Telling the Stupid Truth

2011-06-08 rant

Someone linked me this thread on the python-ldap mailing list earlier today. In summary, the maintainer of python-ldap doesn't want his code to be on services like Github for "legal reasons" - he thinks they're going to be bought out by some evil company who claims ownership of all user code. Now, do note that the CVS repo for python-ldap is hosted on SourceForge.

It would appear that Mr. Ströder's main concern is that he doesn't want to read and understand the terms of use of Github, citing the fact that he is "not a lawyer". Again, this is in spite of the fact that Sourceforge also has terms of use that... were written by either a lawyer or someone who writes like one?

So, let's pull out the relevant parts of the terms of use of each of these, and compare and contrast. Here's SourceForge:

You retain your ownership rights to any and all of Your Content. Geeknet claims no ownership of any Content you submit to Geeknet. You or your third party licensor, as applicable, retain all intellectual property rights to any Content and you are responsible for protecting those rights, as appropriate.

And Github:

We claim no intellectual property rights over the material you provide to the Service. Your profile and materials uploaded remain yours. However, by setting your pages to be viewed publicly, you agree to allow others to view your Content. By setting your repositories to be viewed publicly, you agree to allow others to view and fork your repositories.

Even the most in-depth reading of these terms shows them to be functionally equivalent. Nothing in either set of Terms of Use indicates that the terms of service will not change.

So, this brings us to my greater rant: Don't make up stupid reasons for not using tools. We all have our preferred tools - my friend Rich likes C# on Windows. I like Ruby on Slackware Linux. The fact that we even have such varied services as Github, SourceForge, Google Code. and even Codeplex is a testament to the tenacity, productiveness, and variety of the open source world. We have dozens of hosting services, a couple dozen source code management utilities, a few hundred languages, and about a dozen active operating systems available to us.

Okay, so different people prefer different things, and Michael Ströder doesn't want to use Github. That's fine! I don't have a problem with that. If you don't want to use a tool for any reason, just say so! It's cool, do what you want. Just don't make up lame excuses. Put on your big girl panties, and proudly proclaim, "I don't like putting my code on Github because they use light blue links for everything!" If that's your real reason, then go with it - we'll respect your intellectual honesty. We'll still call you stupid, but we'll then go back to writing code in vim because GUIs are for button clickers and hooligans.

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