FSF to launch code hosting [LWN.net]

FSF to launch code hosting

Posted Feb 25, 2020 21:11 UTC (Tue) by Seirdy (guest, #137326) [Link] (12 responses)

From my comment on the lobste.rs thread [0]:

It's important to remember that git is already decentralized and federated, and has
built-in support for what GitHub has re-implemented and branded as "pull requests".
Git can already format a patch from your local repository and email it, regardless
of which code forge is being used (if any). **Web interfaces should be optional;**
git itself has everything needed for asynchronous collaboration. Synchronous
collaboration can already be provided through IRC.

[0]: https://lobste.rs/s/f2iya3/fsf_2019_forge_evaluation_libr...

FSF to launch code hosting

Posted Feb 25, 2020 23:45 UTC (Tue) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129) [Link] (10 responses)

E-mail? In 2020? Thanks, but no thanks.

FSF to launch code hosting

Posted Feb 26, 2020 6:00 UTC (Wed) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link] (9 responses)

The same could be said about the web :)

FSF to launch code hosting

Posted Feb 26, 2020 7:58 UTC (Wed) by gfernandes (subscriber, #119910) [Link] (3 responses)

Really? Faff over a couple of clicks?

FSF to launch code hosting

Posted Feb 26, 2020 10:27 UTC (Wed) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (2 responses)

People forget that other people may not be as lucky as they are. I gather in the US that some people are still stuck on dial-up! Here in the UK while most people have access to fibre, I thought that we were still stuck on ADSL-2 (that may no longer be true) and there are a few people left on ADSL.

And then, what about peoples' workflow? I *still* prefer to work in "offline" mode with the online stuff happening behind my back. Try doing THAT when your internet is down! (Which until recently was pretty common - dunno why).

Why is it that people seem to delight in assuming that OTHER PEOPLE should adopt THEIR OWN way of working/thinking/living? I don't give a monkeys how you live your life - stop telling me how to live mine, thanks.

Cheers,
Wol

FSF to launch code hosting

Posted Feb 26, 2020 21:03 UTC (Wed) by ejr (subscriber, #51652) [Link] (1 responses)

Some rural US areas have access only to relatively expensive satellite "broadband." These come with absurdly low data caps, the kind that will be blown away when people forward PowerPoint slides or watch anything streaming.

Plus there are people with longer-ish train or plane transits. Trains are starting to support wifi, but, um, not always successfully in my experience. Planes charge extra.

And some people just want to unplug, sit, and think about what they're doing.

The "offline" world still exists.

FSF to launch code hosting

Posted Feb 26, 2020 21:31 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

Git works perfectly fine offline. You don't to have to send a PR right away. The amount of data consumed by using Github UI or API is also pretty insignificant.

So email workflow these days is mostly a matter of personal preference. Supporting it would certainly be nice, but I don't think it has any practical advantage.

FSF to launch code hosting

Posted Feb 26, 2020 17:42 UTC (Wed) by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325) [Link] (4 responses)

The difference, I think, is that email is increasingly a non-federated medium, whereas the web is still somewhat federated (on the server side). If you want to speak SMTP to arbitrary systems, you have to do a variety of things which are (to my knowledge) not in any RFC to convince the recipient servers that your message is non-spam. If you mess up, somebody may just add you to a blackhole list without telling you. You won't know until six months later when a user complains they didn't get your email.

And options for end-to-end encryption of email are still, frankly, terrible. Yes, I know PGP, GPG, Enigmail, etc. exist. Their UX is totally inadequate compared to the web browser experience of "Is there a padlock in the URL bar? Then you don't have to do anything." More to the point, they require everyone in the conversation to have the necessary tools installed and available. A single person clicking Reply All and failing to remove quoted text can result in a cleartext disclosure of the entire record. As for signatures, realistically, half your recipients are doing this: https://xkcd.com/1181/

FSF to launch code hosting

Posted Feb 27, 2020 5:19 UTC (Thu) by wtarreau (subscriber, #51152) [Link] (3 responses)

> Their UX is totally inadequate compared to the web browser experience

It's exactly the opposite. Have you ever tried to use GitHub UI ? It's terribly misdesigned, slow, inefficient, with horrible alignment making you totally inefficient. With e-mail I can chose the e-mail client *I* want, and I'm not forced to follow the UX pattern that $RANDOM_JERK_OF_THE_DAY decided was better for me because it looks fine on their smartphone.

And better, I can script processing of my e-mails without even having to think about it. Running sed, grep, vi is just routine. Try to do that in a web interface, and good luck!

