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And Github manages to shoot their own foot again: https://daplie.com/articles/why-github-took-down-daplie/
I can understand why they don't want ads in a README, but the whole thing stinks of a power trip. They should at least have related their actions to their own terms of service and send an email to the owners of the repo informing them of why their repo was turned private.
GH is well within their right to not want to be an ad platform, but put kiwi like that in your ToS. It's not like a good lawyer can't think of "people may put ads in their repo's", thinking of ways people may abuse your service is their job and you pay them well for it.
But most of all, don't take unilateral actions unless you can point to a ToS violation or the law. Nobody likes companies with "we do whatever we feel like" policies.-
@verius This is why most TOS have those blanket "we can do whatever for any reason" backup clauses, but really, it sets a bad precedent.
And I don't say that because of the ad thing. I don't care about that actually, insofar as them hosting it. I'd avoid a project that had such ads as a personal choice, but I don't care if Github does or does not host projects with ads as a policy point. It's a side issue at best to me.
The bad precedent here is in the method they went about this, in my opinion. There was no real communication to the project owners. They weren't given a chance to take corrective action prior to the takedown. They were immediately taken down and the project owners had to find out on their own. That's just a bad way of doing things in general. There are cases where it would be justified (clear and present legal problems that a project presents to GitHub for instance), but that wasn't it. It shows how little care is given to such matters.-
@verius Personally, given my own experience with GitHub after I was banned for forking a project "without permission" (you don't need permission to fork a GPLv2 project, incidentally, and to impose such a restriction is in direct contravention of the license), I am hardly surprised to learn they deal with others in similarly heavy-handed measures.
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@verius That was the official reason anyways. The unofficial reason is the people running the project in question was influential in socjus circles at the time and made a big stink about opinions I expressed on Twitter (that weren't related at all to the project). I'd contributed to the project before then, but went to fork it when I had that falling out.
I don't want to go into too many details because I contributed using an alias I don't really need to link back to my actual identity and end up dealing with all the baggage all over again.
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@maiyannah Exactly. There was no rush, no threat to Github itself. Even a marginal threat of "some bad publicity because we allow ads" would have been diffused by Github commenting if asked that they've contacted the owner of the repos and are working with them to get things cleaned up.
If Github wants to market to companies they need to act reasonably. Companies do not like vital infrastructure providers acting without warning.-
@verius It's exactly why I used git.gnu.io and later now my own gitlab for postactiv and our own projects - I do not trust them as an infrastucture provider not to apple me, so I self-host, which honestly is probably ideal anyways.
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@maiyannah Well, to be fair, I don't trust any infrastructure provider fully. In my experience any service you don't fully control yourself is going to bite you sooner or later. The ones you do fully control also do, but at least you can try to fix it yourself.
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@maiyannah @verius As you both said, they're just shooting themselves. Without a legal risk for the hosting company over the content, not telling the uploader "you have x time to take this down because y" or "we preemptively blocked x from access because y goes against site policy" will only cause the hosting service to be seen as powertripping jerks regardless of whether the TOS allows such action.
Saturday, 31-Dec-16 11:03:11 UTC from web-
@nerthos @maiyannah The thing with an "whatever, whenever" clause in a ToS is that it gives a degree of protection against legal attacks. A wise company realizes that it does help with PR fallout.
A wise and mature company also has procedures in place, vetted by legal and PR, to prevent situations like this.
Stuff like this tells me Github is not a mature company.-
@verius @nerthos Most of these start-ups do not take matters like these seriously in a way that's fair to anyone but themselves, no.
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@verius @nerthos Well, they still act like one, don't they? And to be fair, some inexperience and mistakes are a natural part of making a company. You're going to have some mishaps, do some things you shouldn't, and make some mistakes that anger people. If they're a mature company, as you suggest, they will have learned from that, and taken the steps to go through these policies and potential problems they could have, and developed strategies for them. They self-evidently have not. They're still acting like novices.
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@maiyannah Anything that can be compared to furry forum drama is enough to show the company's administration is not porfessional, and this can.
Saturday, 31-Dec-16 11:17:56 UTC from web-
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@maiyannah Thank you, I try.
Saturday, 31-Dec-16 11:23:12 UTC from web
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@maiyannah @nerthos I think it's the culture over in the valley and in GH specifically. It always feels a bit Peter Pan-y: don't grow up.
While I'm not a Gitlab fanboy they do tend to handle PR stuff better by having their executives being on top of that. It's PR of course but it does work. Github on the other hand comes across as arrogant.
Being powerful can offset the negative effects of being arrogant for some time, but eventually you'll run into a newcomer who will use it against you to great effect. 2016 has plenty of examples of that.
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