I think free (or "open source") and ethical mean the same in most cases.
Exceptions might include something like Facebook, which is technically somehow usable w/o non-free JS when using their basic mobile web page, but where the company is still engaging in other unethical activities, like selling user data to sway elections.
Or something like Amazon, where you might possibly be able to buy something w/o non-free JS (haven't checked), but where the treatment of their employees is unacceptable.
But, I think, when we're talking git hosting sites, there's no difference?
But FSF considers Gitlab ethical enough for hosting GNU packages[0].
As I understand it - the 'Open Source' movement concerns itself with improving the software by making the code openly accessible, where as the 'Free Software' movement concerns itself with a fighting for users rights (i.e. having the freedom to access, modify and distribute the code in a manner that empowers the user).
And so, an 'Open Source' repository holds code that is openly accessible for the purpose of improving the software. Where as an 'Ethical Repository' holds code that is graded by its' ability to guarantee users rights according to a specific set of morals (established by free software foundation). It so happens that open source repos tend to align well the ethics associated with free-software, but they should not be mistaken for each other. As an example to illustrate: If a repo SaaS were built for open source code, but restricted users from a certain country it wouldn't rank high in ethical repository grading. This is because while having the code openly accessible leans towards a Grade A rating (excellent), the restricting some users part puts it at a Grade F rating (unacceptable).
"Despite initially accepting it,[31] Richard Stallman of the FSF now flatly opposes the term "Open Source" being applied to what they refer to as "free software". Although he agrees that the two terms describe "almost the same category of software", Stallman considers equating the terms incorrect and misleading.[32] Stallman also opposes the professed pragmatism of the Open Source Initiative, as he fears that the free software ideals of freedom and community are threatened by compromising on the FSF's idealistic standards for software freedom.[33] The FSF considers free software to be a subset of open-source software, and Richard Stallman explained that DRM software, for example, can be developed as open source, despite that it does not give its users freedom (it restricts them), and thus doesn't qualify as free software.[34]"
I'm sorry it took me so long to reply to this. Basically, I don't think I've successfully explained to anyone what a hypertee is, ever. There are some places in the comments in Punctaffy where I explain them, but I haven't put in the work to make it a very well-illustrated introduction.
Lately I realized I shouldn't be representing my higher quasiquotation/hypersnippet macro system's syntax with plain old hypertees anyway, but with something I'm calling "hypernests." So I implemented hypernests... in a flawed way that didn't actually serve the purpose I expected, so now I'm in the middle of some refactoring to fix them. It's hard for me to justify talking about the things I've built in Punctaffy when I know I can explain and motivate the topic a lot better once I have a working macro system to show for it.
It never seems like it should be that much work to just take out a piece of paper and draw up some diagrams for a blog post... but whenever I get started trying to explain like that, I usually realize I've been doing certain things wrong and need to refactor.
I hope to have something soon. I've written up a lot more unit tests, and the latest refactoring of the hypernest implementation is becoming as simple as I always hoped this kind of thing could be; the primary risk I anticipate is that it'll fall into infinite loops. I technically already have a working macro system for extensible `quasiquote` which could serve as a demo, but I'm pretty sure it breaks for operators of higher dimension than `quasiquote`, and that's what my refactoring is going to fix.
---
If it helps to write a very short explanation:
In quasiquotation syntax, the unquote operation is like a 1-dimensional closing bracket, just as the closing parenthesis is a 0-dimensional closing bracket. See, the unquoted part of the code starts at one (0-dimensional) location in the text and stops at another, so it's like a line segment. We can imagine 2-dimensional closing brackets which are shaped like quasiquotations, and so on.
The 1-dimensional closing bracket actually begins with a 0-dimensional bracket that opens a 1-dimensional region that must be closed by another 0-dimensional closing bracket.
,(...)
The whole thing is the 1-dimensional closing bracket.
The parenthesis at the end is the 0-dimensional bracket that closes it.