This is why I ask people to continue to send me exclusively patches over e-mail. I can trivially and efficiently adapt them and integrate them. In a web UI you're encouraged to take the crap as it is because fixing minore details suddenly becomes extremely complicated.

FSF to launch code hosting

Posted Feb 27, 2020 19:21 UTC (Thu) by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325) [Link] (2 responses)

In that paragraph, I was specifically talking about end-to-end encryption, not *all* UX.

FSF to launch code hosting

Posted Feb 28, 2020 10:59 UTC (Fri) by gdt (subscriber, #6284) [Link] (1 responses)

Could I suggest that the end-point of an end-to-end argument is the commit, not the email (which is essentially a transport)?

Git has support for signed commits. The user experience for commit signing is fine on GNOME or KDE. The horrible GPG user interface is still needed to create the keys -- this means few Git beginner guides configure commit signing.

If you want to use a Secure Attention Key to authorise a hardware-generated signature then be prepared for four pages of dense instructions of GPG open-heart surgery. You can set up some Git* servers to reject unsigned commits, some Git* servers will check the signatures. To date none of the Git* servers nor git clients will reject a signature based upon attestation (so all signed commits are equivalent, meaning the server can't insist only on hardware-signed commits confirmed by a Secure Attention Key). Even so I'd seriously suggest to Linux developers that they look at a hardware device for GPG-signing commits (Yubikey, etc). Then opportunities for unauthorised commits are small, even when the developer is using a compromised laptop.

FSF to launch code hosting

Posted Feb 28, 2020 18:45 UTC (Fri) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link]

Should that be Secure Attestation Key, or something of that nature? Because to me a Secure Attention Key means the likes of Ctrl-Alt-Del on Windows NT (etc.) or Alt+SysRq+(whatever) on Linux.

FSF to launch code hosting

Posted Feb 26, 2020 12:47 UTC (Wed) by lobachevsky (subscriber, #121871) [Link]

Whether one sees it as a good or a bad thing, that ship has sailed. Most people dislike email and don't use IRC. In my experience this is doubly true for younger people. If we as a free software community want to have a future, we need to (also) embrace the Github style of collaboration. Both a web-centric approach and classical tools should be able to coexist, but if I had to choose something, I'd go for web-centric. Given a suitable API I can always build my own workflow, but most people who are potential collaborators will or cannot do that.

FSF to launch code hosting

Posted Feb 25, 2020 21:15 UTC (Tue) by Flameeyes (guest, #51238) [Link] (3 responses)

Wasn't that Savannah?

FSF to launch code hosting

Posted Feb 26, 2020 7:08 UTC (Wed) by jdulaney (subscriber, #83672) [Link] (2 responses)

ahhh, but that's gnu!

FSF to launch code hosting

Posted Feb 26, 2020 13:21 UTC (Wed) by Flameeyes (guest, #51238) [Link] (1 responses)

Yeah sounds FSF and GNU always have great ways to make it welcoming for newcomers, and when they run out of idiosyncrasies, they make up new ones.

FSF to launch code hosting

Posted Mar 4, 2020 19:23 UTC (Wed) by BlueLightning (subscriber, #38978) [Link]

It goes another level deeper, there's also savannah.nongnu.org.

FSF to launch code hosting

Posted Feb 25, 2020 21:28 UTC (Tue) by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325) [Link] (15 responses)

I think it's great that they're building their own forge to match their ideals.

But I'm less thrilled with the way they have structured their ethical repository criteria. They tend to mix ideological and functional criteria in a way that I think is unhelpful. For example (each bullet is a direct quotation from the linked source):

Recommends and encourages GPL 3-or-later licensing at least as much as any other kind of licensing. (C5)
Encourages use of GPL 3-or-later as preferred option. (A2)
Says “free software,” not “open source.” (A6)
Clearly endorses the Free Software Movement's ideas of freedom. (A7)
Avoids saying “Linux” without “GNU” when referring to GNU/Linux. (A8)

Many of these items are, at best, idiosyncratic to the FSF's particular worldview, and unhelpful to anyone who "just wants to host some code." I think their grading system would be more useful if they had a separate grade for ideology, so that those of us who care about the more functional items on the list (A0, A1, A9, etc.) could see a separate grade for those criteria. It also bothers me deeply that WCAG and ARIA conformance are listed as "extra credit." A site that discriminates against disabled users should not be considered "excellent" by any rubric of ethical standards.

Of course, it's their list, and they get to decide how they want to grade repositories. I'm just not sure who besides the FSF is supposed to benefit from it in its current form.

