Comment by easterncalculus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by easterncalculus | Hacker News Reader

easterncalculus

One of the things that people should know about SourceHut is that even though it is "Free Software", it is not a very "free" platform. Certain types of projects are a red line to the owner and will be removed[0].

I'll be honest, I do not trust cryptocurrency stuff and don't believe that it has utility. I hold none, I don't use it. That being said, this makes me wonder what the next category of projects that SourceHut will ban is.

What is the point of a free software forge if you can't host certain types of (legal) projects? It's hard to take a platform seriously, to move all of your work there when the administrators can (and most importantly, actually do) ban your projects based solely on their personal views.

[0]: https://sourcehut.org/blog/2022-10-31-tos-update-cryptocurre...

I'm actually pretty fine with this, because they are pretty open about one point:

> We will exercise discretion when applying this rule. If you believe that your use-case for cryptocurrency or blockchain is not plagued by these social problems, you may ask for permission to host it on SourceHut, or appeal its removal, by contacting support.

First of all, it says that you can talk with a real human about this, second they are very open it.

When contrasted with a certain forge owned by Microsoft, which reaps my source code w/o my consent & regardless of its license to train a model which do not approve, Source Hut's stance is much more acceptable.

I'm fine with companies having opinions, and I love it when they're open about them instead of being faceless and do unpredictable things to benefit themselves.

And lastly, nobody forces you to work with a company you don't agree with. I don't work with GitHub anymore, and you're not preferring SourceHut. That's OK.

+1. I moved from Sourcehut when it announced IRS change of TOS. I realised I would prefer to support less discriminatory forges.

I also have no interest in crytocurrency.

This comes up over and over on different platforms. It's sad to me how many services that are built on open source software don't allow you to use a custom domain. It's not that hard. Let's Encrypt makes it almost trivial.

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