If we write a single opening bracket, including all the closing brackets it needs, and all the closing brackets those closing brackets need, etc., I'm pretty sure we have an opetopic shape as used in higher category theory: The closing brackets are the various-dimensional source cells of the opetope.
If we label each of the closing brackets (of every dimension) of the single opening bracket with a data value -- or from another point of view, put an "unquoted expression" into every hole of our higher-quasiquotation-shaped syntax, then that's what I call a hypertee.
If we have a syntax with closing brackets and (nestable) opening brackets, and we put labels on all the closing brackets of the outermost opening bracket (labels which we can think of as "unquoted expressions") and labels on all the nested opening brackets (labels which we can think of as "operators" or "macro names" which apply to those opening brackets' contents), then that's what I call a hypernest.
Closing brackets have to be of a dimension strictly lower than the bracket they're closing. That's different from opening brackets; we can nest a high-dimensional opening bracket inside of a low-dimensional one.
Nesting opening brackets are pretty exotic if you consider them from the geometric standpoint of opetopes -- how does it make sense to have a low-dimensional shape with high-dimensional faces on it? -- but it's necessary for Punctaffy's syntax purposes. That's because we need to be able to write a quasiquotation operator of some specific dimension N that can quote any operator in the language, including those of dimension N or greater. This is why I've needed to move to hypernests for syntax lately, even though I spent a lot of time thinking I could get by with hypertees.
Do you happen to remember how long ago this was? If it was more than 30 days ago I may well have accepted and forgotten, and see no trace of it in my email's trash.
Adding people to organizations without informing them seems like a bad idea. It's also not what GitHub does, and GitHub is who all these sites are copying, so shouldn't be happening.
> It insinuates that non-free software is unethical when the majority of non-free software has no nefarious intent or code.
The term can also be used by people who consider it unethical to even give programmers the possibility to hide nefarious code from users, regardless whether they actually do or not.
> The term can also be used by people who consider it unethical to even give programmers the possibility to hide nefarious code from users, regardless whether they actually do or not.
But that's not what's happening here. They are categorically demonizing innocent people.
> They are categorically demonizing innocent people.
I'm sorry; that was not my intention.
Perhaps I can make a comparison to clarify? As an example, some people think that guns are unethical because they may be seen as an unjust instrument of violence. Even if a particular gun hasn't killed anyone (yet), or even if most guns happened not to be used to kill, then surely it can still be legitimate for people to object to the passive presence of guns, because it gives gun owners the power to kill, and that power may be considered unjust by principle.
Similarly, some people think that non-free software is unethical because it gives programmers the power to do bad stuff, regardless of whether some particular non-free program is actually malware (yet).
(Sorry in advance if I've derailed this discussion into a more controversial subject.)
(continuing the discussion for clarity... no emotional connotation is intended)
I realize this is a comparison for clarification, but isn't it still just 'categorically demonizing innocent people'?
You picked a more controversial topic where more people are likely to agree with the demonization I suppose, but your assertion that the power to kill "may be considered unjust by principle" is not well supported by vague assertions that "some think" guns "may be seen as" unjust instruments of violence. I fully support everyone's right to object to something they see as dangerous; opinion does not constitute principle, however.
To me, something is just or unjust based on whether or not it aligns with or infringes anyone's rights. So, I suppose I might actually agree that a power could be "unjust in principle" if it could be shown that the power could not be used justly - that is, without infringing on anyone else's rights. For some powers, mostly political ones, this is the case. In this case I think guns may be a poor comparison, because they actually can be used in ways which are just (defense, etc.), even if you believe that those cases are unlikely and so desire strict gun control, etc.
In contrast, it may be that producing nonfree software is always 'wrong' (in that it infringes on the supposed rights of the users to understand and modify the program they are running) and therefore having or providing the power to do so would be 'unjust in principle'. If the concern is merely that some may produce malware, and there are actually legitimate reasons for producing nonfree software, then it is not unjust in principle to do so, or to provide someone with said power.
