Re: debian github organization ?
Ben Finney <ben+debian@benfinney.id.au> writes:
> Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org> writes:
>> Funny, this is why I don't get why people are so upset that some use
>> GitHub. Because of how Git works, the impact of lock-in is pretty much
>> limited to the non-repository stuff (issues and so forth).
> Yet it is exactly those lock-in features that is the basis for arguments
> to put special effort into the centralised single point of failure.
> For example, the centralised proprietary GitHub “pull request” is
> presented as a reason to abandon a decentralised model:
Uh, a pull request isn't something proprietary. It was part of the design
of Git from the beginning and is based on the workflow of the Linux
kernel. What GitHub offers are some nice tools for managing those pull
requests that reduces the friction considerably, just like they offer a
nice web interface for viewing repositories. Those tools are useful, and
I hope they'll be replicated in an open source framework for Git
repository management, but they're not lock-in. You can do pull requests
without GitHub (and in fact I've done a fair bit of that).
> So upstream have chosen a proprietary lock-in service for their
> workflow. That should not put any obligation on others to also submit to
> proprietary lock-in.
Of course not. You don't have to use anything you don't want to use, and
no one in this thread is advocating otherwise, at least that I've seen.
All that I'd ask is that, if other people want to use GitHub, for you to
not be an ass about it, the same way that we don't lecture people for
using a proprietary editor to write free sofware. Some of us are willing
to reach out to people who are using GitHub and give and take patches from
them in their preferred way, particularly right now when there aren't a
lot of compelling alternatives to point them to. If you aren't, that's
perfectly fine; just please don't get in the way of us who are.
There's a whole spectrum of difference within the project about how
absolute people want to personally be about only using free tools. Some
people are at the end of the spectrum with RMS and are investigating
computers with fully free firmware, and more power to them. Other people
are using non-free software for some things and free software for other
things and are contributing the latter to Debian. And more power to them
as well, since they're helping us build the free software community.
Sometimes I wonder if people think free software is so fragile that if
anyone who works on it ever touches non-free software, everything we built
will crumble. I think our community and ecosystem is a lot more robust
than that.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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