Re: Gitlab Migration

[Richard Stallman]

[[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
[[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
[[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]

  > They communicate/share information via slack, discord, reddit, instagram
  > etc.

Those are online dis-services -- they treat users unjustly.
Each of them requires users to run nonfree software to talk to it,
even when the user is doing so through a web browser.
Several of them have other unjust practices I know of;
see stallman.org/slack.html, discord.html, instagram.html.

To recommend that people use one of them would contradict our goal of
computing that respects the user's freedom.  Thus, we can't recommend
any of them.  Whatever practical "advantages" it might have, they
could not make up for the moral contradiction it would cause.

>From the node References in the GNU Coding Standards:

======================================================================
A web page recommends a program in an implicit but particularly strong
way if it requires users to run that program in order to use the page.
Many pages contain Javascript code which they recommend in this way.
This Javascript code may be free or non-free, but non-free is the usual
case.

If the purpose for which you would refer to the page cannot be carried
out without running non-free Javascript code, then you should not refer
to it.  Thus, if the purpose of referring to the page is for people to
view a video, or subscribing to a mailing list, and the viewing or
subscribing fail to work if the user's browser blocks the non-free
Javascript code, then don't refer to that page.
======================================================================

It's fine if users have the _option_ of communicating with the
maintainers and developers via some interface other than email.  (Or
ten different interfaces other than email.)  But when some of them use
it. that must not compel the maintainers and developers to use it too.


-- 
Dr Richard Stallman (https://stallman.org)
Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org)
Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)