
The GNU Project Is Bleeding into Microsoft - davesailer
http://techrights.org/2020/06/29/gnu-redirects/
======
hannob
GNU has their own code and project management plattform called Savannah. If
you've ever interacted with it you know why this is happening. It's horrible
in every way. I remember once trying to make some suggestions to get some
basic security improvements that never happened. It wasn't even clear to me to
whom I'd have to talk to.

I don't think this has anything to do with the controversy around RMS. GNU has
neglected to provide decent development infrastructure for its projects and
has only provided them the joke that savannah is. So people are naturally
looking elsewhere.

~~~
pinusc
Savannah might be awful, but there are more sensible options. There actually
is a good discussion on the GNU website [1]. Savannah gets an A for ethical
concerns (which to be fair is what's important to GNU, rather than usability);
GitHub gets an F (fully closed source and now controlled by Microsoft...);

However, in the middle there is GitLab, with a respectable C. In my
experience, it's usable and has all the important features that Github also
has. And it's much better from ethical standpoints! I can't imagine any point
of view from where Github is more acceptable than Gitlab.

1: [https://www.gnu.org/software/repo-criteria-
evaluation.html](https://www.gnu.org/software/repo-criteria-evaluation.html)

------
rhaps0dy
I really don't see what the problem is here. Stallman himself is OK with using
proprietary software if it runs on someone else's machine. For example, here
[https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html](https://stallman.org/stallman-
computing.html), he states he uses DuckDuckGo and ixquick, which are not
clearly free software. (Though, they might be free software; their server code
isn't distributed to the user, so even under the GPL they would not have to
also distribute the source).

So what if GitHub is proprietary? So long as you don't run their JavaScript on
your machine, your computing can still be fully free. And, if the problem is
that Microsoft will prevent some project from being developed there, they can
take their local Git (GPLv2 licensed) repositories and push them somewhere
else.

This all seems like a win from the FSF's perspective. Their projects are
easier to discover and to contribute to, the developer's computing can remain
fully free and the FSF does not need to pay for hosting.

Flex being BSD licensed is a slight problem for copyleft, though.

~~~
ancarda
>So long as you don't run their JavaScript on your machine

Do you have much of a choice? I think a lot of GitHub features do not work
properly without JavaScript. For instance, just trying it now:

\- Can't mark notifications as done

\- Can't edit the title or description of an issue or PR

\- Can't dismiss banners or most modals/popups

\- Can't commit files directly on the web interface

\- Can't edit an issue or PR metadata (i.e. labels)

\- Can't edit most, maybe almost all, repo settings

At-least it's not a blank page. If I see websites like that these days, I just
close the tab. Thankfully, you can pretty much use GitHub in "read-only" mode
without JavaScript, but working on it is probably quite hard without running
their non-free code.

It would probably be better if they'd use Sourcehut or maybe GitLab.

~~~
jwilk
> _\- Can 't mark notifications as done_

What kind of notifications?

> _\- Can 't edit the title or description of an issue or PR_

You can if you disable CSS. (Admittedly that's not very convenient…)

> _\- Can 't dismiss banners or most modals/popups_

Any examples? This has (almost?) always worked for me.

~~~
ancarda
Hmm, I went to get you an example and I found they seem to dismiss if you
click elsewhere on the page. I think I was clicking on the close button (the
"x" in the title bar) - which won't work without JavaScript.

------
Gollapalli
It might be better titled "Microsoft is bleeding into the GNU Project".
Honestly, I'm not super bothered by GNU using github, because everybody uses
github. I mean, it's the hub for git repos! At the risk of making more bad
puns... well, I can't think of anything worse than the last one, but my point
stands that github won this war, and while GNU might feasibly use gitlab or
similar, github is where everybody is at, and it's very quickly becoming the
place people search for code. It's almost like, "your code isn't open source
because it's not on github." Github is code google.

EDIT: It should be obvious that github being "code google" is not great for
freedom. It's brilliant on the part of Microsoft, in the same way that
securing a monopoly on OS's 20 years ago was brilliant. With the cloud-
backend->web-frontend being our new defacto operating system, Microsoft is set
to achieve this once again. Azure and GitHub synergize really well together.
At this rate, the default way to deploy open source code will be VS Code ->
.NET 5 -> Github -> Azure, and we will be at Microsoft's monopolistic mercies
once again, enthralled to the cloud instead of running our own software that
we own (even if we don't understand) on our own hardware that we own (even if
we don't understand), and maintaining some semblance of ownership over our own
computing and communication with one another via these computers.

------
Pashai3t
> Interestingly, most of these redirections seem to have made fairly recently,
> not long after Richard Stallman was ousted.

That's factually wrong : Richard Stallman resigned from the FSF, not from GNU.

The very first paragraph on his personal website reads: "I continue to be the
Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project. I do not intend to stop any time soon."

