SFC-Talks/FOSDEM-2025-keynote
1
0
Fork 0
Code Issues Pull requests Projects Releases Packages Wiki Activity Actions

Preston-Warner: Slide 4

Browse source
This commit is contained in:
Bradley M. Kuhn 2025-02-02 13:07:34 +01:00
parent 1ca7e63831
commit 68f95dc45b
2 changed files with 65 additions and 7 deletions
Show stats Download patch file Download diff file Expand all files Collapse all files

30
index.html
View file

@ -83,13 +83,6 @@
real time.</p>
</section>
<!-- Denver: you can edit above all you want -->
<!-- bkuhn promises to not work above here -->
<!-- bkuhn is still working on the below: -->
<!-- NO ONE BUT BKUHN EDIT BELOW YET: -->
<section>
<h3>Post-Sourceforge Diaspora</h3>
<ul><li>Berlios</li>
@ -103,6 +96,29 @@
</section>
<!-- Denver: you can edit above all you want -->
<!-- bkuhn promises to not work above here -->
<!-- bkuhn is still working on the below: -->
<!-- NO ONE BUT BKUHN EDIT BELOW YET: -->
<section>
<!-- Next slide -->
<h2 class="top-title">An Old bkuhn Slide</h2>
<img src="preston-werner.jpg" align="right" />
<p align="left">
&#8226; Tom Preston-Werner<br/>
&#8226;the <a href="http://tom.preston-werner.com/2011/11/22/open-source-everything.html">&ldquo;open source almost everything&rdquo;</a> guy<br/>
&#8226;claimed at OSCON 2013:<br/>
&#8226;&ldquo;The GPL is a license of restrictions; I don’t like restrictions. just use MIT&rdquo;<br/>
</p>
</section>
</section>
<section>
<h3 >Follow-Up / Talk License</h3>

42
what-bkuhn-was-going-to-say.md
View file

@ -146,3 +146,45 @@ that, by the time AJAX and Web 2.0 came along, there was not enough
leadership to move an old PHP+HTML application to the more interactive and
modern looks that users were demanding by the late 2000s. [ switch slides ]
## Preston-Warner: Slide 4
Enter GitHub, founded in October 2007. GitHub from its very founding learned
the VA Linux lesson: don't ever give anyone code, and in fact, take great
efforts to convince the FOSS community that copyleft, particularly the Affero
GPL are terrible.
Enter GitHub, founded in October 2007. GitHub from its very founding learned
the VA Linux lesson: don't ever give anyone any code: keep it all
proprietary — and if you must release FOSS, do it in a way that doesn't allow
people to make their own system.
This is an old slide of Bradley's, which he insisted we include even though
he's shown a slide like this on the main stage at FOSDEM at least once
before, simply to point out that convincing users of a fully GPL'd VCS
(namely, Git) to switch to a forge that locked them into proprietary
services.
While Preston-Warner was pushed out of GitHub due to an unrelated HR
scandal, his vision, warped morality, and aggressive hatred of copyleft was
baked into GitHub culture.
In fact, GitHub took great political and advocacy efforts to convince the
FOSS community that copyleft (particularly the Affero GPL) are terrible
license beyond this OSCON keynote of Preston-Warner's. We have seen cases,
BTW, of GitHub employees, proudly sporting their “GitHub employee”
achievement badge right next to their user icon, go into AGPL'd projects that
they aren't even **contributing** to with rants about how the AGPL is a bad
license.
We've also heard reliable intelligence (confirmed by multiple sources) that
GitHub has an **internal fork of Git itself**. Now, the GPL of course allows
internal forks, since its copyleft requirements (in most cases — there are a
few exceptions) trigger only on distribution. Obviously convincing our own
Git member project to switch to the AGPL is *way beyond* politically viable
and we haven't even asked. But, this situation shows that if GitHub has a
legally viable choice between liberating code on their own accord and
proprietarizing it, they chose proprietarization *every* *single* *time*.
[ next slide ]