GitHub considered harmful

[Alexander Larsson]

On Thu, Oct 10, 2019 at 12:35 AM Michael Gratton <mike at vee.net> 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.

I think what the ICE is currently doing is horrible, and I in no way
support that. However, the value I've seen mentioned is $200k, not $260M.

> 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.

Having a modern, working infrastructure was one part, but another
important reason is to reach a maximal set of developers, and the
amount of people that have a github account and know how to find it
there and how to use it is massively larger than any other current
alternative (although gitlab is getting traction these days).

> 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?

>From a pure technical perspective: Migration of repos is trivial with
git, but migration of issues and history with things like references
to PRs etc is much more complicated. CI would have to be redone in a
different system, but that is not overly hard. However, if you're
talking about flatpak you really also must talk about flathub, and
that uses the github infrastructure in a much more complicated
automated fashion that will be much harder to migrate.

But that is just the pure technical part. There is also a lot of
non-technical aspects like documentation and links all over the web,
and people (including) having to re-learn and change how they work,
etc. This is not a neglible part of a switch. And if we also changed
flathub over it would affect a *lot* of developers which we don't even
have a good way of reaching.

Now, to the issue at hand. As I said, I disagree with (some of) ICE
current policies, however, I don't believe us immediately dropping
github is an efficient way of causing these policies to change. I also
believe that the github organization is not defined by one $200k
business transaction (sold by a 3rd party even), but that you must
take into consideration the whole behavior of github. Given what I
have seen of github so far, the other good aspects of what they do
IMHO outweigh this one issue.

That doesn't mean we can't *complain* loudly to github, and indeed
other companies about this, in the best ways we can. In fact I think
this is an important general question today. To what degree do
companies need to consider morals when it comes to the bottom line.
See for example the current issues blizzard has with china. This is an
important, complex issue that needs much discussion.

I realize people might not want to use github for this (or whatever
other personal reason) though, so we should maybe look at alternative
ways for people to submit code. For example, I already own
https://gitlab.com/flatpak, and we could easily set up a mirror of
github there, and then you can branch that and email merge requests.