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Comment by sethherr | Hacker News Reader

See, here's the thing: I don't want free private repos to exist. What GitHub has done is incentive making things open source, and that's immeasurably valuable.

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I agree that this has been a very positive effect. On the other hand forcing people to make code public when they might not want to might lead to problems when people are haunted by code they didn't intent to be read by others.

Nobody is forcing anybody to make their code public. It's their choice. You can have your code on your machine and on your servers only. Hosting your code is an option.

And what if you are working with more than one person on the same private code base? You work on the same machine? Extreme programming?

You probably don't know how easy it is to push your code to another machine through SSH and share a Git repository that way.

Actually I do, isn't that how it is most frequently done? Fact is that even though it works and you can set it up yourself, it is not a good solution to decentralizing a code base. You might have a private machine to which everybody ssh'es and pushes and pulls from, but only a few do that because they don't want to be/have the ops people who run that box. And that is including but not limited to issues and a sane UI for collaborations. That's very well the problem that github/bitbucket/gitlab and the like solve.

So you are telling me that there is no problem and people should just use a private SSH connection to a box they own?

For many people hosting their code makes it easier to work on it, especially for collaboration, ci and deploys.

Just because it's in a public repo doesn't mean it's open source.

If source code can be viewed by all in a public repo, then it's open source. Not necessarily FOSS though.

No it isn't. Open source has an actual meaning: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_software

For it to be open source it must "made available with a license in which the copyright holder provides the rights to study, change, and distribute the software to anyone and for any purpose."

It seems rms would agree with my definition - at least partly. From one of his GNU essays[1]:

    Nearly all open source software is free software, but 
    there are exceptions. First, some open source licenses
    are too restrictive, so they do not qualify as free
    licenses. For example, “Open Watcom” is nonfree because
    its license does not allow making a modified version
    and using it privately.

He considers Open Watcom to be open source but nonfree, when it has a license that would not qualify as open source by your definition. I think you're using the OSI definition? I tend to think of open source software more like rms does in his essay. If I can see and read the code, the source is open for me to peruse, then I consider it open source. Might be a total legal clusterf*ck to work with, but still, I have access to the source. I don't think the issue is as clear cut as no license - all rights reserved[2].

[1]: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.h...

[2]: https://opensource.com/law/13/8/github-poss-licensing

RMS is focused on the four freedoms. Open Source licenses which don't provide those freedoms he considers to be nonfree. In the extreme case, you can read the source, but all rights are reserved, as you mentioned. Java is the highest profile project that existed this way until it was finally open-sourced. You could read the source, but were not allowed to really do anything with it. As such, it was not only non-free, but also not open source.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_(software_platform)#Licen...

How do you mean open source? I can work on a project or whatever in a private repo then release it as open source, or close source, or both. If it is not ready it hurts the open source probably to have half implemented, broken, unmaintained junk.

Now it makes Github look good -- look we have millions of users, billions of lines of code, so many repos. You can see it here it all.

Of course it is important to realize it is free and provided by Github with their infrastructure. So certainly not implying that owe people with free repos anything and if they want those terms of agreement for whatever reason then that's fine.

I just don't necessarily agree that what github is doing is necessarily to benefit "open source" as movement (if there is such a thing).

Bitbucket's free private repos are the best backup solution for university stuff, which is super valuable. I'd rather use git than say Dropbox to version code, I don't want to share unsubmitted assignments and I want a backup - it's perfect.

Actually, I do want free private repos to exist as a mostly open source developer. I often start cooking a project in a private repo. If it leads nowhere I just keep the repository private. Usually that meant moving it to BitBucket because I only have 5 private repos on GitHub[1]. Once I am happy with the quality or usefulness, I clean up the history and make the repository public.

[1] Yep, my BitBucket account is basically a graveyard.

I'm not so sure I agree with that conclusion, seems like a causation/correlation issue. Also, AFAIK public repository != open source.

A more reasonable conclusion is that developers not involved in open source use github free repos, people find their stuff, start talking to them, they start collaborating, and then they become open source projects.

On gitlab when most stuff is default-private it leads to a lot of potential collaboration being lost, regardless of license.

Atheist until your plane starts to fall down, communist until you get rich.

GitLab CE code is open-source. To use your analogy, that code will stay communist regardless of the wealth accumulated by the parent company.

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