Don't sell this position short as a mere "political reason". Github has decided that rationality and critical thinking take a back seat. This is a vastly damaging attitude that hurts the world. Providing any encouragement to unclear thinking is a vile thing to do. This is far worse than environmentally unfriendly attitudes; it's far more important than even open source.
I agree that Github's positions are ultimately negative beyond the scope of the company and product itself.
Ironically the GitLab CEO has also injected politics where it didn't belong. Thus is the power of open source, even though I don't agree with GitLab Inc's politics, I can take the code base and host it myself.
I upvoted you only because people should know where companies like gitlab stand on these kinds of issues. I'm not agreeing or disagreeing what he did was right - but it is important to know about it.
I host my own free source code hosting service and I couldn't tell you what I would have done in his position.
This question isn't meant to spark a heated debate (I'm on the fence and could argue either way) - but I'm honestly curious on how you think it should have been handled? I honestly want to know if there is an action that benefits everyone.
Thank you for the upvote, I wish more people would engage in conversation vs. just downvote opinions they don't agree with.
I think the best course of action is to have a policy of:
"We don't delete repos unless required by law."
That would satisfy me as a potential customer.
I think commenting on Twitter and getting involved at all was probably a mistake unless they were going to stick with the above philosophy. All they did was call attention to the issue then delete the repo once everyone was watching.
The tweet seems like an honest mistake since I don't think they wanted to get involved with this controversy. They made it though and had to make some decision on what to do. I think they chose the most damaging option.
The staff doesn't have to personally endorse the opinions of their users and the repos they host. I wouldn't expect that of them, but they shouldn't delete repos they don't agree with.
> We don't delete repos unless explicitly requested by law enforcement or a DMCA takedown notice.
What you said could be interpreted as "well...this repo was technically breaking the law so that's why we deleted it" - I would rather say "I deleted it to cooperate with law enforcement". And the DMCA takedown policy is required to protect service providers in the event some idiot decides to upload copyrighted material - the RIAA/MPAA won't go after the service provider they will just ask them to take it down.
In case this is the policy it would mean we could not delete something like revenge porn ourselves, we would first have to wait for a takedown notice. I don't want to host content like that https://xkcd.com/1357/
That XKCD is one of the worst strawman arguments I've ever seen.
Freedom of Speech is not a law, and it's certainly not just a law found in one single document that applies to the United States. Here's what the United Nation's Universal Deceleration of Human Rights says:
> Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.
Not one word there refers to governments.
The true purpose of freedom of speech is to protect people from the consequences of their speech, because those consequences serve to silence unpopular ideas. Remember that historically unpopular ideas have included freedom of religion, African American civil rights, alternative sexualities, and even heliocentricism.
It depends on how you interpret the XKCD comic. It often gets used to argue "institutions have the moral right to block people if they have unpopular opinions", which goes against the spirit of free speech (even if it's not illegal). I don't know if that's it's original intent - it might just mean "You can't claim you have a constitutional right to swear at people on my forum".
A public forum (which GitLab isn't - it's a place for code more than politics) that doesn't allow civil discussion of on-topic ideas is arguably a bad thing.
From On Liberty, by JS Mill:
> If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind. Were an opinion a personal possession of no value except to the owner; if to be obstructed in the enjoyment of it were simply a private injury, it would make some difference whether the injury was inflicted only on a few persons or on many. But the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.
Of course, Mill assumed that most people are capable of rational thought, and would generally move towards a more correct view of the world when exposed to a marketplace of ideas. The internet doesn't always work like that. However, the alternative to "free speech" is echo chambers, which is probably worse.
But I don't see why GitLab has any real responsibility to allow stuff that's not code (or is just joke code) - it's not a really a marketplace of ideas, it's a place to share code. And given GitLab has a FOSS version, yes, people can get their own server.
Unless either of us can find Randall explaining his intent somewhere (and even then; death of the author probably applies - how sytse used the comic is equally important) all we can do is go by it's working. The comic doesn't say "The First Amendment", it says "Freedom of Speech".
