How to publish Git repos that cannot be republished to GitHub

http://joeyh.name/blog/entry/how_to_publish_git_repos_that_cannot_be_republished_to_github/

by edward • 6 years ago

526 197 6 years ago

Aachen• 6 years ago

I read the post twice but don't quite get what the author wants to share. Is it some git(hub) trick I don't understand, just a way of saying Github's/Microsoft's monopoly is bad, or something else altogether?

Fellshard3• 6 years ago

They're using the fact the YouTube-DL (sp?) is being removed by GitHub automatically when rehosted in new repositories, due to DMCA complaint (and likely overreach). If someone rehosts his repository onto GitHub, the repository will be taken down, and the rehosting account likely banned.

akerl_• 6 years ago

Is there any evidence that GitHub is automatically removing reheated copies? Last I saw, GitHub had posted a comment asking folks not to re-host, at risk of being suspended, but there was no indication they’d started any kind of automated scanning.

Beyond that, it seems like a very community-hostile move to intentionally embed commit hashes that would even potentially cause a user to get banned from another platform if they push a copy of the code there. This doesn’t stick it to GitHub, it sticks it to the users of your repo.

dheera3• 6 years ago

ROT13 the entire repo?

If they figure it out, then ROT14 it.

If they figure that out, encrypt it and post the key somewhere that blocks the offices of Github.

If they figure that out, we'll still find a way to build a better mouse.

BoorishBears• 6 years ago

It's a trick to (theoretically) get someone banned for pushing a cloned project to Github despite not actually containing banned content.

renewiltord• 6 years ago

Github complies with the DMCA, recently famously through the DMCA takedown of youtube-dl. The writer, Joey Hess (a relatively well-known OSS programmer, moreutils, for instance), is choosing to interpret this as their banning any repo that hosts the commit hash for youtube-dl (which they banned).

So he is jokingly showing you a way to create a Github poison pill. The joke is that if you include this 'illegal' hash you subject the repo to being DMCA'd out (not really, but it's sort of an 'imagine if'). Which means his repo is now unpublishable on Github (for long anyway).

It's kind of hacker humour in the sort of vein that you'd expect from an old-schooler like him. You sort of have to get the joke to get the joke.

syshum• 6 years ago

is it a joke though.....

Wowfunhappy• 6 years ago

I'd find the joke funny if it actually worked.

Since as far as I can tell, Github isn't actually banning specific hashes (because they care about the content, not the hashes), and there's no sign that they're going to do so in the future, I can't say I understand the humor...

vSanjo• 6 years ago

That was a very well-written comment, thank you. Hit the dopamine and gave me a smile for your explanation.

AceJohnny2• 6 years ago

It's a way to sneak in the hash of a commit (the latest youtube-DL commit) in a non-obvious way.

A git repo is fundamentally composed of 3 object types:

* Blob (effectively a file)

* Tree (which refers to collection of Blobs and Trees, effectively a dir)

* Commit (comment/ author info and various other metadata, a Tree, and a previous Commit)

This is what the git tools are used to dealing with. However git submodules changed things. With submodules, a Tree object can also contain a commit object! Together with the .gitmodules metadata file, this allows you to include another git repo inside your repo.

Joey leveraged that ability to add the youtube-dl latest master commit into his repo as a submodule, but deleted the .gitmodules file so that git wouldn't be verbose about it.

And that's how you sneak a commit into a repo.

This additionally leverages GitHub's data model (which is really the git data model), where they just have this huge DB of all the objects of all the repos on GitHub. So effectively by including this commit in a repo on GH, you're making it refer to the the entire (buried) youtube-dl repo, but you need to be sneaky to be able to see it.

_ikke_• 6 years ago

Note that it's only a _reference_ to a commit, not the commit object itself. So from a a github point of view, it would not even make sense to scan / trigger on this. As long as there are no commit objects with that hash, any reference is harmless.

geofft3• 6 years ago

It's Git performance art/protest art, more or less.

Git has a mechanism called "submodules" which allows one repo to reference another repo. It doesn't actually include any of the content from the second repo: all that's included is the URL (in the file .gitmodules) and a commit hash (in Git's view of the directory structure).

When you clone a Git repository with submodules and you pass an option to git clone, or if you run a git submodule command later, Git will make a nested clone at whatever subdirectory path contains the submodule, and check out that commit. If you make commits in the submodule (and, hopefully, remember to push them), the outer repo will appear to be modified, and you can git add the changes, which will record the new commit hash, but only the hash.

