Almost Everything We Do Will Be Open

I think you should just hire me as your PR and/or developer guy ;). It's always good to have a guy with a different perspective who thinks and plays outside the box. I mean inside the box is so boring....

> I do wonder how would you define the patch file?

Something like....

> A patch file contains the modified file name, author of the change, date, hash with snippets of content recording the changes. A patch file cannot contain enough information to reconstruct the software in whole or modify the CE to include copyrighted features in the EE edition. The author must not knowingly introduce backdoors, exploits, or other code that introduces malicious intent. If the author is identified their gitlab EE license will be revoked irrevocably and permanently and requested to halt any use of gitlab EE.

(However - a patch may still introduce features from the EE edition that were written with original code)

> A patch may be released under whatever license or agreements the author wants without the requirement for permission from Gitlab if it satisfies the previous conditions.

It might be good to add a clause:

> By applying a third party patch you agree to not hold Gitlab liable for any damages or misconfigurations that might happen by applying the patch. You acknowledge by applying a third party patch that it may fix your problem, introduce a new problem, or open a tear in the space-time continuum.

I'm sure you get the idea. I'm tired and I just watched an episode of Doctor Who - so I had to include something related to time :).

If you are legally required to take something down it is kind of different from when you freely choose to do so because you find the content objectionable on ideological grounds. In this case you decided to act against the principles of free speech and network neutrality of your own free will.

Some for instance (GitHub, BitBucket, Google Code) also decided to remove the satirical "C+=" repo from their service, you didn't: https://gitlab.com/femsf/c-plus-equality

For interested parties, there is actually a server that has existed for a while, but this is mostly about the choices you make as a company in the wake of GitHub deleting repos over the use of the word "retarded" and employing an intentionally discriminatory Code of Conduct: https://gitgud.io/gamergate/gamergateop/tree/master

Nobody is arguing this isn't your right as a company, they are just questioning your judgment and reason and if their projects are safe with a company that will remove something that doesn't intellectually agree with the political stance of its CEO.

All these people you saw surging to your service the other day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10003334

Most of them don't want to deal with the volatility of a professional environment where someone just has to be "offended" and their work could be arbitrarily pulled.

Why would I ever consider trust gitlab with data vital to the future of my company without that certainty?

1. References to pokemon on main pages 2. Confusing names for features 3. Written in PHP (this was an initial bias from my prior experience with the language and belief that such a language wouldn't be used to maintain a large-scale application).

These three points led me to believe that Phabricator was not a first-party application but just PHP glue tying together other open source applications. With this in mind, along with the pokemon, I wrote it off as some highschool/college project and turned my attention elsewhere.

I took a fresh look at it in 2014 and realized several of these misconceptions. The developers of Phab tend to be light-hearted and embrace some humor in development. This has proven to be valuable in sustaining good-natured development teams and keeping code-criticisms well-intentioned. They also have a "serious" setting which tones down some of the language in the application itself.

The feature names can be confusing, which is a valid criticism though after a week or so it doesn't tend to interfere with work. The most difficulty in adopting Phabricator has been getting developers to understand the different development workflow to utilize the code review. Our team sizes range from ~3 to ~8 and haven't had any major problems.

They have an IRC channel which is usually pretty active, and I'm sure any questions or concerns you have can be brought up there.

We've been using it since ~Febuary 2015 and it's been a terrific addition to our development.

Unless either of us can find Randall explaining his intent somewhere (and even then; death of the author probably applies - how sytse used the comic is equally important) all we can do is go by it's working. The comic doesn't say "The First Amendment", it says "Freedom of Speech".

I won't say that the average netizen shouting freedom of speech is educated on the philosophy of liberty or has read JS Mill (I haven't, I need too). But when they say freedom of speech about forums. Freedom of Speech is still a human right, not a clause in the USA constitution. I still think it's a strawman to respond by pointing the limits of the First Amendment.

> Of course, Mill assumed that most people are capable of rational thought, and would generally move towards a more correct view of the world when exposed to a marketplace of ideas. The internet doesn't always work like that. However, the alternative to "free speech" is echo chambers, which is probably worse.

On Liberty was written in 1859. It's an indisputable fact that in all forms of social justice - sexual equality, racial equality, LGBT rights, and far far more - things have been improved enormously during the last 66 years. If Mills ideas have either influenced or reflected the political philosophies of the those 66 years then clearly he's onto something.

Even the internet doesn't change much, human nature is still human nature. Besides, to pick a date, the internet has only been influential since September 1993. Social justice has mostly gotten better since 1993 even if online discourse has gotten worse. It's premature to say we the world is too different to go by On Liberty.

After 66 years of liberty bringing progress we should only attempt to replace liberal ideas with the utmost care, thought and deliberation. And when I see people arguing to limit freedom of speech, I do not see that care and deliberation; if I did a comic saying that Freedom of Speech was merely a clause in one country's legal code would never have gotten popular.

> But I don't see why GitLab has any real responsibility to allow stuff that's not code (or is just joke code) - it's not a really a marketplace of ideas, it's a place to share code.

If they had a clearly written rule saying only code is aloud, or only code and documentation relating to code is aloud then that would be fine.

However once GitLab starts judging repositories based on the ideas they contain and deleting legal repositories they dislike then they have crossed the line.