11.08.21
Gemini version available ♊︎Any Ongoing Participation in GitHub Helps Microsoft Attack Free Software
Video download link | md5sum bce590b7c85c676c4a9210f152a277cd
Summary: Microsoft’s GitHub is going down the drain because of a pile-up of scandals; the reason GitHub’s CEO is thrown under the bus is face-saving efforts or ‘crisis management’ (mitigation) by Microsoft and we strongly urge people to leave GitHub right now because there’s a lot more to come
THIS morning we published Part 5 of an ongoing series about GitHub’s internal affairs [1, 2, 3, 4].
Over the past few years we’ve consistently campaigned for people to abandon GitHub and move to self-hosting or some provider that’s more freedom-respecting.
Months ago Microsoft took the gloves off; it made it beyond apparent that it had planned to weaponise GitHub against GPL/copyright/coipyleft. That’s what Copilot is all about.
At the moment there’s a crisis at GitHub, but Microsoft tries hard to keep it under the wraps; the removal of Friedman is only the start of it. Next week we’ll publish Part 6 and get a little deeper or closer to the core of the problem.
“Git as a command line program keeps things nice and simple, unlike GitHub, which one cannot even control (it is entirely proprietary), so one does not need to dislike Microsoft to fully understand the urgent need to abandon that platform.”The video above is an unplanned and unedited ramble; but the key point is in the latter part, which shows how we’re managing Git graphically, not with a Web GUI but a Gemini GUI that we’ve hand-crafted. Later in the series (maybe the start of next year) we’ll show how easy that is to implement and maintain. A lot of Web interfaces of Git are a bloated mess that’s very expensive and complicated to maintain in the long run. Maybe those take an hour (or a lot less) to install, configure, set up for one’s repository/ies. But all the incidents, upgrades, costs etc. can last years. Git as a command line program keeps things nice and simple, unlike GitHub, which one cannot even control (it is entirely proprietary), so one does not need to dislike Microsoft to fully understand the urgent need to abandon that platform. In GitHub, there’s only one master — Microsoft — and everybody else is a slave. The issue is the topology of coercion, not the words.
While testing the video above I realised I had made an error near the very beginning; I meant to say this is the first part (Part 6) since Friedman had announced his impending departure; I diverged or veered into another topic and so that sentence of mine never ended. █
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