GitHub madness (nontechnical, long and boring)

#1

Recently there was a discussion about hosting the code related to the Haskell Foundation on GitHub. I’d like to share a short, unrelated story and some thoughts. I don’t know what I want to achieve, probably I just have to give my thoughts some organized form. The whole story is very subjective, don’t take it to heart.

The story is really short: Some weeks ago I moved all my personal, open source projects away from GitHub and removed my organization. I host these projects myself now. This affects my Haskell implementation of GraphQL.

Background

  • I was an active GitHub contributor for several years. Mostly I worked on my own projects, though my projects weren’t popular, that is I had only a few contributors.
  • I’m self-employed and I’m working on some closed source projects. For many years I’m maintaining a small linux-server. Some years ago I’ve set up a Redmine bug tracker, mostly because of its time tracking capabilities. Recently I also configured a CI for my private projects (GoCD). Now I use the same infrastructure for my open source projects. So I haven’t done the whole setup just to leave GitHub, the infrastructure was there.
  • One year ago I would hate myself for this decision. I thought that only stupid people who live in the past, still haven’t moved to GitHub.

At the present time

  • So what is my problem with GitHub? GitHub is mainstream. There were times I thought it is a good thing. My worries are pretty well summarized in the first part of this article: https://sanctum.geek.nz/why-not-github.html:

    However, I also dislike the tacit acceptance of GitHub as the dominant free software hosting platform for a decentralised version control protocol, when it is itself centralised, proprietary, for-profit, closed-source, and politically active.
    […]
    The issue here is not political correctness, it’s centralisation. If GitHub were not in this monopolistic position, nobody would care so much about any of the above. The overwhelming monopoly that GitHub has as a code host is a problem that the free software community chooses to ignore.

    So I can’t post something on my private facebook page, because the day will come, someone will read and dislike it, open an issue in my project and ask to ban me from the project, because I don’t have an „open mind“.

  • Then I looked what happend to some people in other grown open source organizations, e.g. R. Stallman and E. Raymond, and it made me so unbelievable sad and angry.

  • Then GitHub announces renaming the „master“ branch to „main“ and I say to myself: enough is enough. Maybe I shouldn’t have written my bachelor thesis on Nietzsche, maybe he made me believe that we aren’t good people, and that renaming slave to worker and blacklist to blocklist isn’t a good action, but in the best case just self-deception. But some GitHub projects are busy with renaming whitelists to whatever it is called now in their documentation. I don’t want to participate in it, I’m out.

  • Some time later the situation around youtube-dl came to my attention and I thought: I’m so happy, I’m not on GitHub anymore.

Further

  • GitHub isn’t more convenient or easy to use. Create a fork, close the browser, sync the fork, create a branch, open the browser, create a pull request. Microsoft even wrote their own special CLI tool because GitHub is so unusable.
    As ingenieurs we just don’t see anymore what we have to do to achieve a simple goal. We wrote so many overcomplicated, overengineered tools, that we don’t get, how unusable, insecure and buggy they are. We can’t manage the complexity we create and every few years we create even more complexity on top of it, in the hope we can fix the situation. I don’t risk to list a few examples here, I think some people can feel with me and have their own examples.
  • … oh and this social crap… I used to look every day whether my project has new stars or I got new followers. „Oh, I haven’t contributed today, I should make a commit…“ Why do I even care? I wasted so much time on it.
  • I don’t want to create an account everywhere, but nowadays we have OpenID, login with GitHub/Google/Social media.
  • Are big, successful companies satisfied with GitHub or are they forced to use it in order to be „nice“ and „community-friendly“? I mean Facebook imports all pull requests to their private Phabricator, Google wrote and uses Gerrit.

But

  • I’m continuing to contribute to GitHub projects.
  • GitHub is a great platform for projects that don’t have the capacity for self-hosting.

There is no such thing as the open source community, there are open source communities, and free communities are free to choose a hosting solution for their code and communication.

2 Likes
#2

Thanks for writing your post @belka, I found myself frequently nodding in agreement while reading it.
Since I was the person brought up the issue, let me just specify exactly what I meant.

Access to GitHub from some countries is restricted; sadly this is true with other gratis hosting services. How much this conflicts with the All are welcome, all can contribute statement from the Foundation homepage is a matter for the Foundation Board of Directors to decide.
I understand choices as such are never easy and that there is a powerful network effect in place we cannot ignore, not to talk about the resources needed for self-hosting.

@snoyberg’s post contains many good proposals.

1 Like
#3

With the respect to your experience with GitHub, I think that this is unacceptable. If you can’t have any empathy to other people and respect their feelings, it is a good indicator, that probably you are not the best contributor to the decision for the open, diverse and welcoming community.