The purpose is to deal with vendoring or sometimes making changes to large repositories owned by someone else without copying the whole source code into your own repository. (It's also occasionally used as a mechanism to split up very large repositories that are owned by the same group/organization, e.g., if you have a test suite or large data files or something, or a shared library used by multiple projects, you might find it helpful to use submodules.) https://github.com/ceph/ceph is an example repo that uses them - "ceph-object-corpus" and "ceph-erasure-code-corpus" at the top level are submodules, and if you click on the .gitmodules file, you'll find that there are other submodules inside src/, too. This is also an example of how GitHub handles submodules also hosted on GitHub - it will link you to the submodule at that commit.

So, GitHub does at least some parsing of submodules. The author is claiming that if you include a banned commit hash as a submodule in the history of your own project, and then promptly delete it, it won't noticeably increase the size of your Git repo, nor will you actually include any of the banned content yourself, but GitHub will potentially prevent that history from being pushed. As a result, you have a Git repo that GitHub would not accept.

Since the author both does not use GitHub and wants to encourage others to do the same, this would be a fairly effective way of forcing that.

(The article doesn't show GitHub actually refusing to accept the history containing this submodule, though - it only shows the submodule having been created, locally. Although maybe the author's argument is simply that pushing it violates the Terms of Service even if it's not blocked by automated means.)

Fellshard3• 6 years ago

GitHub does not have a monopoly.

That said, this is a very clever use of / exposure of the current systems in place. Unintended consequences of bad laws should be highlighted like this more regularly.

brunoqc• 6 years ago

GitHub does not have a monopoly.

Yeah, well, that's just, like, your opinion, man.

young_unixer• 6 years ago

Unintended?

dx0345• 6 years ago

It depends which market you look at. Git hosting in general, especially for enterprise, Github has no monopoly. Gitlab (esp self hosted) is very strong there.

But for public repositories, OSS development and to a certain degree even job applications, Github does have a monopoly.

dgrin912• 6 years ago

The author claims the commit hash is bad links to an article... but that claim seems entirely unsubstantiated? Its not the hash that is bad, its the files that are bad. If you manage to hack git to get the commit without the files (clever trick by him), you don't hit any legal issues.

Am I missing something?

Fellshard3• 6 years ago

The hash is probably an excellent heuristic for spotting commits from the original YouTube-DL Git log, and so GitHub probably scans for that when searching for rehosted copies.

dgrin912• 6 years ago

Agreed, but no one has actually stated that GH is scanning for these commits, let alone make the claim that the hashes are illegal. If you're going to start making legal claims they have to hold up to scrutiny, which this does not.

bloaf• 6 years ago

All you have to do to substantiate it is follow his procedure and see if you can successfully fork such a project to github. Let me know how it goes!

eminence322• 6 years ago

Quoting from the linked torrentfreak article:

If you commit or post content to this repository that violates our Terms of Service, we will delete that content and may suspend access to your account as well

My reading of this is that github wants to stem the flood of garbage pull requests to their [dmca](https://github.com/github/dmca/pulls?q=is%3Apr+is%3Aclosed) repo, which I guess is probably reasonable.

I don't quite see where github is banning certain commit hashes or tree hashes on sight.

I certainly respect the authors desire to not publish their repos to github (and indeed one of the nice things about git is how easy it is to self host). And I can understand not wanting others to fork the repos to github (due to objections about the company itself), but I'm not sure how I feel about adding deliberate boobytraps to repos that seems to be purely punitive.

joeyh2• 6 years ago

It's currently posssible to make a PR to the github dmca repo that merges youtube-dl, and so violate their TOS.

When you make that PR, you do not transfer any of youtube-dl to github. Their repo already has those objects.

So all you have done is pushed a repo containing a specific hash, which is now a TOS violation, in that specific case at least. I wrote "Certain commit hashes are rapidly heading toward being illegal" because of that specificity.

eminence322• 6 years ago

Thanks for clarifying. I do understand that these specific hashes are effectively forbidden in the dmca repo.

Are you aware of any specific instances where the presence of youtube-dl hashes in other repos have been found by github and used as the grounds for disciplinary action? That would be noteworthy indeed.

nine_k• 6 years ago

So, in addition to illegal primes, we are getting a collection of illegal random numbers?

(I wonder when illegal transcendental numbers will become a thing.)

d3nj4l• 6 years ago

I'm not sure how I feel about adding deliberate boobytraps to repos that seems to be purely punitive.