Also, while I share author's annoyance of seeing GNU packages on github
(that's what savannah is made for, after all), singling out GNU here seems
sensationalism : it could basically be said that "most FOSS projects are
bleeding into Microsoft", or probably more reasonably "FOSS projects should
consider what it means to be hosted by Github now that Microsoft owns it".

------
orangeshark
It more about how difficult Savannah is to use which is why people use
alternatives. Though the GNU project does evaluate whether a code hosting
service is suitable. [0] They were also looking into hosting their own
alternative to Savannah. [1]

[0] [https://www.fsf.org/news/gnu-releases-ethical-evaluations-
of...](https://www.fsf.org/news/gnu-releases-ethical-evaluations-of-code-
hosting-services)

[1] [https://www.fsf.org/blogs/sysadmin/coming-soon-a-new-site-
fo...](https://www.fsf.org/blogs/sysadmin/coming-soon-a-new-site-for-fully-
free-collaboration)

~~~
savannahisbad
Based on the latest updates[1], it looks likely that they'll try setting up an
instance of Pagure[2].

[1]
[https://libreplanet.org/wiki/Fsf_2019_forge_evaluation](https://libreplanet.org/wiki/Fsf_2019_forge_evaluation)

[2] [https://pagure.io/pagure](https://pagure.io/pagure)

------
SmokeyHamster
> For a number of important reasons, hosting GNU development on a proprietary
> Microsoft platform should be verboten.

What ridiculous hyperbole. Yeah, a "number of important reasons", yet they
list none. I hate Microsoft as much as the next guy, but it's Github. It was
fine to host open source software on them before, but now that they're bought
my Microsoft, it's bad? Why? Because we're afraid Microsoft is going to steal
our free open source code? I've mitigated some of my own projects to other git
sites, like gitlab, just to get more experience and diversify my access, but
it makes no sense to abandon Github.

This level of anti-Microsoft hysteria is a little over the top.

You want to know the real reason why GNU is hosting so many of their projects
on Github? Because their interface is clean and it's free and the GNU
developers want to spend their time writing GNU software, not maintaining
websites.

------
AdmiralAsshat
Some of the projects, like GNU Radio, seem pretty active. I imagine that GH is
simply a more attractive platform than whatever they were using previously
(Savannah?), and it seems to much better facilitate community interaction than
e-mail mailing lists. And honestly, for the sake of developing _free /libre
software_, I'd much prefer that it be hosted on a platform that facilitates
active development, than following a Stallman-approved™ fully libre stack,
that results in the entire project being maintained by two guys in a
university closet.

Is the whole contention solved by just moving over to GitLab?

~~~
robertlagrant
GitLab would certainly "feel" like a better bet. But I don't think there's
much in it. If it's a free platform, perhaps some GNUers like the idea of
their code being hosted on Microsoft's dime :-)

------
savannahisbad
"The GNU Project" is not really a thing. It's just a list, and the list
includes projects with varying degrees of connection to the FSF:

1\. Some projects are owned and controlled by the FSF. All contributors have
to assign copyright to the FSF, and the FSF makes decisions about appointing
maintainers, where the code is hosted, etc. Examples: Emacs, gcc, glibc.

2\. A much larger set of projects are not FSF-owned or controlled in any
meaningful way. The maintainers (or former maintainers) voluntarily chose to
associate with the GNU project, but didn't assign copyright to the FSF, and
basically kept their own project governance. Examples: R[1], GNOME[2], GIMP.

3\. Finally, many projects on the official list[3] are basically abandonware.
They got started because someone thought it was important or useful to have an
open source clone of some widely used piece of software, but they never got
close to feature-complete, were never widely used, and the authors have moved
on. Check the most recent releases for most of the software on the list - it's
often been 2+ years since there has been any activity.

The projects that have moved to GitHub are all in category #2. The developers
and maintainers of those projects don't necessarily share the antagonism
towards SaaS platforms that the FSF has historically had, and they've moved to
a platform with better tooling and a larger community. A few better-resourced
projects that have stronger views on avoiding proprietary SaaS code have set
up self-hosted GitLab instances. The projects I follow that have FSF-appointed
maintainers have stayed on GNU Savannah, although many have GitHub read-only
mirrors.

[1]
[https://www.r-project.org/about.html](https://www.r-project.org/about.html)

[2]
[https://wiki.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/Resources/CopyrightAs...](https://wiki.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/Resources/CopyrightAssignment/Guidelines)

[3]
[https://www.gnu.org/manual/blurbs.html](https://www.gnu.org/manual/blurbs.html)

------
pjmlp
Having been around for a while, I believe that GNU based software was a
generational event, in the upcoming two to three decades future generations
will have back our old shareware and public domain software licenses.

~~~
savannahisbad
Rob Landley argues that a lot of the popularity was due to the fact that the
FSF had a high bandwidth FTP site at a time when that was pretty rare, so
people were willing to sign code to the FSF and license it GPL in order to
have access to that distribution method:
[https://landley.net/notes-2010.html#19-07-2010](https://landley.net/notes-2010.html#19-07-2010)

Obviously that particular advantage is no longer relevant.

