Re: [libreplanet-discuss] GNU ethical repository criteria: Should privacy issues really be extra credit?

[Daniel Pocock]

On 19/11/15 19:52, anonymiss wrote:
>> Daniel Pocock:
>> --snip--
> this part:
>> I think the FSF approach (ranking each provider) is a good step but it
>> is not the complete solution.  The real solution needs to look at how
>> to encourage free-software-minded sysadmins to volunteer time and
>> energy to run things to the highest standard on the FSF criteria, not
>> just for repository hosting, but for everything else, including email,
>> SIP, XMPP, etc
>>
> While I think this could be good for people who still think that it
> matters that much where you have your email hosted, where you
> participate in that other federation service (xmpp), you can't copy
> those ethical repository criteria 1:1 to federation or client-server
> based message systems.
> (Leaving out all the facts which should tell people not to use those
> technologies anymore and fade them out (as soon as we have easy enough
> to use alternatives accessible for everyone),) I'm still curious how
> your list for those technologies would look like.
> 

I'm not suggesting the criteria for those things would be identical.

What is identical is the need for somebody (paid or volunteer) to do the
tedious stuff like keeping out spam (whether it is email spam, blog
spam, wiki spam or Github pull request spam), security updates on the
servers, managing DoS attacks and other sysadmin responsibilities.

Some communities try to do things but do them badly and in cases like
that I think it is better that people just say they don't have the time.
 A volunteer silently doing nothing or not giving any updates undermines
the reputation of the community and the free software concept in
general.  These types of situations can be a distraction, they can be
de-motivating and many developers who are really keen to just get on
with what they are developing simply give up and go somewhere else -
like Github, Skype, Telegram, Hangouts or whatever.

When somebody is taking care of stuff though, developers can then get on
with developing free software.