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

["Anthony G. Basile" <blueness@gentoo.org>]

On 02/15/15 01:04, Michał Górny wrote:
> Dnia 2015-02-14, o godz. 21:48:22
> "Andreas K. Huettel" <dilfridge@gentoo.org> napisał(a):
>
>> whenever the suggestion comes up to enable contributions to Gentoo via Github
>> pull requests, we also encounter discussion of the Gentoo Social Contract.
>>
>> The two points that are seen as conflicting are
>>
>> * The software running Github is closed source, proprietary.
>>
>> * The Gentoo Social Contract states [1]:
>> "Gentoo will never depend upon a piece of software or metadata unless it
>> conforms to the GNU General Public License, the GNU Lesser General Public
>> License, the Creative Commons - Attribution/Share Alike or some other license
>> approved by the Open Source Initiative (OSI)."
> Maybe you should start by providing an alternative conforming to this.
> For a start, Infra should stop running proprietary software. However,
> so far they have been openly refusing to publish their scripts.
> In fact, I've been recently asked to put my open source overlay QA
> scripts [1] in a restricted-access repository.
>
> [1]:https://bitbucket.org/mgorny/overlay-qa-tools
>
  I don't know why infra doesn't open their scripts.  It may lead to 
security issues, I don't know.  They probably should, and I do 
appreciate you're pointing out to your git hooks way back when I asked.  
So kudos.

But the big difference here is that github is a company while infra is 
volunteer work.  While I don't mind people making money off our work, as 
google does with chromeos, I do want to remain free of them.  I had a 
friend at cornell.  We did our ph.d. together.  He wrote some code that 
did band structure calculations.  Because he wrote it at cornell, it 
belonged to cornell who sold the rights to one company.  That company 
then sold the rights to another and my friend followed the code.  The 
last company finally said, sorry you can't develop this code anymore and 
you can't tell people how it works.   My friend was devastated as his 
life work was taken from him.  Obviously the situation is different 
here, but this should be a lesson.

The other reason I don't like github is because it decentralizes the 
community as we adopt our workflow around github rather than our own infra.

BTW, at D'Youville College our union contract says, our intellectual 
property belongs to us and the college can't take that from us. 100% 
ours.  If you see me going around aggressively slapping glp on anything 
I write it so as to assert that claim vigorously.

-- 
Anthony G. Basile, Ph.D.
Gentoo Linux Developer [Hardened]
E-Mail    : blueness@gentoo.org
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