FSF to launch code hosting

Posted Feb 25, 2020 23:06 UTC (Tue) by k8to (guest, #15413) [Link] (8 responses)

Personally I think the ideology of Free Software matters. But conflating that with things like using on-brand markers without broad support, or specifically requiring the promotion of a specific copyleft license with actual support for Free Software ideals is not helping. It's just bringing unwanted baggage along with the ideology.

FSF to launch code hosting

Posted Feb 25, 2020 23:51 UTC (Tue) by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75) [Link] (7 responses)

Personally I think the ideology of Free Software matters.

Absolutely. The decision to use a FOSS license for your software is inherently ideological. The thing is, we have a tendency to forget just how ideological a position is when we adopted it a long time ago and deal with many other people who agree with it, while we pay great attention to how ideological things are when we don't agree with them or at least know lots of people who still disagree with them. So we accept

Note that free software must come with the real source code. Minified JavaScript code, and code generated by translation from some other language, are not source code. They are a kind of object code. (C0.0)

as being a sensible while seeing

Says “free software,” not “open source.” (A6)

as deeply ideological.

FSF to launch code hosting

Posted Feb 26, 2020 1:05 UTC (Wed) by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325) [Link] (3 responses)

> The decision to use a FOSS license for your software is inherently ideological.

I disagree. I imagine that most people who pick (for example) the Expat license or the {2,3}-clause BSD licenses don't care about ideology and just want to make their code widely available (this is also the attitude that spawned various "crayon" licenses like the WTFPL). Linus is on the record about Linux's use of GPLv2 being non-ideological (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PaKIZ7gJlRU for Linus's take on GPLv3 - TL;DW "I just wanted to get patches back from downstreams, why are you dragging me into this Tivoization thing?").

There are many people for whom free software is inherently ideological, and there is certainly some correlation between ideology and choice of license. But I don't think free software ideology is inherent to the entire set of FOSS licenses - that's too wide a generalization.

FSF to launch code hosting

Posted Feb 26, 2020 2:02 UTC (Wed) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

The choice of a FLOSS licence can easily be pragmatic too ... for some companies software is a cost, not an income generator. Choosing a FLOSS licence can lower that cost, by encouraging others to do some of your work for you ...

And using a Free licence stops your competitors from using your code against you :-)

Cheers,
Wol

FSF to launch code hosting

Posted Feb 26, 2020 2:07 UTC (Wed) by donbarry (guest, #10485) [Link] (1 responses)

It isn't, but you're effectively saying that's a good thing.

And it's not.

Those who punt ideology off the playing field for "practicality" are only accidental and momentary friends of free software, and their friendship cannot be trusted to survive changes in the markets or their own interests.

Just in the last month, I found myself thrown off the "Home Assistant" official forum -- *a Facebook group!* -- because I criticized the abuse of someone who filed a bug that their "official Android client" was built with the assumption of Google Play Services, and while it did not yet rely on them, the project manager stated that this project intends to use them and will not support a version which does not. And this is a project which sings how central privacy is to their mission on all their web pages!

And what about Wire, which strung along the community for four years promising how important the future availability of an F-Droid non-Google dependent Android client was, until three months ago when suddenly it wasn't.

Or Mozilla singing how important respect for the community is, and then adding telemetry that doesn't respect the "do not telemeter us" flag -- to find how many people had disabled telemetry?!

Yes, ideology is important. I am glad the FSF still has some fight in it, even if their refusal to defend the unprincipled and scurrilous attacks on Stallman have significantly reduced their credibility in this regards.

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Posted Feb 26, 2020 6:25 UTC (Wed) by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325) [Link]

> It isn't, but you're effectively saying that's a good thing.

I tried very hard to keep my comment as value-neutral as possible. Any judgment that you saw in it was not intended to be there.

FSF to launch code hosting

Posted Feb 26, 2020 7:01 UTC (Wed) by tchernobog (guest, #73595) [Link] (2 responses)

> seeing
>
> Says “free software,” not “open source.” (A6)
>
>as deeply ideological.

You could say that also insisting on saying "open source" in place of "free software" is also deeply ideological.

Point being, there is a difference in values between the two movinents, the FSF is in the free software camp (the FS in FSF...), so I don't get why people pint out the obvious... ?

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Posted Feb 27, 2020 13:47 UTC (Thu) by ncm (guest, #165) [Link] (1 responses)

Yes. "I differ" does not imply "You're wrong".

People come from different places and emphasize different things. There's room for us together if we make it.

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Posted Mar 11, 2020 12:38 UTC (Wed) by ghane (guest, #1805) [Link]

Thank you. Well put.

--
Sanjeev

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Posted Feb 26, 2020 10:11 UTC (Wed) by LtWorf (subscriber, #124958) [Link] (1 responses)

Considering that on github they openly suggest to use MIT license and have FAQ pages saying to just go for a MIT license, seems that it is quite needed.

