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Comment by mankash666 | Hacker News Reader

Censorship now moves to source code revision control. Regardless of the good intentions, this make me queasy.

This is not at all censorship. Daily reminder: https://xkcd.com/1357/

This comment seems to be a misconception regarding a misconception: the cited xkcd addresses Freedom of Speech, not censorship. Censorship can be applied by any medium owner. E.g. if Y Combinator deletes comments or articles on Hacker News regarding a certain topic or from a specific user, without being or acquiescing to a government organization, it may still be reasonably said that they are censoring that topic or user.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship

The cited xkcd also does not do a good job of addressing freedom of speech. Many writers have used "free of speech" to refer to a broad social and cultural principle, not merely a legal doctrine, and defended it on grounds that apply just as much against private censorship and social ostracism as much as against government censorship. The idea that free speech is a concept that is applicable only to government restrictions is of fairly recent vintage, and historically was most used by libertarians rather than the progressives who more often promote it now. In summary, John Stuart Mill had much clearer and sounder ideas about free speech than Randall Munroe.

The comic doesn't actually address freedom of speech, it addresses the First Amendment of the United States Constitution (and conflates it with free speech). The first is an amendment to a contract between the people of the United States and the government of the United States and the second is a philosophical principle. The concept of Free Speech did not start with the United States constitution and any reference to the First Amendment when referencing Free Speech kind of misses the point.

Cryptofascism: so hot right now.

Does it also make you queasy that the person in charge of a project has the ability to approve or deny pull requests? Is that also a form of censorship? I don't see this being much more than the typical administrative control someone would have over a collaborative project or account.

How is denying a pull request the same as banning someone from forking your project? Don't you see undue power bestowed on some people here?

It's OK for admins to deny pull requests, but not OK for them to deny the right to fork the said open source project. Kind of takes the open out of the open source by doing so.

They can fork it, they just have been disinvited from using github's fork button to do so. There's nothing blocking them from downloading the source, etc.

No, because that only applies to forking a project within the Github UI. Nothing is stopping anyone from cloning a project and pushing it to their repository.

It's an administrative detail. Just use the HTTPS end point. That requires no auth for read-only access to public repos.

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