Re: Gitlab's "C" rating is overrated; add netneutrality; evaluate Playstore & F-Droid

[Hannes Rosenögger]

I think you might have misunderstood my intention.

I'm not saying you shouldn't downgrade the rating.  

I don't have enough experience with the rating process to really participate in that discussion.

I just wanted to point out that at least for self-hosted instances (which most big open source projects that use gitlab use afaik) there is an alternative to Recaptcha that can be enabled right now.

Imho this is important info for open source projects regardless of whether it is enabled on gitlab.com

Am Mo., 13. Jan. 2020 um 17:48 Uhr schrieb <address@hidden>:

* Hannes Rosenögger - address@hidden <address@hidden> [2020-01-13 09:51]:
> Fyi: It seems that Gitlab merged an alternative to recaptcha 2 month ago.
>
> https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-foss/issues/46548#note_203922493
>
> It is not yet enabled by default on gitlab.com though.

There is a trend for projects to move from MS Github to gitlab.com
under the naive idea that gitlab.com is an ethical alternative.
Gitlab.com has several ties to Google: Google hosting, Google
reCAPTCHA, and gmail for issue notices and submissions.  Note that
among other evils, Google has been caught spending dark money on
climate denial, and this is ultimately fed by the surveillance
capitalism machine of all Google's services.

Now if we neglect the scope of ethics that are orthoganol to free
software, it first must be realized that the GNU Ethical Repository
Criteria Evaluations applies to the Gitlab.com *service* not the
underlying software.  While the software change you mention is in a
positive direction, readers expect the rating system to reflect
today's reality rather than hope for the future.

There is an opportunity here to downgrade Gitlab.com's rating, as it
should be, so the action can then be publicized in social media.  The
effect of which is people learning about better places to host their
project (e.g. GNU Savannah), as well as people learning about FSF's
ethical repo campaign itself.  Waiting for gitlab.com to implement the
non-Google CAPTCHA would defeat these opportunities.

BTW, there are some other repositories that should perhaps be
considered for rating:

* codeberg.org
* git.openprivacy.ca
* gitgud.io
* notabug.org
* pagure.io

Having a paltry evalutation list of four sites doesn't make for a very
interesting resource.