Some of your points are showing the affection for inappropriate behaviour and support of misogynist attitude which can remain uncontrolled. So I wouldn’t like to see Haskell Foundation making their decision based on these facts.

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#4

I feel this bit is unfair to the original poster; a modicum of assuming good faith makes me think they do not like being pigeonholed with detestable views.

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#5

If they don’t want to be associated with those statements, it is better not to state openly that they don’t respect other people reasonable concerns.
In the original post, it is clearly showed what the position of the author regarding “main” branches and the author also showed the support of people with misogynist attitude and showed that they accept such behaviour and against any ways to stop that, which is the same as the support of such views as it is.

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#6

I mostly agree with your comment, but I don’t fully agree with this part. You seem to imply that Stallman has misogynist attitude. I don’t think that is fair. His controversial statements could also be explained by his rigid, black and white thinking (in fact, based on a few interviews I have seen, I think this is likely).

I don’t think we as a community should stop supporting people just because they are very pedantic and stubborn, because such behavior can also be caused by an autism spectrum disorder.

2 Likes
#7

The OP submitted perfectly reasonable concerns about Github’s increasing centralization and politicization, and you respond with a lack of empathy and an exclusive attitude, while simultaneously accusing the OP of both.

It’s completely inappropriate to respond to the polite, detailed, and non-hostile comment from the OP with “you are not the best contributor [to this community]” and an accusation of misogyny(???).

And with respect to “it is better not to state openly that they don’t respect other people reasonable concerns”; this is precisely what you are doing.

It is doubly inappropriate for someone who represents themselves as part of a public Haskell development foundation to post this kind of hostile and exclusionary commentary in this venue.

With respect to the OP: I have similar concerns. I would choose to migrate to some sort of self-hosted alternative to Github were it not for the social-netowrk functionality that is one of Github’s distinguishing features. With respect to the development of a large open source project, I don’t think there are too many salient arguments to hosting it on a freemium hosted website like Github. The most common argument seems to be “lowering barriers to entry”, but the most substantive barriers to making useful contributions to an open source project are usually not “creating a new account on an issue tracker”. Many of the most successful software projects of all time (Linux, Postgres, etc.) do not use popular issue trackers even to this day.

1 Like
#8

Sorry OP, just to clarify: Are you sad and angry about the things these people did, the humiliation, harassment, racist and more generally bigoted discourse these men publicly had? Or how, as a direct consequence of public actions and discourses, they were handled by their community and how they were called on their bullshit? I think it’s better for your position to clarify your stance on holding people accountable for their actions when they are harmful to other people who didn’t ask anything.

4 Likes
#9

Autism, uncontrolled misogynist attitude. Why not a slavery advocate? I should visit my psychiatrist once again.

Richard Stallman… I don’t like Richard Stallman. Never liked him. Do I find he is a very smart person, who did a lot? Yes, I do. Do I respect him? Yes, I do. But I don’t find his sarcastic humor funny, he makes fun of things he doesn’t understand. I never was following his life and talks. Would I write letters to organizations and universities he works in, because he makes me feel uncomfortable? No, I couldn’t care less. He can say whatever he likes.

It terrifies me that diverse communities have problem with the free speech. We can’t talk and question some areas of our lives and culture, they are tabu, we’re not allowed to speak about them anymore. The freedom of speech is almost dead. We’re caught up in a ideology. This was my whole point and nothing else.

It reminds me of the soviet ideology. It wasn’t bad in the last decades of the Soviet Union, it was all about be honest, work hard, help other people. What did people if their neighbour lived not like a Soviet citizen? They wrote letters to the local government, so that person can be arrested, because he destroys the morals. Vladimir Vysotsky and Alexander Galich and others have written enough poems and songs about it.

#10

I am not a part of any Haskell development foundations, and I don’t represent its views, to clarify.

This is my personal opinion on people that accuse women, support rapes, sexism and racism and in any way are trying to humiliate initiatives that are trying to support respectful behaviour to all minorities.

I wish it wouldn’t be needed for me to explain that support of such a mindset is very harmful and erases any reasonability from the original request (apart from the very opinionated things on tolerance and unacceptance of some world’s norms). I am not taking into consideration the question “is there better alternatives than GitHub and why”, but rather telling that “making a decision because the platform did not tolerate awful statements” is not helpful for the community.

3 Likes
#11

Before falling in the hole of comparisons with dictatorial regimes, why don’t you tell us your opinion on Volksverhetzung laws, OP? Just so we can have a modern and reasonable example for your stance? Do you think protecting people’s dignity is a personal attack on your freedom?

#12

This is called privilege my friend. You don’t care because it doesn’t affect you, but in fact it affects a lot of other people that aren’t you.

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#13

There is a lot that can be said about GitHub and its implications on F/OSS communities, the members of these communities, the risks, the benefits and the alternatives. This might very well be a discussion worth having for the Haskell community as well.

