GitHub considered harmful

[Michael Gratton]

On Thu, 10 Oct, 2019 at 09:34, Bastien Nocera <hadess at hadess.net> wrote:
> 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.

That would be great, but surely the people being back-channelled, if 
they are who I assume they are, are have already been involved in the 
decision making process around this. So I look forward to GitHub doing 
better than Chef, but I don't have high hopes (especially given who 
owns GitHub these days).

On Thu, 10 Oct, 2019 at 10:53, Alexander Larsson <alexl at redhat.com> 
wrote:
> 
> 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.

Yes I think you are right, can't find the source for my figure any 
more, however the precise amount isn't the point.

> 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

Yep, that's what I was getting at by "getting initial traction". I'd 
say Flatpak and Flathub have the momentum now however that if people 
want to publish on Flathub, they'll sign up wherever as needed. Which 
is the whole point of this, the projects should be using it's draw to 
get people to sign up for services that aren't enabling people being 
abused, even if indirectly.

In any case, the sign up process for a code hosting service is 
literally the easiest part of getting something published on Flathub. 
If people can't be bothered doing that, are they going to bother 
putting together a manifest, appdata, etc, etc, together? Or 
conversely, if they are willing to do all that, then is a signup 
process going to stop them? I doubt it.

> 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.

Yep, but that's just a good reason to move somewhere sooner rather than 
later.

> 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.

Sure, and I'm willing to help with this, obviously.

> 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.

Yes, this will be painful, but hey, it's for a good cause.

> 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.

Well, I guess that's where I disagree. There's only going to be one way 
to convince them to drop what is otherwise an easy $200k, which is 
start costing them money because of it.

You see how effective this is when (say) bigoted news readers say 
something particularly heinous, such that people start contacting their 
advertisers and getting them to cancel ad their ad spend the show - 
there's always a quick reversal.

However, unless I'm missing something Flatpak/Flathub isn't giving 
Github any money, so the only means we have of discouraging them is 
packing up and going elsewhere. Even if Github is getting paid, not 
paying them anymore will also necessitate going somewhere else.

> 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.

This isn't a personal axe, this is about pressuring companies that are 
or that are considering providing materiel support to ICE into dropping 
that support to reduce the operational capabilities of ICE, and hence 
reducing their capacity to physically and mentally abuse the many 
people, including children, who in their concentration camps.

As such, a mirror isn't going to help.

//Mike

-- 
⊨ Michael Gratton, Percept Wrangler.
⚙ <http://mjog.vee.net/>