[Mostly off-topic] > Pretty harsh is the right word. I do not agree with all their > measures, but for the FSF, it is logical. Agreed. Whatever one's opinion of the FSF, they are consistent with their views and explain them clearly. > Nevertheless, the relative order they have come up between Gitlab and > Github makes sense to me. Also agreed. Interestingly, GitLab is from Ukraine. But like most big companies they opened a branch in the US so it remains to be seen if their fate is any different from GitHub. For a large social network owned by Microsoft, GitHub's track record is unbelievably good so far. Centralized social networks are so valuable that all of the commercial ones will probably end up being owned by a big US, Chinese, or Russian company eventually. It's hard to see how to solve the problem without a fundamentally decentralized infrastructure. Telegram (the messaging app) is trying by being a non-profit with independently wealthy founders. Since social networks are completely dominated by network effects, the decentralized ones need to be made as convenient to use as the centralized ones. Distributed VCS was a brilliant move in that respect. > There was also a takedown request from Spain if I read correctly. There was. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_Tsunami>. Those people called it protest while the government called it terrorism. > That's very problematic. And each single case must be considered > individually. However, it is not so clear to me how much Github can do > against the requests even if they want to. The only reasonable other > answer they could give would be to stop their service in Russia and > China. Agreed. GitHub has 50 takedown requests against 100 million repos. It's not really possible for a company of that size to have a more responsible track record than they do. I used to be quite concerned with ethics earlier in life but that is not sustainable for most of us. In order to change society one has to change what most people do, and we all go by convenience in most areas of life. The things that make the better option fun to use are the ones that win goodwill among regular people and make inroads into wider society. Free software and open source made great strides in the face of improbable odds, spreading over all areas of computing. The coming tidal wave is that other people are using software _on us_ at all times and we won't be able to opt out of it without opting out of society [1]. It's like passive smoking and free software cannot address it effectively. The problem is so pervasive that the only solution is legislative. [1] https://www.theonion.com/google-opt-out-feature-lets-users-protect-privacy-by-mo-1819594840
