Re: Please, no GitHub

[Luboš Doležel]

Dne 10.12.2015 06:27, Richard Stallman napsal:
> GitHub does a number of things that are wrong.  It requires users to
> run nonfree programs (Javascript code in web pages) to do certain
> operations (see http://gnu.org/philosophy/javascript-trap.html).

So instead of giving people a choice of not running these scripts, you 
rather have them use another site that possibly doesn't provide such 
functionality at all?

> It
> encourages bad licensing practices, such as posting code with no
> license (which makes it nonfree), and failing to state the license
> clearly.  Among free licenses, it encourages weak licenses over
> copyleft.

GitHub does not encourage posting code without a license. In its very 
simple wizard, it gives you a choice of adding a license file on your 
behalf. The default is NONE simply because adding a file means *creating 
a commit*, which would cause many people to run into trouble if they had 
run 'git init' locally first (git push would fail).

And again, it does not encourage weak licenses. It lists a dozen of 
possible licenses with three of the most popular being emphasized. It 
gives people a choice instead of pushing a single philosophy. And I say 
that as a proponent of GPL, who has never released any of his code under 
a BSD, MIT or similar license.

But the licence of GNUstep is clear, so this is no concern.

> Those are the flaws I remember, and they are grave.  There may be more
> I don't recall now.

They are not grave, this is simply nitpicking. Your vision of freedom is 
rather absolutistic, since forcing freedom upon others goes against the 
very nature of freedom.

GitHub has been tremendously beneficial to free software, especially in 
the light of gradual demise of SourceForge, which used to be the hosting 
facility of choice for free software.

--
Luboš Doležel