I hope I've understood all that correctly, and restated it well. I'm not sure that I agree with the idea that nonfree software is always bad, but I am open to it. Perhaps what I'm missing is a clear understanding of the specific rights that nonfree software violates.
No worries, I know you (as well as the authors) are simply trying to apply implicit safety measures to counter bad actors. And I'm certainly not offended by you adopting the program. It's my feeling, however, that their approach is horribly wrong and bordering on corruption. I simply don't believe they will have any success when trampling over the good actors in their process of trying to better the world. IMO; If they really wanted to make a dent, they should push for a regulation requiring that browsers provide functionality that enforces a free-software configuration OPTION. Then allow society to decide for themselves (this is a free world after all). I'd even be ok if the default setting was on. But as it sits right now they will get nowhere really fast.
edit: oh and as for the gun analogy... I'm from Canada and fully support gun control (we have it), but I'm not going around and implying that every gun owner is unethical in the process of asking for gun control. That would be shooting myself in the foot!
> IMO; If they really wanted to make a dent, they should push for a regulation requiring that browsers provide functionality that enforces a free-software configuration OPTION.
Sounds interesting. Apart from the regulation part, it sounds a bit like LibreJS[0].
Actually, I got the notion from Stallman's original post 'The Javascript Trap' [1].
"Finally, we need to change free browsers to detect and block nontrivial nonfree JavaScript in web pages. The program LibreJS detects nonfree, nontrivial JavaScript in pages you visit, and blocks it. LibreJS is included in IceCat, and available as an add-on for Firefox."
However I am opposed to that call for action given it's an all-or-none implementation. I feel it's the role of each country to regulate, which is why I expressly suggested it as a configuration option (ideally it could be enforced at the browser level country by country and if not then user by user).
It seems like the thesis here is that whether or not "non-trivial" Javascript (which is just about all Javascript in the wild) should be trusted depends on the presence of an explicit GPL license. If so, that doesn't seem like a reliable heuristic for a script blocker to me.
I'm pretty sure it would be similar to ad-blockers. The initial implementations are trivial and easily circumvented, but as they evolve they become more useful overall.
Plus note that I was just suggesting that it would be more effective than a social movement with 'ethical repositories'. Just imagine if the ad-blocker devs tried the same strategy...
I think Gogs/Gitea is interesting in that it's super lightweight and shipped a self-contained binary, that's up and running in seconds. (Gitlab recommends at least 4GB of free memory[0])
Perhaps that is not relevant when someone else is doing the hosting, but I've gotten used to Gogs/Gitea now.
Interesting. That does sound somewhat attractive. I do occasionally try to run a git repository myself, and while I appreciate that Gitlab is open source, it was a bit cumbersome to set up.
I note that notabug said it was powered by a liberated version of gogs. What are they referring to there? Was something not sufficiently free about the original?
Tweets can be missed. Perhaps we should email hn@ycombinator.com.
I've been reluctant to do this, because the outcome may well be, "wait, is this old site really still up? Let's just take it down." :) Don't mind li'l ol' us out here, we're no trouble, no trouble at all..
edit: I'm ok if they take it down. I'll know where to go via the anarki wiki (if someone updates it). And it may actually be better if they do take it down IMHO as it will force everyone to find a place with more control over the setup.
I think if we fork the community site to run on anarki. which I think is more likely than being given control over the Arc Forum, we should consider ways to archive and bring forward all of the stuff on the existing arc forum. It shouldn't be too hard to crawl the forum, though I think there might be some DoS prevention that would slow it down.
> "wait, is this old site really still up? Let's just take it down."
That is a valid concern. Perhaps, we could ask that if YC chooses to shut it down, could they at least give someone here a copy of the `www` folder?
Then someone could take over hosting this forum (which possibly might be on a different domain).
I have a somewhat reliable server running anyway, and it wouldn't be a problem for me to do this, but if someone else could do it, that would also be great.
But yes, worst case scenario is that this site is nuked. But that would just be such a disrespectful response, so I kinda doubt it..?
