"This isn't censorship of the type that is illegal or not allowed. It is a private company deciding a word was inappropriate."
As a Github user, that kind of thinking worries me. Google Code went away, and Sourceforge started packaging adware and spyware with other people's projects. They could do this because "they were a private company". Now Github's management is starting to throw their weight around. We now need to think about a backup plan in case Github management gets out of line. All their value, after all, is created by others.
Not to say that Github couldn't close down some of their API endpoints in the future (like reading issues/comments), but they're one of the web services I use that I _don't_ actually fear lock-in on.
Let me add Launchpad.net (Operated by Canonical of Ubuntu Linux fame). They recently added Git support, albeit in beta and still quite rudimentary supported.
That said, if I recall correctly - the whole Launchpad platform is Free and Open Source Software. (https://launchpad.net/launchpad)
I know gitlab has an option to log into your github account and I believe you can copy everything down.
I use gitlab pretty much exclusively and I prefer it to github by a large margin.
I do maintain a "public"(you likely won't come across it unless you know about it) gitlab server and host a few people's repos including my own. I mean you have to trust me instead of github, but the server is always up to date, and I won't take down anything that isn't illegal. If anyone is interested, feel free to shoot me an email.
Glad to hear you like the import function. It works pretty reliably although it can struggle when someone imports 400 repo's (10GB+) with one click of the button, but we're working on that too.
That is fine as long as it is just you by yourself finding a place to stuff code nobody looks at. But if you have a long-term open source project homed at Github, your job uses Github, etc. and all your workflow and historical data is already tied to Github, it does not really help that the code could be stuffed on some other server.
Well, this is the fundamental problem of trusting private companies to build, maintain, and run public infrastructure, or at least, infrastructure which is treated as de facto public. They do in fact own it, and, being a private business, they are in fact going to respond more to mob upsets and strong-arming than to any kind of liberal (in the classical sense) principle.
If you wanted some liberal principle, there's an organization lying neglected in the corner whose charter says it more-or-less cannot censor anything under any circumstances. Or you could start it as a commons trust, or a users' cooperative, or some other form of organization that would ultimately leave your source repo company more accountable to its users than to baying mobs of internet raiders trying to threaten ad revenue with bad publicity.
There are competitive services available, you know. You could host yourself with Gitweb, Gitlab or if that's not your cup of tea, then simply switch to Bitbucket - they're even allowing private repos for free! Vote with your legs.
That's not the only reason people use Github. It's the Facebook of programmers in some sense and it's got a critical mass that switching to something else is not practicable (not without some serious momentum).
I think this is an unfair jump because they do have a legitimate business model with enterprise revenue - they don't need to start owning your life to continue to exist.
The "Facebook of programmers" is a great analogy. Because while the masses act like they cannot live without it, those of us who just don't use it really do not feel like we are missing anything in our lives.
There are other Git services. There are other source control mechanisms. There are other ways to do things. Just like you can actually leave Facebook, feel free to leave Github. Or stay. But make a conscious choice.
It is not a "kind of thinking", it is a simple statement. The word "censorship" doesn't work here. You may still argue that you don't like that Github behaves like that: the statement that you quoted doesn't oppose that view.
Censorship is not by defintion done by the government. It's perfectly correct to say "GitHub is censoring X on their platform".
Now censorship by the government is a much worse act, because you can't just go become a citizen of another country, but it's still censorship if a compay does it.
I use definition of "censorship" that people use when they think that "censorship is bad". Because this definition implies that this kind of censorship affects everyone and they can't do anything about it.
The other definition of censorship, that also includes private companies and people restricting some materials in their own domain can also be used — that seems to be what you have in mind. But this censorship, when you think about it, is almost always quite OK. Which contradicts the inherent negative connotations that people perceive when they hear the word "censorship".
So, for the sake of using words with definitions that don't contradict their cultural perceptions, I would stick the first definition.
Eh, seems to me there are lots of situations where censorship by private companies is a problem.
For example, if Chinese banks / communication companies / whatever refuse to do business with human rights groups, that's a bad thing even if the companies acted without being explicitly ordered to by the government.
