Re: Forge Software Evaluation by FSF

[Han-Wen Nienhuys]

On Tue, Feb 25, 2020 at 11:23 PM Jonas Hahnfeld <address@hidden> wrote:
>
> Hi all,
>
> I was meaning to write on the next steps of switching to new tooling
> when I came across this:
> https://lwn.net/Articles/813254/rss
> https://www.fsf.org/blogs/sysadmin/coming-soon-a-new-site-for-fully-free-collaboration
> https://libreplanet.org/wiki/Fsf_2019_forge_evaluation
>
> In particular the last page claims with respect to GitLab:
> "GNU ethical repo criteria: gitlab.com listed as C, but has been
> operating at an F and will be reclassified soon because it sometimes
> requires users to run nonfree Google ReCAPTCHA code they have been very
> slowly working on moving away from for almost 2 years now [...]"
>
> What do people think about this? Is that serious enough to stop
> considering GitLab?
>
> Note that Gerrit is not on the list (probably because it's not a
> complete forge software, ie no issues?), so I can't comment on how it
> compares with respect to freedom.

Gerrit is open source under the Apache 2 license.  However, this is
comparing apples and pears. Because gitlab.com is a service provider,
that runs Gitlab for you.

If we want someone to host our forge (eg. gitlab.com) for free or a
small fee, that will have to be an entity that needs to scale its user
support model (or it wouldn't be gratis). This typically means it
needs something like reCaptcha to heed off spam/abuse, and Tor access
is probably problematic for the same reason.

This is also why I have a hard time taking the FSF's stance here
seriously.  Their conditions make it almost impossible to use a
commercial provider. For example C2 "Does not discriminate against
classes of users, or against any country" is impossible to satisfy for
any US company due to export restrictions for countries like North
Korea and Iran.

There is also a bunch of verbiage about how tracking tags are evil.
(lilypond.org has been running Google Analytics for 15 years or so).

I suggest to focus on the needs of our project, rather than the edicts of RMS.

> Let me see if I can get more information on when they plan to bring the
> hosting platform online.

-- 
Han-Wen Nienhuys - address@hidden - http://www.xs4all.nl/~hanwen