I’m not super opposed, but Drew can be pretty over the top ideological/irritable for my tastes (at least that’s my perception from reading his blog). I’m not sure I want to invest in his platform if he could just boot me over an Internet disagreement or something. Yeah, I can back up my stuff, but at a certain point I may as well self-host.
In the history of SourceHut, only one person (setting aside spam/crypto-miner bots) has been banned from the platform. They were harassing maintainers and failed to respond to an email inquiry seeking to discuss their behavior before resorting to a ban.
I have strong principles and I stand steadfast by them. However, one of those principles is tolerance for different views. I want SourceHut to be available for everyone, even if we don't see eye-to-eye. You won't be booted off if you and I happen to end up in an argument somewhere online.
I've made myself personally available to users, as a person they can directly reach about problems and concerns with the services, rather than a support ticket answered by a random lackey. I think this is very valuable. Software is made by people. One of the risks that comes with this, however, is that people can start to view SourceHut and my private identity tangled together. Rest assured, they are separate, and I treat SourceHut with a great deal of deliberate professionalism and reverence for our users.
I wonder if a public ban log would reduce food fights. Nothing too fancy. Maybe just date, account name, cite terms violated, optionally cite evidence, admin actions taken. No need for comments, discussion, whatever.
Then whenever the peanut gallery starts concern trolling, you can just link to the ban log entry. Instead of explaining yourself, yet again.
Maybe. Even if someone is banned, I still care about their privacy, and I would not want to disclose that they were banned. Providing this information also provides useful feedback to malicious actors like spammers, who are ordinarily banned in a means which makes it difficult for them to tell when an account is burned.
SourceHut is not a social network and does not have particularly arduous moderation needs. It's vanishingly rare for us to ban someone at all for this reason. We additionally provide banned users with a complete data export and tools to re-import that data into other SourceHut instances or instances using compatible software, so they are not left without options.
If someone feels slighted by moderation on SourceHut, I would invite them to speak publicly about it. I'm prepared to justify our actions in the court of public opinion with consent from the maligned.
He basically ignores anyone who has or currently does work at any company he deems unethical (read: Google/Amazon/Facebook/etc). You're forever tainted in his eyes, and your opinions are always only useful if someone else agrees with you that isn't tainted.
Which really sucks because his entire software stack depends on the work (and opinions) of the people that he discards: Go, Python, and Git for a few.
But is he right? At what point is it unethical for an ethical person to continue to work for an unethical company? When should people who work for an unethical face personal negative effects?
He's not unique in this viewpoint. Quoting jwz: "As I've said before, if you work for Facebook, you should quit; it's the only morally defensible thing for you to do."
> his entire software stack depends ...
That sounds like the Mr. Gotcha meme: https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/ . Again referring to jwz, his nightclub is on Facebook and Instagram because it's not economically viable to avoid them. ... Gotcha!
Similarly, it's hard to avoid all software which doesn't have influence from the big tech companies. I used https://github.com/swenson/sort ('Sorting routine implementations in "template" C"), and even this little indy package has contributors from Google Inc and the main developer worked at Google for a year.
DeVault's working on a new programming language, Hare. You could view that as having the long-term unstated goal of escaping unethical companies.
I think the other comment was right to call them out on hypocrisy. There really are people out there who put their beliefs before their own comfort and even productivity (see: Richard Stallman). Now, that doesn't make them right, but if you're going to defend an opinion, you may as well go all the way. Personally, seeing petty behavior like this doesn't exactly fill me with confidence for whatever product they maintain. I wish I could get paid to maintain random OSS projects too, but the lights gotta stay on and $3 GitHub donations only take you so far. There's nothing evil about working at a company like Facebook unless you're an evil person.
I only gave source hut as an example. Maybe there are other projects like source hut that you might like, but are not ethically challenged like GitHub, that you might support?
The larger point still stands though. Instead of consumers simply supporting the biggest players in the market (because of convenience), it would be nice to give smaller players (who are not shady) a chance?
> I’m not sure I want to invest in his platform if he could just boot me over an Internet disagreement or something.
There's a wide gap between being irritable and being unprofessional. Nothing I've seen so far in regards to how SourceHut is being managed, indicate that you'd have such problems. (I'm saying this as a long time user of SoutrceHut and as someone that got into arguments with Drew)
Self hosting is OK. I self host my personal projects and a few work ones (the ones with a customer that basically doesn't know what code is.) I usually don't want anyone else to look at them though. I let some friends work with me on some of them. If I need strangers or customers to look / work at the code it's been GitHub, GitLab or Bitbucket.
The iPhone App Store terms still conflicts with the GPL, right?
If so, isn't that also "over the top ideological"? After all, we know Apple's opposition to the GPL dates back to the early 1990s when NeXT used gcc for Objective C, and their rejection of GPLv3 caused them to ship ancient versions of bash, recently replaced with zsh, so it's not like they weren't aware of the GPL.
Some people use Linux (the moral equivalent to "self-host") to avoid Apple's ideological stance.
Which, from a business standpoint, makes for a marketing opportunity for a FOSS-aligned source code hosting company. Which takes us from an ideological position to an economics one.
(To quote Bill Hicks: “Oh, you know what Bill’s doing? He’s going for that anti-marketing dollar. That’s a good market. He’s very smart.”)
I’m not super opposed, but Drew can be pretty over the top ideological/irritable for my tastes (at least that’s my perception from reading his blog). I’m not sure I want to invest in his platform if he could just boot me over an Internet disagreement or something. Yeah, I can back up my stuff, but at a certain point I may as well self-host.