On 12 December 2015 at 23:39, Donald Stufft <don...@stufft.io> wrote: > It seems pretty hypocritical to be against GitHub because it's proprietary > and hosted by a company that can sell your data (both things I've seen people > say against GitHub) and be pro GitLab EE (either hosted by Gitlab or > ourselves) or pro using a Hosted Gitlab. I don't personally have a problem > with it, I'm fine with the tooling not being free but it seems disingenuous > to treat Gitlab EE (as opposed CE) as if it's free software. I'm particularly > interested in a managed option of some kind to reduce to load on the infra > team.
Yeah, that's why I suggested there'd need to be at least four options in a useful survey question (if Brett decides a survey is worth doing at all), since those would help tease out what folks are actually worried about, similar to the way that presenting a vegetarian option for a meal may still not be sufficient for vegans. Running through them: a. GitLab EE instance hosted and managed by GitLab, Inc * Being happier with this option than with the use of GitHub would indicate someone was bothered by GitHub specifically, rather than the use of proprietary software. Given the tech industry's propensity for flocking to proprietary vendors who then turn around to attempt to extract monopoly rents (cf. IBM, legacy UNIX vendors, Microsoft, Oracle, etc), this is certainly one of the factors in my own concerns - Silicon Valley venture capitalists are deliberately running a "ubiquity first, revenue later" strategy for GitHub, which means it's important to plan for an exit strategy if the flow of free money (and the associated free services) dries up when investors start getting impatient for their returns. While I've personally come to the conclusion that "Migrate-to-GitLab-or-some-other-service-if-the-need-arises" adequately addresses such concerns (along with the general market forces of GitHub doing battle with incumbents like Microsoft's Team Foundation Server and Atlassian's software lifecycle management portfolio), it may be that not everyone feels the same way. b. GitLab EE instance hosted by the PSF, and managed by GitLab, Inc * This gets into cases where folks are mainly concerned about having permanent copies of everything important from GitHub always ready to go on PSF controlled infrastructure, even if we're not using it actively. It's essentially the "GitLab-as-GitHub-exit-strategy" approach, with an additional hedge where PSF admins have direct control over the data, even if GitLab have been tasked with the day-to-day operation of the service. c. GitLab EE instance hosted and managed by the PSF * Similar to the previous option, this option would likely indicate that someone is more concerned by privacy and data control issues than they are by the use of proprietary software. Both GitLab and GitHub are private for profit entities, answerable to their investors moreso than to their users, so monetisation of user data, including becoming a data broker for information on user's online activities, is well within the prospective scope of corporate activities (even if neither company is pursuing such activities today). By contrast, the PSF is a non-profit entity, answerable to its members. If the PSF controls the identity information needed to participate in the core development process, then we can categorically assure participants that we're not selling their information to data brokers, whereas if we use third party services, we'll have to both tell people to check the Terms & Conditions for those services, as well as consider defining trigger conditions for what we consider to be unacceptable barriers to entry for participation in the core development process. d. GitLab CE instance hosted and managed by the PSF * This is the only option that gets all the way to "Free software needs free tools" - it denies even GitLab's open core development model as a legitimate revenue raising tactic, since it's still using the proprietary model to exercise coercive control over customers. The main advantage GitLab EE has over GitHub in that context is that the exit strategy from EE to CE is even simpler than that from GitHub to GitLab EE. I honestly don't know how the different areas of concern break down across the core contributor base, and I've seen enough demands for free software and privacy advocates to "stop being unreasonable" in various contexts to suspect that an anonymous survey (that is still somehow restricted to core developers) would be the only way to get an even halfway accurate assessment. Cheers, Nick. -- Nick Coghlan | ncogh...@gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia _______________________________________________ core-workflow mailing list core-workflow@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/core-workflow This list is governed by the PSF Code of Conduct: https://www.python.org/psf/codeofconduct
