Post open source software, licensing and GitHub (opensource.com)
Few would deny that the rise of GitHub as a popular hosting service for software projects is one of the most significant developments to affect open source during the past five years. GitHub's extraordinary success is necessary context for understanding the criticism leveled at it during the past year from some within or close to the open source world. This criticism has focused on licensing, or rather the lack of it: it is claimed that GitHub hosts an enormous amount of code with no explicit software license. Some critics have suggested that this situation results from a combination of the ignorance of younger developers about legal matters and willful inaction by GitHub's management."
Posted Aug 14, 2013 19:20 UTC (Wed)
by gioele (subscriber, #61675)
[Link] (1 responses)
[1] https://github.com/blog/1530-choosing-an-open-source-license
Posted Aug 14, 2013 19:45 UTC (Wed)
by mjw (subscriber, #16740)
[Link]
Posted Aug 14, 2013 19:36 UTC (Wed)
by tsmithe (guest, #57598)
[Link] (9 responses)
Posted Aug 14, 2013 21:57 UTC (Wed)
by zyga (subscriber, #81533)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Aug 14, 2013 23:53 UTC (Wed)
by tsmithe (guest, #57598)
[Link]
Posted Aug 15, 2013 0:03 UTC (Thu)
by wahern (subscriber, #37304)
[Link] (2 responses)
We all write crap code, but not all of us publish it as if it's god's gift to mankind.
People seem to like GitHub for all the wrong reasons. If you want to fork my project, go for it. But don't think for an instant I'm at all enthusiastic about merging in random branches from your tree. If you can't find the time to test and send me a diff by e-mail, then I have little faith in the quality of your patch.
I think most people use GitHub as a replacement for having their own public_html directory, like in the good ole' days. For most people, GitHub is effectively a sophisticated version of paste.org.
Posted Aug 15, 2013 0:22 UTC (Thu)
by bloopletech (guest, #71203)
[Link]
Posted Aug 15, 2013 0:23 UTC (Thu)
by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
[Link]
Posted Aug 15, 2013 1:17 UTC (Thu)
by rqosa (subscriber, #24136)
[Link] (1 responses)
> so much of the open source ecosystem is hosted on a closed-source network service It really doesn't matter too much that the GitHub web frontend is proprietary — it's little more than decoration around what at its core is a distributed application with a FLOSS reference implementation, thus making GitHub interchangeable with any other generic Git hosting provider. Consequently, it's easy for any project hosted there to "pack its bags" and move elsewhere if/when necessary. For example, when I've used Git, I've usually kept about 3 copies of my repository: one on the machine used for development, one on a personal file server machine, and one on a public server (i.e. Gitorious, GitHub, any SSH shell-account provider, etc.). So, even if the public server were to go away entirely, I'd still have multiple copies of the full revision history.
Posted Aug 19, 2013 7:30 UTC (Mon)
by fb (guest, #53265)
[Link]
In practice, for many projects GitHub is more than a web front end to GIT+SSH. GitHub also provides an API, and I believe a lot of projects use services and or plugins based on those. So I don't think it is so easy to migrate if there is something based on those APIs you are not willing to let go. An example would be this Jenkins plugin to (automatically) run unit tests on Pull-Requests (of selected developers only).
Posted Aug 15, 2013 7:10 UTC (Thu)
by Felix (guest, #36445)
[Link]
I personally really free software but still I use github because there is no technical lock-in: It is trivial to set up a git hosting on my own servers (without any information loss).
Posted Aug 16, 2013 0:50 UTC (Fri)
by dberkholz (guest, #23346)
[Link]
Posted Aug 15, 2013 23:48 UTC (Thu)
by leif81 (guest, #75132)
[Link]
Post open source software, licensing and GitHub (opensource.com)
I think you are just waiting for the followup article. To quote the fine article:
Post open source software, licensing and GitHub (opensource.com)
In a followup article I will discuss the measures recently taken by GitHub to address these concerns; this article explores aspects of the complaint itself.
Post open source software, licensing and GitHub (opensource.com)
Post open source software, licensing and GitHub (opensource.com)
Post open source software, licensing and GitHub (opensource.com)
Post open source software, licensing and GitHub (opensource.com)
Post open source software, licensing and GitHub (opensource.com)
Post open source software, licensing and GitHub (opensource.com)
Post open source software, licensing and GitHub (opensource.com)
Post open source software, licensing and GitHub (opensource.com)
Post open source software, licensing and GitHub (opensource.com)
The FLOSS community as a whole is shifting in a much more permissive direction. GitHub itself runs a whole lot of permissively licensed software in its own infrastructure and does release some of its work back. As for the rest, hey that's what permissive licensing is for, right?
Post open source software, licensing and GitHub (opensource.com)
Post open source software, licensing and GitHub (opensource.com)