On Sun, Aug 23, 2015 at 2:44 PM, Christian Kalkhoff softmetz@fsfe.org wrote:
Hi, I'm currently in the early stages of starting a new Free Software initiative for knowledge workers. One thing that bothers me is where to host the development infrastructure. I would like to avoid self hosting at the moment for time reasons. Until a while ago there was Gitorious, which seemed to fulfill my requirements for a Free Software hosting site since it was built on Free Software. Since its acquisition through Gitlab, that just provides an open core model, I think of it no better than of Github.
There is certainly difference between software which is 90% free and software which is 0% free software.
Github did a fine job in providing reliable hosting but its non-free from its base up.
That's pretty much the same as all the software you use "as a service". That is from the routers involved to transfer packets, to the actual software running the service.
I want to create 100% Free Software but not force its users to rely 100% on Free Software to run it (I would wish for that, but I also like freedom of choice for end users that are not yet ready to switch).
I am not sure whether the same principles should be applied to services. When I download (free software) files from the internet, I don't have the requirement for all the components involved in the process (routers, screens, ...) to consist only of free software. I don't see why free software hosting should be different.
regards, Nikos