[copyleft-next] [MERGE REQUEST] HBR should require the project stands up for software freedom of those who contribute to it

Richard Fontana fontana at sharpeleven.org
Sat Feb 9 15:22:26 UTC 2013


On Fri, Feb 08, 2013 at 08:29:31AM -0500, Bradley M. Kuhn wrote:
> Can we discuss institution of a rule that only Free Software and network
> services that share their code will be used to develop copyleft-next?
> Are you willing to consider such a rule (outside the scope of HBR, of
> course)?

Sure, it should be considered. But defining what that means may not be
as easy as you are assuming. 

> I'm willing to set up a bugs-everywhere area in the canonical Git
> repository for copyleft-next and scrape all the content from there into
> bugs-everywhere, but *only* if there could be agreement that it would
> become canonical and use of the GitHub Issue Tracker would cease, with
> a statement on the GitHub page that says not to use the Issue Tracker,
> but to use bugs-everywhere instead.  Is that agreeable?

I still want to investigate alternatives to bugs-everywhere. I'll try
to do that soon.
 
> It's very good to know that yesterday's incident *does not* indicate
> we're on a slippery slope back to GitHub.  Perhaps we're on a slippery
> slope toward self-hosting, which is probably ok.

I don't understand why self-hosting is considered worse than using
some gratis service that purports to offer its source code, which is
what I read into your phrase "probably OK". Isn't self-hosting always
*better* from a software freedom perspective?
 
> BTW, have you reported bugs to Gitorious?  Offered patches?

'Offering patches' doesn't make sense; even if a network service
purports to provide its source code, there's no reliable way to know
whether the source code is corresponding for immediate error-reporting
purposes, so it's not worth the effort to try to build an instance of
Gitorious myself, try to recreate the error, and then offer a patch
upstream. If I were to do that, from a conservation of effort
perspective I might as well just use Gitorious for self-hosting. 

I pointed out one of the problems I was experiencing a while back to
Gitorious, and it was corrected. As for the other mysterious glitches
and suboptimal behavior I claim to have experienced, I am in the usual
situation of not knowing what to report. To put it another way, it is
less effort to find a non-Gitorious solution than to figure out how to
usefully report the problems I've experienced. 

- RF



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