set up a virtual machine to isolate them.

And I can assure you the push script used in Github-hosted repository on your 
machine is the standard, default settings for Git. 

Also, I think LibreJS is a piece of software that became the antithesis of 
libre in the name of libre. It can end up blocking several Web development 
frameworks entirely (e.g. ASP.net AJAX, which is open source already) just 
because it is not marked “libre”, and some trivial Web tricks are considered 
“non-trivial” by its criteria. Also, minified scripts, which usually contains 
no whitespace let alone comments, are usually not marked.

By the way, the BIOS of your computer may not be free. Should you consider 
throwing that away and buy another computer that may be supported by core boot 
or SeaBIOS?

> On Dec 9, 2015, at 14:32, Svetlana A. Tkachenko <svetlana@members.fsf.org> 
> wrote:
> 
>> did you mean the unknown scripts running on Github's servers making up
>> their web site?
> 
> No.
> 
> Backend = software GitHub runs on its servers. Whether it's free or not
> is up to them. The burden of running proprietary software there is on
> them.
> 
> Frontend = the things we download and render in our web browsers. It has
> been established among GNU project that all scripts users run need to be
> free. It is not ethical to publish non-free scripts on the web. But
> GitHub does that.
> 
> (There is this question of whether the HTML markup also needs to be
> free. I think yes. I have not got a second opinion on this, though, and
> it is another can of worms.)
> 
>> The word "frontend" would be the word Ivan and me have misunderstood:
>> the "computer in front of you" = the web browser / client running
>> JavaScripts.
> 
> Think of it as of a TV. The movie you see is the front. The wires are at
> the back.
> 
>> I learned ~1 year ago that there is an FSF initiative (license? I don't
>> know the
>> right word) that all software running on a web server must also be open
>> source
>> to be considered "free speech".
> 
> It may, but it is not your primary concern: you are just a user.
> The bigger concern is what is running on your web client (i.e. in your
> own browser).
> 
> For this reason I use and recommend LibreJS:
> https://www.gnu.org/software/librejs/
> 
> -- 
> Svetlana A. Tkachenko
> Member of the Free Software Foundation
> www.fsf.org  www.gnu.org www.freenode.net
> 
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