Only i don’t believe this “short story” has any chance of leading us there. It’s a rant draped in personal views and comments of despise which, to me aren’t only questionable, they are ugly, unwelcoming and they make a useful discussion impossible from the very start.

Disappointing.

2 Likes
#14

Hi Everyone

@belka:

So I can’t post something on my private facebook page, because the day will come, someone will read and dislike it, open an issue in my project and ask to ban me from the project, because I don’t have an „open mind“.

I can relate to this argument on the basis that it is a human right to err, and to grow, and that this is a particularly frightening prospect for those of us who base our careers in an industry with a degree of persistent commentary not seen in other fields. I don’t think this is a problem that HF will magically solve by choosing to host its own Phabricator instance, or other private VCS, because that immediately transports us into the realm of problems associated with censorship, and opacity. This is not a battle I think HF should be involved in. What we can do is issue guidelines and codes of conduct that protect you and others from future scrutiny as you interact with us, but even that’s not a good gaurantee. This is an unsolved problem. Let’s see if we can discuss it as Haskellers.

Then I looked what happend to some people in other grown open source organizations, e.g. R. Stallman and E. Raymond, and it made me so unbelievable sad and angry.

I think this thread has gone off the rails because of this and the next statement, because it paints ESR and RMS as noble martyrs. They are not. ESR once wrote that, quote “Gays experimented with unfettered promiscuity in the 1970s and got AIDS as a consequence”, among other inflammatory statements about women, feminists using sexual-assault as strategy, and race, that, while perhaps in context of the time could be seen as intellectual thought experiments, are just plain wrong and offensive. As we struggle to include more and more of our underrepresented minorities in this industry which is bereft of them, to include someone like ESR in that list, who intellectualizes LGBT and Black bodies for his offensive thought experiments, is poor judgement. The same goes for the second statement regarding master and main branches, as well as block/blacklists. These things are an appeal to empathy, not deception, and you are not required to approve of them or even use the features!

The point being that I think these points devalue your overall point, which is that Github has a model that conflicts with your ideals of free speech and free community. That is fine, but please stay on topic, and mind our Guidelines For Respectful Communication. As a suggestion, you could provide clarity warnings to your arguments that those points were examples of politicized speech that you did not want to engage in, even if you supported the notion that ESR and RMS were flawed humans. This could have been avoided by that clarity!

I would also like to keep in mind, before anyone brings it up: free speech is a civil right, guaranteed as part of the social contract between the state and its people, NOT private companies and their users. Github is free to do as it pleases. Whether or not you agree with their feature set and community standards is what is up for debate here, and it has not made you happy. Fair play. Let’s discuss that in a civil manner.

@vrom911:

I can appreciate how you feel here. I almost did not want to step in, but I feel like things are going off the rail a bit and this is turning into a flame war, so let me just say that, while users may display privileged behavior, or perhaps dog-whistled racism/misogyny, we should try and take the high road and let the moderator staff handle these people. We’re so used to having to battle for ourselves that we have to default to this behavior on social media, but I’d like there to be a little trust that we’ll take care of this appropriately in this org. But I know that oppressors should not be dictate to the oppressed about how they should be addressed, so take it for what it’s worth.

So with that and mind… can we reset with anyone willing to still debate the original point?

5 Likes
#15

Ok, I’ll bite… responding to OP’s original post:

It’s a good thing for a website about an organization dedicated to broadening the adoption of Haskell. Furthermore your fears are orthogonal to github and can happen in any project.

irrelevant to github. can happen in any project.

I really don’t see the issue tbh. and again, can happen in any project.

don’t think the haskell foundation has to worry about that.

name a better option that most people are familiar with? I don’t think the organization needs to invent the wheel in order to host a website.

then don’t worry about it :slight_smile:

I believe most of the target audience for the foundation already have a github account, but I might be wrong.

You’re saying that as if it’s a bad thing :wink:

awesome then.

1 Like
#16

How about this thread is just discarded for the (pardon my french) inflammatory bullshit it contains? I do think you are very much acting in good faith but at the same time i cannot help but perceive what you are saying as

“let’s cut this person who wrote a post with a lot of offensive talking points some slack, ignore these insulting parts and move on with the discussion”

I honestly don’t understand what merits this courtesy.

How about: “your post has some valid points that could be discussed if they were presented in a neutral and factual manner. Please rephrase and try again. Thank you”

We should extend trust to moderators to handle this, yet at the same time we should enable and support a position and writing like this? To me this doesn’t add up ;(

1 Like
#17

“let’s cut this person who wrote a post with a lot of offensive talking points some slack, ignore these insulting parts and move on with the discussion”

That’s a fair point. @belka, feel free to raise rephrase the discussion and open a new thread.

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