And just because newspapers and TV stations are privately owned, doesn't mean it's a good thing if they all decide not to publish negative stories about Qatar/HSBC/whatever due to a profitable advertising deal. Such self-censorship, if it happened widely, would be deleterious to the independent checks and balances our democracy relies on.
Now, I agree with you that it's not censorship if Joe's Childrens Books declines to publish my manuscript "Best Of 4Chan Shock Images And Racist Jokes" - but I don't think it makes sense to ignore censorship by private companies all together, as sometimes such censorship can be deeply problematic.
I'm sorry, you must have misunderstood my point. I'm not saying that what these companies are doing is OK. I'm actually quite appalled by Github's behaviour in OP.
I'm just saying that we should use definitions correctly, and "censorship" doesn't work here.
I agree that it's not bad for them to not publish it [edit: I mean, not bad for the kids books publisher to not publish the 4 Chan book of shock images and racist jokes] (probably good actually), but does that mean it isn't censorship?
It seems like the only things which might be why it isn't "censorship" would be because either we like it (or it is objectively good by some reasoning) (which would be a terrible definition of censorship), or because there are sufficiently many comparable other options.
So, it seems that either some censorship is good, or whether something is censorship depends on what the other options for publication are?
I guess that conclusion (that or statement) is reasonable?
whoever downvoted this, that is entirely within your rights and all. I'm just a bit confused. This comment of mine seemed entirely inoffensive, so I'm not sure why it has been downvoted three times.
When I ended it with "Thoughts?" I meant to be inviting arguments against the line of reasoning that I proposed. I thought I was being fairly open minded about it.
If it is because I was allowing for the possibility of some censorship being good, know that I was not claiming that some censorship was good. I just was choosing to not immediately reject that possibility when looking for how best to define censorship. I was not arguing in favor of censorship.
I was hoping for a discussion to try to find reasons why some definitions of the word "censorship" would be better than others.
I really don't understand why my post would be sufficiently objectionable for 3 people to downvote it. I don't mean that they were incorrect to do so, their/your reasons could have been made perfect sense. I'm just saying that I don't understand what the reasons were, and I would appreciate understanding what they were or might have been (so, if you are only providing your best guess for why someone else might have, I would appreciate that also)
Let's take this a step furher, for arguments sake.
Say blogger.com or wordpress.com would delete any mention of police violence because, well, that offensive to many people. Is that censorship? If not, what should I call it?
Censorship does not require an act of Congress. Private entities are perfectly capable of censorship. How else could the term "self-censorship" have any semantic value?
Self-censorship only has value when people fear retribution by government.
"I won't use the word retard in my project hosted on github because github's TOS prevents it" is not self-censorship in any meaningful sense of the word. (Just as "Github doesn't let me spam all these users" is not Github censoring people.) Nothing is stopping you from hosting the repo in a wide number of other places.
"I won't insult my employer in this or that nation, because I risk a jail term" is self censorship.
This is nonsense. Self-censorship occurs whenever somebody censors himself. In polite conversation we might call it discretion (or valor). In a fiduciary or confidential relationship, we might call it adherence to the duty of confidentiality. In a contractual relationship, we would call it nondisclosure. In employment, on one hand we might call it professionalism—or self censorship on the other—depending on the context.
Regardless, the term "self-censorship" is not germane to or inherent in only citizen-government interactions.
People self-censor constantly on social media. You're not worried about the government taking a tweet out of context and driving your reputation into the ground, the mob of internet idiots has that covered. Fear of internet mobs causes people to censor themselves, and a definition of "censorship" that doesn't cover uses like that is not a particularly useful one.
Self-censorship as a term has value whenever people fear losing something that is important to them. With governments it might be their their career chances, personal freedom or even their life. With companies it might be your online identity, your data, your social contacts. Imagine being removed from Facebook/Google/Twitter/[your social network of choice] for writing the wrong post/email. While it is certainly orders of magnitude less threatening than being tortured by the secret police, it is still a deterrent.
As a Github user, that kind of thinking worries me. Google Code went away, and Sourceforge started packaging adware and spyware with other people's projects. They could do this because "they were a private company". Now Github's management is starting to throw their weight around. We now need to think about a backup plan in case Github management gets out of line. All their value, after all, is created by others.