Please, no GitHub (2015)

Some of the comments here help remind me to shut up whenever I find myself thinking dismissive thoughts about a caricature of someone&#x27;s views when I don&#x27;t really have insights into what they think. It&#x27;s far too easy to get a vague impression from a few tidbits, hearsay, and groupthink. It&#x27;s worth practicing saying &quot;I don&#x27;t know&quot; a lot more.<p>It&#x27;s crazy how much people are willing to attack others for holding supposed views without bothering to actually verify the view being held.<p>The vast, vast majority of criticism of Richard Stallman comes from people mischaracterizing his views. It&#x27;s as though grappling with his actual arguments is just too much of a threat or something. More likely, it&#x27;s just intellectual sloppiness — posting crap on some online forum without bothering to care about being reasonable.

The reasons RMS has for not liking Github have nothing to do with the recent MS acquisition.<p>If you read into the thread, it&#x27;s quite non-sensical, RMS eg. says Github is evil because the license picker doesn&#x27;t push his license strong enough, with just the wording he&#x27;d be happy with: &quot;You&#x27;ve put your finger on the problem. The site leads people not to specify explicitly whether it is [GPLv3] &quot;only&quot; or &quot;or-later&quot;.&quot;<p>I read into thread about 10 deep but I had to stop, my blood was starting to boil from the nonsense.

RMS has an annoying habit of being quite unreasonable and also, in retrospect, absolutely right.

On the same topic: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bogomips.org&#x2F;unicorn-public&#x2F;20140801213202.GA2729%40dcvr.yhbt.net&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bogomips.org&#x2F;unicorn-public&#x2F;20140801213202.GA2729%40...</a><p><pre><code> &gt; Current state makes it very hard to mange&#x2F;search&#x2F;fork&#x2F;open-issues etc &gt; especially for newcomers, &gt; please move the project to github so we can have nice disussions &gt; forks&#x2F;prs etc goodness. No. Never. Github is proprietary communications tool which requires users to accept a terms of service and login. That gives power and influence to a single entity (and a for-profit organization at that). Contributing to unicorn is *socially* as easy as contributing to git or the Linux kernel. There is no need to signup for anything, no need to ever touch a bloated web browser. The reason I contribute to Free Software is because I am against any sort of lock-in or proprietary features. It absolutely sickens me to encounter users who seem to be incapable of using git without a proprietary communications tool.</code></pre>

I feel like what I liked about open source, back in the 90s when I was in high school, was the concept and ideals around the GPL. Linux was my primary OS all through University. I wrote this about OSS a while back:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;penguindreams.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;the-philosophy-of-open-source-in-community-and-enterprise-software&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;penguindreams.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;the-philosophy-of-open-source...</a><p>I&#x27;ve worked for an &quot;open source&quot; shop that made no differentiation on licenses (GPL vs BSDL). They did a lot of consulting&#x2F;contracting and although they did release OSS code, a lot of times it was for a project that died off or was deprecated. Meanwhile, Apple has actively been trying to remove GPL code from their OS.<p>I know Stallman does agree with support license based companies liked Redhat, but what are his opinions on Commercial vs Enterprise setups like Gitlab? (Even with Gitlab, the Enterprise version is open source; you just can&#x27;t legally run it without a license ... which is an interesting model for sure).

The interesting tidbits are here <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lists.gnu.org&#x2F;archive&#x2F;html&#x2F;discuss-gnustep&#x2F;2015-12&#x2F;msg00182.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lists.gnu.org&#x2F;archive&#x2F;html&#x2F;discuss-gnustep&#x2F;2015-12&#x2F;m...</a><p>Savannah is some kind of hosting platform for GNU projects.

I&#x27;m game. I&#x27;ll have to figure out how to help.<p>RMS has strong principles. We need more of that.

Free software is a healthy diet. You’ll feel restricted but benefit from it in the long term.

Richard Stalman hates _anything_ that isn&#x27;t GPL. His restrictions is very dogmatic.<p>Don&#x27;t get me wrong, I think he is important to create the far extreme end of the open source movement so we can gauge ourselves. But his stuff is dogmatic in nature _NOT_ logical in nature. He would rather software be crippled than be useful but non-free. He wants everyone to magically develop on their spare time for free with copyleft licenses. This is craaaaaaazy. People gotta eat.<p>With his model you fall into the musician trap. If you are a world-renown musician you get people coming to your recitals and don&#x27;t gotta worry about anything else. If you are not, nobody attends and thus you work as a teacher or waiter.<p>There are some open-source developers who make a full living on donations. But they are few and far between.

Please, GOD, no mailing lists. The irony of Stallman&#x27;s irrelevant comment is multiplied by the use of a mailing list.