GitHub considered harmful

[Alexander Larsson]

On Thu, Oct 10, 2019 at 11:26 AM Michael Gratton <mike at vee.net> wrote:
> On Thu, 10 Oct, 2019 at 10:53, Alexander Larsson <alexl at redhat.com>
> wrote:
> >
>
> > 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.

Its already costing them money. They did a $500k donation to "offset"
the $200k causing it to be a net loss deal, and thats not even
considering all the bad PR they are already getting over this from
various sources.

> 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.

Well, cancelling ads is very easy to do, and easy to reverse. A large
infrastructure reboot is not that easy, so it has to be considered
much more carefully.

And there is also the question of what guarantees that the new host is
any better (see the link to gitllab policy in my other mail). In fact,
am I any better? I'm currently employed by the company that literally
tabulated the holocaust...

My personal opinion about this is:

I find what ICE is doing reprehensible, and I would prefer if github
dropped ICE as a customer. But I realize the complexities of business,
and this contract is imho not something fundamental or defining of the
github organization either in terms of money or in moral values, nor
is it (I assume) a major thing for the ICE operational capabilities. I
also think that flatpak moving elsewhere will not really add a
significant effect to this particular case as this is already being
fought in a lot of ways.

So, currently I don't think there is an urgent need to switch from
github to something else.

However, long-term we should maybe look at options for infrastructure
that are not directly tied to any particular company. For example,
freedesktop.org is pretty closely tied with flatpak in terms of values
and goals.

Of course, other developers may have different opinions.

-- 
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 Alexander Larsson                                Red Hat, Inc
       alexl at redhat.com         alexander.larsson at gmail.com