Re: [gentoo-project] Call for Agenda Items -- Council Meeting 2015-10-11

[Andrew Savchenko <bircoph@gentoo.org>]

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On Fri, 9 Oct 2015 14:15:15 +0200 hasufell wrote:
> On 10/09/2015 01:56 PM, Anthony G. Basile wrote:
> > Well let's think about this.  If github went away, or we needed to part
> > ways with github, what we would we want to keep from their site?
> 
> It is more likely that our infra servers go down or break than github.
> From a reliability standpoint, our infra servers clearly lose.

This is not a question of infrastructure high availability, this is
a question of the data long-term availability. GitHub is outside of
our control. If it perishes, we are in trouble, big trouble if we
stored important data and had important workflow via GitHub only.

And unfortunately the words above are not sheer speculation.

1) GitHub _was already blocked_ in several countries [1]. We are an
international community, thus we can't rely on such resource.

2) Since GitHub is not completely open, it has a rist of following
SourceForge fate. Before GitHub appeared SourceForge was probably
the most popular development platform, at least 8-10 years ago.
They were good guys. Later their owner changed, their policy
changed, with known consequences: now SourceForge is known for its
project hijacking [2] and adware. The worst result is that
SourceForge is damaged good Free Software projects, e.g. GIMP [3]
and now blocked by most anti-ads software [4,5]. 

And now GitHub are good guys. But for how long?
I want to ensure long-time project stability of Gentoo, that's why
I can't accept the violation of the Gentoo Social contract, which
was made to protect the project from dangers alike this one. That's
why we must have our own infrastructure.

Please note, nobody says: you can use GitHub only overy my dead
body. As can be seen from this discussion, there is a solution: all
GitHub data must be mirrored on our infrastructure in a usable and
searchable way, so that:
1) we will ensure long-time availability of all development data;
2) no single developer will be force to use GitHub to "politely
review pull requests" or whatever.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_GitHub
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SourceForge#Controversies
[3]
https://mail.gnome.org/archives/gimp-developer-list/2015-May/msg00144.html
[4]
https://ma.ttias.be/ublock-origin-now-blocking-access-to-sourceforge/
[5]
http://www.ghacks.net/2015/06/15/popular-software-projects-leave-sourceforge/

Best regards,
Andrew Savchenko

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