The FSF is there because of ideology. If you don't like it, nobody is forcing you to use it.

FSF to launch code hosting

Posted Feb 26, 2020 12:46 UTC (Wed) by ale2018 (guest, #128727) [Link]

> The FSF is there because of ideology.

The point is that those who are not there for ideology are there for interest. Didn't we see that already when Sourceforge bundled malware along with hosted projects? By design, interest can lead people to harm other people.

I agree that FSF's ideology can sound fussy at times. However, sometimes it is necessary.

There is no way, currently, that you can tell whether a forge system runs on free software rather than on some other software that has been installed on their servers. Except for JavaScript. Relaying on an innocent non-free script may look as a frivolous reason to downgrade Gitlab[*]. However, it's difficult to tell in advance where such reliance is going to land.

[*] https://libreplanet.org/wiki/Fsf_2019_forge_evaluation#Ev...

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Posted Feb 26, 2020 10:20 UTC (Wed) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link] (3 responses)

If you think existing forges like Github (owned by Microsoft) are 100% neutral and do not push their owner‘s opinions and agendas via deliberate UI and wording choices, I have prime Lunar real estate to sell you.

The cultural US bias that blindly accepts the “right to free speech” of corporations (ie, suborning the democratic process) while objecting to opinionated public or charity policies continues to astound me…

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Posted Feb 26, 2020 17:01 UTC (Wed) by SEJeff (guest, #51588) [Link] (1 responses)

Github pushed the MIT before they were acquired by Microsoft.

I think this is a case of correlation != causation.

The cultural bias snark you made doesn't seem to have much if any relevance to the conversation.

Personally, I don't have any problem with the FSF doing this, but it will be another sourceforge equivalent like savannah. You're welcome to use it for ideological reasons, but the featureset compared to the worst of the competition is abysmal, so the overall traction compared to less free alternatives will continue to be awful.

FSF to launch code hosting

Posted Feb 26, 2020 17:19 UTC (Wed) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link]

So what? It would have been deeply stupid for Microsoft to acquire a business unit that didn't align with their own goals.

That it was already aligned does not mean it was neutral before or after acquisition.

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Posted Feb 27, 2020 21:13 UTC (Thu) by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325) [Link]

> If you think existing forges like Github (owned by Microsoft) are 100% neutral[...]

I don't, and I struggle to see how you could interpret my comment to mean that.

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Posted Feb 26, 2020 3:44 UTC (Wed) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link] (1 responses)

I predict it'll be swamped by the usual mix of non-participating ideologues, rubberneckers and/or scum drawn to rub themselves over anything tangentially GNU-related, and then outside participation will all but totally evaporate after a few days.

But if it gets some FSF/GNU projects to start developing out in the open like real FOSS instead of throwing patchbombs over the wall, hey, that's still an improvement.

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Posted Feb 26, 2020 10:31 UTC (Wed) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

Well, in "The Cathedral and the Bazaar", the cathedral refers to the FSF, does it not ...

Cheers,
Wol

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Posted Feb 26, 2020 16:18 UTC (Wed) by mxmehl (guest, #104271) [Link] (2 responses)

Good move by the FSF, curious which software they will use.

At the FSFE, we have been offering Gitea since 2017 which supports most features known by popular (proprietary/open-core) source forges. I hope the FSF will also pick something which is easy to use.

FSF to launch code hosting

Posted Feb 26, 2020 17:22 UTC (Wed) by jebba (guest, #4439) [Link]

Here's their evaluations so far:

https://libreplanet.org/wiki/Fsf_2019_forge_evaluation

I really like Gitea too, I hope they choose that. :) The other two under consideration are Pagure by Fedora and Sourcehut. Reading that doc, I learned there is a public Gitea server run by a non-profit in Germany that looks quite nice: https://codeberg.org/

FSF to launch code hosting

Posted Feb 26, 2020 21:43 UTC (Wed) by seneca6 (guest, #63916) [Link]

Great to have that Gitea instance! - My main problem with the older offerings were not web vs e-mail, Git vs others or Savannah vs more "mainstream" options, it was also not about the "social" part or number of users - it was "projects vs individuals". FSF Savannah's focus is on projects. But maybe you don't know yet that you want to set up a project (and how to describe it for an approval process) - you just want to share some snippets / scripts, or a customised fork, or a software you threw together for running some kind of community service, so that others can join the fun of administrating it, too. It may evolve into some kind of cooperative project much later on, or only be useful to a handful of people.

With GitLab, GitHub, and the earlier Google Code etc. you got exactly that - a space for throwing things on to.