Free Software Foundation Aims To Launch Code Hosting / Collaboration Platform This Year

[Michael_S]

They also discussed this with Drew Devault, the Sourcehut primary developer, and these are his comments. I can't fault him on any of them: https://lists.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/sr.ht-...J3OK@homura%3E

[doublez13]

I figured they'd go with the tried and tested RCS.

[Michael_S]

I figured they'd go with the tried and tested RCS.

patch + email + RCS should be good enough for everything. Plus ed for editing, of course. git and especially the whole concept of a forge violates The Unix Philosophy!

( Yes, I'm kidding. )

[ssokolow]

They also discussed this with Drew Devault, the Sourcehut primary developer, and these are his comments. I can't fault him on any of them: https://lists.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/sr.ht-...J3OK@homura%3E

I may not agree with Drew on various things, but I agree with his perspective on the A8 and A9 criteria:

Criterion A8 (Avoids saying “Linux” without “GNU” when referring to GNU/Linux) is a propaganda decision that would steer me away from using a hosting site. See my previous long comments about why GNU/Linux is just Stallman using criteria very divorced from common expectation for what an OS is to justify giving GNU such prominent placement.

(TL;DR: If you're talking about the ABI, all you can justify is "glibc/Linux". If you're talking about amount of code, then it's "X11/Linux" at best. etc. Stallman's skewed definition is "What you need to self-host development using console Emacs and nothing more", which rules out the code to support a GUI and requires GCC to be counted as part of the OS. Also, from a human behaviour perspective, it's got too many syllables to ever catch on and people often use "Linux" to refer collectively to both distros with a GNU userland and distros with a musl+busybox userland.)

As for Criterion A9, (Insists that each nontrivial file in a package clearly and unambiguously state how it is licensed.), I agree with Drew that a COPYING or LICENSE file in the project root should be all that's insisted on. Anything more is too onerous and, depending on the file formats involved, may not be possible.

Criterion A2 is also iffy, because whether I agree depends on how they define "encourage" in "Encourages use of GPL 3-or-later as preferred option." If they mean "overtly", then I don't think that's a hosting site's place. If they would be OK with a fair assessement of the pros and cons of each license, coupled with a heavily-cited run-down of how each provision in the GPLv3 (including the "or later" option) protects against actual corporate attempts at frog-boiling, then I'm all for it.

(My favourite expression of what it means for a license to be "free" is the Debian Free Software Guidelines, which include three very illustrative compliance tests: The Desert Island test, the Dissident test, and the Tentacles of Evil test.)

[cochise]

They should use Kallithea, a fork of Rhode Code created because of GPL violations. Uses few JS, the developers are free software activists, is actively developed...

[jaypatelani]

Guest http://gameoftrees.org/

[kpedersen]

Criterion A8 (Avoids saying “Linux” without “GNU” when referring to GNU/Linux) is a propaganda decision that would steer me away from using a hosting site. See my previous long comments about why GNU/Linux is just Stallman using criteria very divorced from common expectation for what an OS is to justify giving GNU such prominent placement.

I used to think this too. However now that Linux has been embraced in a big way by commercial entities, I can actually see some need for a separation for "Linux as an idealism" and "Linux as a tool".

It is quite minor but it is to empower GNU (or at least raise awareness of it), because without the efforts of these guys, we would all be stuck with Windows (not even *BSD would be where it is without it, they wouldn't have had a C compiler for many years as one example haha).

(That said, without Linux we probably wouldn't be so cloud obsessed and dependent on the Internet as we are now, which would have been nice too)

It does seem pedantic however, I wonder if they would spend time enforcing it?

[Guest]

Guest http://gameoftrees.org/

Wow,... Didn't think it is a name of an existing project.

IMHO, Game of Trees looks like a toy project, because the name seems to be making fun of "Game of Thrones",.. Maybe it's serious project though, but then it would also deserve a serious name.

[ssokolow]

I used to think this too. However now that Linux has been embraced in a big way by commercial entities, I can actually see some need for a separation for "Linux as an idealism" and "Linux as a tool".

It is quite minor but it is to empower GNU (or at least raise awareness of it), because without the efforts of these guys, we would all be stuck with Windows (not even *BSD would be where it is without it, they wouldn't have had a C compiler for many years as one example haha).

(That said, without Linux we probably wouldn't be so cloud obsessed and dependent on the Internet as we are now, which would have been nice too)

It does seem pedantic however, I wonder if they would spend time enforcing it?

Sorry, but you're talking to someone who's looking forward to the day that musl-libc's ABI compatibility becomes high enough that I can run GOG.com games on a Linux+musl+busybox+llvm distro and give the annoying pseudo-pedants the finger, even as I continue to release stuff under the GPLv3 because I agree with the rationale for it.

If they want to make a Linux distro, they can call it "GNU Linux" all they want, and I'll accept "glibc/Linux" or "X11/glibc/Linux" as a name for the ABI people are targeting, but they don't get to argue for "GNU/Linux" when, most of the time, whatever intangible quality people are talking about is also present in the source-compatible but ABI-incompatible distros which use the Linux kernel with non-GNU userlands, and ABI compatibility can be and is achieved by running a userland that is non-GNU aside from glibc.

[kpedersen]

Sorry, but you're talking to someone who's looking forward to the day that musl-libc's ABI compatibility becomes high enough that I can run GOG.com games on a Linux+musl+busybox+llvm distro and give the annoying pseudo-pedants the finger, even as I continue to release stuff under the GPLv3 because I agree with the rationale for it.

To be fair, I am pretty similar. I moved to BSD because I found Linux a little too messy for my liking but I am still an avid fan of the GPL set of licenses (GPL3 and AGPL in particular) and use them for all my personal projects.

However I still believe that a core GNU + Linux ideal needs to be maintained. Otherwise the commercial entities will push Linux so far away from the idea of freedom, that new users won't even know what it used to stand for and that the original goals were for something called "Free Software". The commercial industry wants nothing more than for people to forget that Linux *is* free. Without free, you also get a complete lack of innovation and just respins.

50 years from now we probably wont have any distro currently in circulation today. But we will have GNU/Linux. After all, it is 100% open, no-one can take that away from us in theory.