This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU Affero General Public License for more details. You should have received a copy of the GNU Affero General Public License along with this program. If not, see . */ ?> Please do not use GitHub!

Please do not use GitHub!

Please do not use GitHub to host . is a free software project, so this is only a request, and not a restriction on the software.

Don't use gitorious, either.

What's wrong with GitHub?

  • GitHub itself is proprietary software (Tim reasons it's for business [1])
  • A patch[2] to choose a license was received with some hostility.
  • Tim really likes to talk about freedom, but makes the following claims about the GPLv2/3:

...The GPL is not focused on freedom. It's too long. Too many restrictions. -- Tom Preston-Werner OSCON2013

or how about:

Notice that everything we keep closed has specific business value that could be compromised by giving it away to our competitors. -- Tom Preston-Werner's blog

GitHub simply uses Free Software for its own benefit, releasing source code under a free license only when suited to it's business goals; they are quite happy to violate the rights of their users, for profit.

By contrast, the project adheres strictly to the goals of the Free Software movement, which seeks to eliminate proprietary software to the point where all software is free.

The opinions expressed by Tom Preston-Werner of GitHub are incompatible with those of the project. Users and developers of free software are strongly advised not to use GitHub, for any of their projects.

Where should I host and share my code?

Here are a few examples:

  • Host your own repositories. This is exactly what libreboot does, hosted on a machine that is running libreboot! You can use a frontend like gitweb for easy viewing by others.

[1] Open Source (Almost) - http://tom.preston-werner.com/2011/11/22/open-source-everything.html

[2] Choose A License GPL patch - https://github.com/github/choosealicense.com/pull/177

[3] linux-libre choosealicense issue - http://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/gnu-linux-libre/2014-08/msg00013.html

This text on this page was adapted from http://librecmc.org/librecmc/wiki?name=github, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 like the original.

Back to home page