Re: Please, no GitHub

[Richard Stallman]

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[[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
[[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]

  > What exactly is it, that Github does, that is bad for open source software?

The question is a misunderstanding.  GNUstep is part of the GNU
project, and what we stand for is free software, free as in freedom.
This is a campaign for users' freedom.

"Open source software" is the slogan of people who disagree with the
free software movement; they launched the open source non-movement as
a reaction against our ethical principles.  We don't judge
repositories (or anything else) according to their ideas.

See http://gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.html
for more explanation of the difference between free software and open
source.  See also http://thebaffler.com/past/the_meme_hustler for
Evgeny Morozov's article on the same point.

GitHub does a number of things that are wrong.  It requires users to
run nonfree programs (Javascript code in web pages) to do certain
operations (see http://gnu.org/philosophy/javascript-trap.html).  It
encourages bad licensing practices, such as posting code with no
license (which makes it nonfree), and failing to state the license
clearly.  Among free licenses, it encourages weak licenses over
copyleft.

Those are the flaws I remember, and they are grave.  There may be more
I don't recall now.

However, rather than just criticize GitHub, we developed a set of
repo criteria (https://www.gnu.org/software/repo-criteria.html) to judge
repository sites by.

-- 
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.