[Discuss] Aspiring Grumpy Unix Admin

[Rick Moen]

Quoting admin via Discuss (discuss at lists.bclug.ca):

> Do you have a github account?
> 
> Are you reasonably competent with the git command?
> 
> You'll find both beneficial. Github is the place for tech portfolios.

That's an opinion.  

A different perspective is that it's a slightly pushy proprietary
software business, based in San Francisco and lately owned by Microsoft
Corporation, that somehow conned a lot of people into confusing it with
git, the (backing, in GitHub, Inc.'s case) data store.

I've used git for about as long as git has existed, have been a senior
Ops guy for decades, and have been a member of the Linux community since
1993, but I gave a pass to signing for a contractual relationship with
GitHub, Inc., and giving a bunch of legal rights to that corporation and
its business partners, just for the "AOL appeal" (i.e., everyone ought
to be on AOL because everyone's on AOL) of a trendy proprietary,
for-profit hosted service.

Remember the Linux Documentation Project?  I do, because I maintain a
HOWTO and a FAQ for TLDP.  But I can tell you when it crumbled and
de-facto collapsed, and it involved GitHub, Inc.

It was 10 January 2016.  I politely inquired on TLDP's "discuss" mailing
list as to why my new submissions of SGML source, had, for a few years
running, not being picked up and merged as normal.  As per documented
process, I'd been e-mailing revised SMGL to submit at en.tldp.org.   A
genleman named Serge Victor <dr.serge at random.re>, whom I'd never
encountered before in all my years as an TLDP maintainer, finally
answered:  He claimed he was now the only TLDP administrator, and had in
his sole judgement deleted TLDP's self-hosted CVS repositories and
re-hosted everything onto GitHub.  So, he said, it was easy:  All I
needed to do was sign up for a GitHub account, and submit my revisions
that way, as a GitHub pull request.

Er, hold on, I said.  I have no special desire to enter into a business
relationship with that corporation, or agree to its Terms of Service.  
I just want to give you a copy of a creative work under a copyleft
licence?  Can you handle that, Serge?  Is TLDP interested in
contributions from the community any more, or is it not?

*crickets*

Well, not quite crickets.  First, Serge angrily argued that I ought to
have no problem with GitHub, because it was just git, and open source.
I proved to him that it was _neither_ synonymous with git nor open
source.  That's when I got *crickets*.


Roll forward to 11 February 2019, not long after the corporate buyout by
Redmond.  I gave it one last try, once again on the public
discuss at en.tldp.org mailing list:

---<snip>---


Quoting Serge Victor (dr.serge at random.re), replying to a different HOWTO
author:

> Hi, would it be possible that you add the howto directly to our GIT
> repository at
>
> https://github.com/tLDP/LDP
>
> as a Pull Request?

You know, Serge, on a different but closely related matter:

On 10 Jan 2016, after I'd been getting my submissions of SGML updates to
submit at en.tldp.org ignored for several years, I inquired on this mailing
list, and you advised that LDP is done entirely through GitHub, now, by
decision of -- well, you.  I said whatever works for you is great, but
that I wasn't going to agree to a customer contract with a proprietary
software company (which is what 'getting a GitHub account' means), just
in order to contribute volunteer works to LDP.  I said it'd be really
nice if I could just send the new version some other way.  You made no
reply.

On 25 Feb 2016, I advised this mailing list that a major update of the
Linux User Group HOWTO, v. 1.8.5, was available, and would continue to
be so, at http://linuxmafia.com/lug/User-Group-HOWTO.sgml  . You and
others made no reply.  (It's now up to 1.8.7.)

On 4 June 2018, Microsoft Corporation bought GitHub, Inc. for US $7.5
billion.

If TLDP would like to gratuitously alienate open source people, I think
you've found a good way to do it, but that's just my opinion.  But, my
work remains very welcome as a contribution to LDP, and, if you wish to
fetch version 1.8.7 and check it into Microsoft's site or anywhere else
you prefer, that would be super, and certainly IMO would be beneficial
for LDP.

If you'd rather not, then I guess my TLDP documents are going to remain
forked until something changes on the TLDP end.   I'll be still around,
waiting politely.  So will my work.  After all, it's open source --
unlike GitHub.

---<snip>---


Serge stuck resolutely with his "my way or the highway" attitude, so
that was the end of that -- and I notice that some dozens of other LDP
authors seem to have noticed, because they all walked away, too.
And that seems to have completed the collapse of TLDP, to the best of my
ability to tell.

What was really pathetic?  Serge _truly_ seems to have believed that
Torvalds runs GitHub, and that all of that proprietary service not
proprietary but GPL -- because git is.  Even when I mentioned the
_Microsoft ownership_ plus the huge binary-only proprietary site
software, he at least _claimed_ to still think that.

That would be an example of how, in my view, GitHub, Inc. ended up
conning a bunch of people who really ought to have known better.