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Almost Everything We Do Will Be Open

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201–208 of 208 posts

Re: Almost Everything We Do Will Be Open

#201
post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you stand by your decision to remove a repo for political reasons?

I prefer not to talk about GamerGate anymore. I've made many public comments about this and have nothing more to add.

The topic is your removal of a community organizing resource. You made false accusations about the group, so you should have expected disapprobation from them.

You still have not apologized.

Re: Almost Everything We Do Will Be Open

#203

GitLab Enterprise user here. GitLab's open-source policy is one of the major reasons we chose it (along with self-hosting and fairly modern, built-in continuous integration), but the GitLab community could use some additional design and documentation effort. Things that almost make me want to switch back to GitHub: - GitLab is really hard to look at. All of our devs are having trouble visually locating comments in di…

Thanks for the feedback, we really appreciate it! The quick reply to your comments is: we're working on almost all of it. > - GitLab is really hard to look at. All of our devs are having trouble visually locating comments in diffs. We're always scrolling through the left-side menu looking for the issues tab. It's hard to visually differentiate between items like comments in merge requests. Our eyes just can't find an…

> We're working hard on this and focus more and more of our development capacity to this.

No, no, no. :) It's not a development thing, it's a design thing. The good part is that your users are well-defined - developers; you could do a great job there, but don't allocate your developers to it. Hire or contract someone experienced in UX.

P.S. With a good UX work, you might end up not only bettering GitLab's layout but also discovering new, differentiating and truly useful (user-wise) features.

Re: Almost Everything We Do Will Be Open

#204
post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many major platforms only take down content based on takedown requests and not by their own initiative? We care deeply about free speech too, but please get your own server https://xkcd.com/1357/

http://sealedabstract.com/rants/re-xkcd-1357-free-speech/ 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…

Completely agree with this. If Gitlab is not willing to have a clear policy regarding takedowns I will never be a customer. I paid for Github service for years and pulled my stuff once they decided to get political.

I really wanted to like Gitlab but a "case-by-case" policy basically means "whatever we feel like," and that is not an acceptable standard for something as important as my work.

Re: Almost Everything We Do Will Be Open

#205
post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We make decisions on a case by case basis and people can judge for themselves if they think it is reasonable. Clearly defining where you stand is very hard, and we don't think we'll do a good job at it. Giving a definition and then backtracking won't win us any fans either. Anyway, it will be more PG-13 than the old Reddit.

Under a case by case basis I cannot read the rules and know that my repository won't be deleted by gitlab at some point in the future. Why would I ever consider trust gitlab with data vital to the future of my company without that certainty?

We'll never delete data, we will make the repositories private. You will have to move your public project elsewhere. For significant projects we're open to making it public when you've replaced the repo with one announcing the new location.

Re: Almost Everything We Do Will Be Open

#206
post #31

Announcement itself is fine. The way you contrast "open" with "proprietary" is a bit jarring. It should be free versus proprietary, but if you find that undesirable, then just go with open/closed. EDIT: Quite predictably, I got downvoted for asking people to use proper terminology and for promoting free software.

People just hate when you correct their semantics, don't take it personally. Many people also don't know the difference between free and open. Here's a popular article by RMS which explains the difference: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.e...

That ship has sailed. Today, "open source" means "free" in Stallman's terminology. Asking people to use nonstandard terminology in order to promote a particular viewpoint is not reasonable.

Re: Almost Everything We Do Will Be Open

#207
post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends on how you interpret the XKCD comic. It often gets used to argue "institutions have the moral right to block people if they have unpopular opinions", which goes against the spirit of free speech (even if it's not illegal). I don't know if that's it's original intent - it might just mean "You can't claim you have a constitutional right to swear at people on my forum". A public forum (which GitLab isn't - it…

> It depends on how you interpret the XKCD comic 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 philos…

Can you recommend other authors/books for people who want to educate themselves on this subject?

Re: Almost Everything We Do Will Be Open

#208
post #193
post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just as an aside - we seem to be crossing paths a lot on here... 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…

Thanks! We're hiring https://about.gitlab.com/jobs/ Our lawyer will also study this comment. I'm sure he'll discourage us from offering guaranties against tears in the space-time continuum. Have a good night.

Our lawyer reviewed it and made the following changes, https://dev.gitlab.org/gitlab/gitlab-ee/merge_requests/479/d... Thank again!
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