I won't say that the average netizen shouting freedom of speech is educated on the philosophy of liberty or has read JS Mill (I haven't, I need too). But when they say freedom of speech about forums. Freedom of Speech is still a human right, not a clause in the USA constitution. I still think it's a strawman to respond by pointing the limits of the First Amendment.
> Of course, Mill assumed that most people are capable of rational thought, and would generally move towards a more correct view of the world when exposed to a marketplace of ideas. The internet doesn't always work like that. However, the alternative to "free speech" is echo chambers, which is probably worse.
On Liberty was written in 1859. It's an indisputable fact that in all forms of social justice - sexual equality, racial equality, LGBT rights, and far far more - things have been improved enormously during the last 66 years. If Mills ideas have either influenced or reflected the political philosophies of the those 66 years then clearly he's onto something.
Even the internet doesn't change much, human nature is still human nature. Besides, to pick a date, the internet has only been influential since September 1993. Social justice has mostly gotten better since 1993 even if online discourse has gotten worse. It's premature to say we the world is too different to go by On Liberty.
After 66 years of liberty bringing progress we should only attempt to replace liberal ideas with the utmost care, thought and deliberation. And when I see people arguing to limit freedom of speech, I do not see that care and deliberation; if I did a comic saying that Freedom of Speech was merely a clause in one country's legal code would never have gotten popular.
> But I don't see why GitLab has any real responsibility to allow stuff that's not code (or is just joke code) - it's not a really a marketplace of ideas, it's a place to share code.
If they had a clearly written rule saying only code is aloud, or only code and documentation relating to code is aloud then that would be fine.
However once GitLab starts judging repositories based on the ideas they contain and deleting legal repositories they dislike then they have crossed the line.
If you are legally required to take something down it is kind of different from when you freely choose to do so because you find the content objectionable on ideological grounds. In this case you decided to act against the principles of free speech and network neutrality of your own free will.
Some for instance (GitHub, BitBucket, Google Code) also decided to remove the satirical "C+=" repo from their service, you didn't: https://gitlab.com/femsf/c-plus-equality
For interested parties, there is actually a server that has existed for a while, but this is mostly about the choices you make as a company in the wake of GitHub deleting repos over the use of the word "retarded" and employing an intentionally discriminatory Code of Conduct: https://gitgud.io/gamergate/gamergateop/tree/master
Nobody is arguing this isn't your right as a company, they are just questioning your judgment and reason and if their projects are safe with a company that will remove something that doesn't intellectually agree with the political stance of its CEO.
Most of them don't want to deal with the volatility of a professional environment where someone just has to be "offended" and their work could be arbitrarily pulled.
Completely agree with this. If Gitlab is not willing to have a clear policy regarding takedowns I will never be a customer. I paid for Github service for years and pulled my stuff once they decided to get political.
I really wanted to like Gitlab but a "case-by-case" policy basically means "whatever we feel like," and that is not an acceptable standard for something as important as my work.
> In case this is the policy it would mean we could not delete something like revenge porn ourselves
I could argue either way (I'm a bit of a philosopher that way...). It all depends on how you want to run your service. Do you want a reddit-free-for-all-wild-west or do you want to keep it PG-13?
Either way - it should be clearly defined where you stand and what you allow/don't allow. Making it a guessing game isn't going to win you any fans.
We make decisions on a case by case basis and people can judge for themselves if they think it is reasonable. Clearly defining where you stand is very hard, and we don't think we'll do a good job at it. Giving a definition and then backtracking won't win us any fans either. Anyway, it will be more PG-13 than the old Reddit.
We'll never delete data, we will make the repositories private. You will have to move your public project elsewhere. For significant projects we're open to making it public when you've replaced the repo with one announcing the new location.
That's really disappointing and something I'll be watching for a proper resolution. Gitlab appears to be getting involved with how people seek anonymity on Twitter, which is just odd.
