GitHub considered harmful

[Bastien Nocera]

On Thu, 2019-10-10 at 09:35 +1100, Michael Gratton wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> It has recently come to light[0] that GitHub has recently made a 
> deliberate decision to renew a US$260M contract with the U.S. 
> Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency.
> 
> Since contributing to Flatpak and Flathub requires a GitHub account, 
> these projects are using, promoting and encouraging others to use
> the 
> services of a company that has deliberately chosen to profit from
> the 
> physical and mental abuse of certain races of people. Flatpak and 
> Flathub are by extension of using GitHub's infrastructure benefiting 
> from this abuse, also.
> 
> My understanding of the choice of GitHub in the first place was to
> gain 
> initial traction for the projects, since the existing FDO 
> infrastructure was dated, and as a desktop-neutral development
> forum. 
> Since then, Flatpak is now very well established, and FDO has its
> own 
> GitLab instance, leaving only the third issue.

Not only. GitHub was also selected because it was more likely to have
interested 3rd party developers, developers who would not usually have
Freedesktop.org accounts, usually developers of cross-platform
applications big or small.

> As such, and in light of the developments above, I would like to 
> propose a move from GitHub to another service. This could be the FDO 
> GitLab instance, gitlab.com, or some other suitable, desktop-neutral 
> service.
> 
> Would it be possible to get an idea of what the main technical
> hurdles 
> for this would be? From my perspective the two big issues are 
> automating the migration of the repos and updating the build 
> infrastructure and integration. Does that sound about right?

I think it would be useful for Flatpak (and Flathub) maintainers to
make their voices heard, and possibly speak directly to GitHub
stakeholders. Flatpak, through some of its GNOME roots, has connections
with Microsoft and GitHub, via Xamarin.

I'm confident the above is already happening.

Cheers