Re: Working for free [was: Offensive variable names]
On Tue, 13 Jul 2021 16:08:53 +0300
Reco <recoverym4n@enotuniq.net> wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 13, 2021 at 08:01:58AM -0400, Celejar wrote:
> > > Github (Gitlab, Sourceforge, etc) were and are non-free (as in -
> > > non-gratis) services, so it's only reasonable to stay away from them
> > > regardless of whom is controlling them.
> >
> > What do you mean by calling them non-gratis services? I know that some
> > of their services are non-gratis, but basic code hosting certainly is
> > gratis.
>
> You do not pay for these services, yet they provide them to you and
> everyone else (with certain exclusions).
> Guess who is the product here? The answer is - you are the product.
> Payment involving money is not the only kind of payment that you can
> make today.
I think that's an unreasonable definition of gratis and non-gratis. If
a FLOSS dev gets an ego boost, or even some sort of spiritual
satisfaction, from people using his software, does that mean it's
non-gratis?
> > > You need to be in control of your code - *you* host it. Always was,
> > > always is. It's not that hard anyway.
> >
> > If you maintain a local copy of your code and just push it to Github
> > for serving it publicly (which is what I do, and what I assume most
> > developers do), you haven't lost control of your code
>
> And then you take out your Github repository in compliance with DMCA
> claim (bonus points for false DMCA claim).
> Whoops - suddenly you've lost a chunk of your userbase, possibly
> - some of your contributors, bug reports, CI/CD pipeline, and that's a
> non-exhaustive list.
Those are certainly legitimate concerns, although none of that really
means that you're "not in control of your code." I see that you
yourself acknowledge this below.
> > - if / when the host does anything you don't like, you take the
> > existing code and make it available elsewhere, and stop posting future
> > code to the offending service. (It'll still have a copy of any
> > existing code, of course - but that's inevitable with FLOSS software
> > regardless of where you host it.)
>
> But the "code" aka git repository is not the only thing that's provided
> by such companies, and the temptation to use these other services (that
> are also provided "free" of charge) is way too great for the most.
>
> You've kept your code in the scenario above, but what good did it gave
> you?
>
>
> I don't argue that there are "safe" ways of using these services
> (aforementioned "code dump" is one of them). Problem is - if the risks
> of using these services need to be explained to the participants of
> debian-user - it's not possible to explain the same to the happy GitHub
> crowd.
We are in basic agreement. I'm not really a "developer" - I just host
some relatively simple projects on Github. I agree that a deeper use of
something like Github is something I'd have to carefully consider.
Celejar
Reply to: