Maybe it has done harm to GNU and the GPL, since they have become less relevant. But despite its problems, GitHub has been a huge net positive for free software. They considerably lowered the bar for making a project available. SourceForge acted as gatekeepers and rejected projects. With GitHub, anyone could start a project and no-one would look down on you and tell you that your project is not novel enough or whatever.<p>GitHub also drastically lowered the bar for contributing to free software. Contributing to a project used to mean subscribing to a mailing list, submitting a patch there, and not much would usually happen. With GitHub you fork, submit a PR, get your PR automatically built and unit tested with CI, the project owner can merge your PR with a single button click. It's fine to prefer an e-mail patch workflow, but GitHub has shown that for most of the population, submitting patches through PRs is a much lower bar.<p>At this point, GitHub is largely unnecessary. Most of the features have been copied and reimplemented better in FLOSS alternatives such as GitLab, Gitea, Gogs, etc. But since they were one of the first, people will stay due to network effects.
There is being direct and then there is speaking like an edgy teenager for entirety of your adult life. It's so difficult to take Stallman seriously when he makes these extreme generalisations.
This is just RMS being consistent. He's never liked non-GNU licenses, and considers anything that allows the use of open source code in closed source projects to be the spawn of the devil. He'll continue saying this until his dying breath.<p>That said, GNU and the GPL have been very helpful, sometimes instrumental, in fostering and protecting open source code and developers, so I'll put up with his ivory tower vision for the practical benefits it's brought us.<p>Call him crazy (and he probably is), but he's been a net benefit to society, which is a lot more than most achieve.
GitHub probably did more good for the FOSS community than any other project I can think of. Before GitHub, it was so difficult to share code. Solutions available weren't anywhere close. I don't understand why he wants every little piece of software to be open sourced. GitHub was attractive to investors because it had closed source projects that have to pay in order to use it. I don't see how GitHub was going to succeed if they were purely open source and no-one was paying to use it. Those proprietary projects that he so hates are the ones who were keeping the lights on. They are the ones which were giving Investors hope than GitHub will make lots of money in future and they must invest more.
Is his comment based on outdated information? I just checked and github appears to recognize a few dozen (<a href="https://help.github.com/en/github/creating-cloning-and-archiving-repositories/licensing-a-repository#searching-github-by-license-type" rel="nofollow">https://help.github.com/en/github/creating-cloning-and-archi...</a>) license types including gpl2, gpl3 and lgpl
Seems a weird sentiment to me. GitHub, as is, is largely a throw back to an older time that RMS sought to recreate. when people just wanted to share code, without much motive beyond that.
I'm sorry, but I don't see it.<p>> GitHub's encouragement of sloppy licensing, no licensing, or licensing under only a single version of the GPL, has done terrible harm to our community.<p>There's many projects out there that are meant to be open source, but the author never put a license on it, so it's, legally speaking, "all rights reserve" and you aren'y even allowed to use the software yourself. Github doesn't really encourage this; in fact, it even offers initializing a new repo with a license, but it still happens that project owners just don't<p>> GitHub was so bad for free software, all along, that I could imagine Microsoft's making it less bad<p>First of all, this is obviously just his opinion; I can't really attack or defend it like "good" or "bad" are some sort of mathematical constants. The fact is: github <i>does</i> serve as a platform for non-free software (heck, every single one of my projects is either MIT or public domain, which means it can be put into a closed-source project), so if your ultimate goal is for all software to be "free" in the FSF sense, then yes, github has caused much harm.<p>> We should judge by what actually happens, not by prejudice.<p>This statement is so obviously correct, there's just no way you could interpret it in any unreasonable way.
> GitHub's encouragement of sloppy licensing, no licensing, or licensing
under only a single version of the GPL, has done terrible harm to our
community.<p>> GitHub was so bad for free software, all along, that I could imagine
Microsoft's making it less bad, or making it more bad. We should
judge by what actually happens, not by prejudice.<p>> Keep in mind that Apple is much worse than Microsoft.<p>The title this thread "Github has done terrible harm to our
community." is a very selective quote.
It did, by making Git a monoculture. It's very difficult to get a project to take off if it's not on Github. When Github goes down, so do the majority of important projects, breaking builds and causing chaos across the developer world. It didn't have to be like this. Git hosting should've been distributed like GNU Social/Mastodon.
This guy was my hero growing up because I'm fairly certain that the things the initial community set up is why open source is so common today.<p>But now he needs a handler. My god, man. Get it together.
There is some awful stuff in that thread, like this gem [1]:<p><pre><code> After microsoft puchased Github, they encouraged "Codes of Conduct".
So now 40k "opensource projects" hace CoC's.
Obviously men won't be contributing to said projects, other than
the people allready in them.
</code></pre>
[1] <a href="https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/gnu-system-discuss/2019-11/msg00282.html" rel="nofollow">https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/gnu-system-discuss/2019-1...</a>
Gate keeping<p>Imagine doing the wonderful things RMS did in the past, being a hero of both FOSS and software in general. Imagine then being remembered for the ahole tricks that came later instead.<p>Github opened up both software and FOSS to me. I found projects despite not having a computer science education, not working full time in software, not having a personal network of academic buddies, not using irc. Very occasionally I contributed, and my submissions were taken on the value of the bugs I fixed, despite my lack of reputation.<p>RMS is a gatekeeping mysogynist pxxxx. He is failing to damage the community despite his best efforts because he has marginalised himself by his behaviour.<p>Ps. I haven't started a repo on github in a while, but I firmly remember it suggesting you add a license, and linking to explanations of the different licences. Did RMS want them to force it on you?