Re: [gentoo-project] Gentoo, GitHub, and the Social Contract

["Michał Górny" <mgorny@gentoo.org>]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 3081 bytes --]

Dnia 2015-02-15, o godz. 18:05:01
Andrew Savchenko <bircoph@gentoo.org> napisał(a):

> On Sun, 15 Feb 2015 14:50:27 +0100 Michał Górny wrote:
> > Dnia 2015-02-15, o godz. 15:39:58
> > Andrew Savchenko <bircoph@gentoo.org> napisał(a):
> > > On Sun, 15 Feb 2015 10:55:41 +0100 Alexey Lapitsky wrote:
> [...]
> > > Is Gentoo willing to say "no" to the software freedom and its own
> > > social obligations in order to make contributions easier in the
> > > simplest way possible?
> > 
> > Please explain me, how *exactly* does allowing contributions via
> > proprietary platform hurt free software?
> 
> If this platform will become a de-facto common way to made
> contributions (and this may happen taking into account github's
> popularity), then platform unavailability or policy changes may
> hurt the whole development process.

Sure. So what's the alternative? Not getting the contributions
in the first place?

If users are willing enough to contribute without GitHub, then GitHub
availability doesn't really impact that. If it becomes unavailable,
the contributions may require some more effort for them but they'll do
it.

Of course, some users will decide it's no longer worth the extra effort
to contribute if GH becomes unavailable. But then, those people
wouldn't contribute if we didn't ever use GitHub either. So either way,
we lose.

And yes, we are already getting contributions via GH we wouldn't get
other way. Because it's low effort enough for people to submit trivial
fixes. The alternative of opening bugs and attaching patches,
and the package maintainers ignoring them is not really welcoming.

That said, I'm willing to accept contributions via any media as long
as it's remotely sane on my end. Feel free to open a mailing list to
accept patches/pull requests. Or any other patch review framework
as long as it's relatively sane and works.

Just don't require contributors to do too much. Yes, git can do plain
pull requests but you have to have somewhere to pull from first. Not
every user has a private git hosting. Sure, they could ask you to pull
from github... but what's the difference then?

The risk of being unable to using something in the future should not
prohibit people from using its benefits right now.

> Please forgive me for repeating myself once more, but I was
> directly asked "how", so... Github is not just a git server, this
> is a platform with numerous instruments and auxiliary data. In case
> of any negative change all these data (issues, code reviews and so
> on) will be lost. And there is no clean way to migrate these data
> to another facilities. Thus we will have a classic web-based
> lock-in with all lock-in driven consequences.

That's a problem with every solution. If you migrate to another one,
you may have trouble moving the data. If the hard drive fails, you lose
the data since last backup. And finally, if you get too much data, you
lose it anyway because nobody cares to dig up what you're looking for.

-- 
Best regards,
Michał Górny

[-- Attachment #2: OpenPGP digital signature --]
[-- Type: application/pgp-signature, Size: 949 bytes --]