It also feels like it would violate the license of the repository. I see that one of the author's repos is LGPL [1], which allows redistribution of the source. Restricting how that source is distributed seems to me like a violation of that license, if not in letter at least in spirit.

(Of course, it goes without saying that I'm not a lawyer, which is why I said it feels like a violation.)

1: https://git.joeyh.name/index.cgi/haskell-mountpoints.git/tre...

NullPrefix• 6 years ago

Would you please kindly delete your comment before corporate lawyers get any funny ideas.

tedunangst• 6 years ago

You can't force somebody else to host your GPL code if they are not a party to the license.

geofft3• 6 years ago

He's not restricting GitHub from hosting it, he's just using an artifact of GitHub's implementation (or, well, a hypothetical GitHub implementation - I'm not sure GitHub actually blocks submodules that reference the relevant commit hash?) that happens to make GitHub refuse to host it.

GitHub is free to change their minds about the implementation and start accepting those commits again. That is, you, as a recipient of the code, are free to ask GitHub to host it, and to offer them a license under the terms of the GPL; GitHub is free to accept or to decline, same as if you sent me the code, I am free to host it on my personal website but I'm also free to not host it.

(It would feel more like violating the spirit if it, say, prevented you from uploading it to a GitLab instance you self-host... but since you self-host it, you could just patch out any suppression code, so that case can't come up.)

sokoloff• 6 years ago

I don’t even think it’s an in-spirit violation. You have to offer to distribute the source. That doesn’t have to be from any particular hosting provider; it just has to be reasonable.

(The license is ~14 years older than git itself. There’s no way distribution using a specific git hosting service is required under the license.)

slang800• 6 years ago

Making a repo that is incompatible with another hosting system is not a GPL violation.

There are all sorts of compatibility issues that can arise from platforms doing dumb things. For example, a repo with the files README.md and readme.md in the same directory would break on certain Windows machines due to case sensitivity problems.

dx0345• 6 years ago

If a country now decided that the Linux kernel violates law and bans it I don't think the kernel would violate their license just because it's now illegal to distribute it in that country.

GoblinSlayer2• 6 years ago

GPL doesn't require you to provide a git repository, a tarball is good enough.

jimmaswell2• 6 years ago

I'd find it incredibly childish and needlessly divisive to make your repo impossible to host on a given provider just because you don't like the provider. This does nothing but make the tech community worse for everyone and less accessible. Newcomers shouldn't have to navigate petty politics to get started with tech and people already here shouldn't have to have their time wasted with it when they're just trying to be productive.

ponker2• 6 years ago

Would you say the same about code that, for example, is designed to fail when used in a missile? E.g. navigation code that deliberately pilots into the ocean if onboard something going faster than Mach 3?

manquer• 6 years ago

Newcomers have to navigate the copyright politics whether they like it or not. The amercian copyright laws have created this mess not the op.

enriquto• 6 years ago

I'd find it incredibly childish and needlessly divisive to make your repo impossible to host

If only it was! In that case, it is github who is allegedly making the repo impossible to host. It is, thus, github who is acting in a childish way. The repo author is only adding some silly hashes.

By the way, the real "childish" behavior is believing that speech can be censored by technical means alone. This is impossible, there are always technical means to circumvent it. Speech can only be effectively censored by means of armed police action.

sillysaurusx• 6 years ago

I find those pull requests absolutely hilarious, but my sense of humor is lowbrow childish.

https://github.com/github/dmca/pull/8210

https://github.com/github/dmca/pull/8207

https://github.com/github/dmca/pull/8203

https://github.com/github/dmca/pull/8202

DMCAs would be much better served OwO'ified.

read_if_gay_• 6 years ago

https://github.com/github/dmca/pull/8214/commits/65ec4b0dc45...

coldpie• 6 years ago

It is wonderful to see GitHub being a victim of their own refusal to implement a feature to disable pull requests on a repo.

WhyNotHugo• 6 years ago

It's a way of proving a point.

"Hey, GitHub has stupid practices which are just terribly harmful for the community. Also, here's my source code."

Someone comes along and pushes that same repo to GitHub. GitHub bans them. This is exactly what you'd been warned of!

monksy2• 6 years ago

IF you've already pulled it down your origin will be from where you pulled it.

Create an empty repo else where.

With your environment do a: git remote rm origin; git remote add origin <new environment> ; git push -u origin master

You've filled up the new repo with what you have, history and all.

judge20203• 6 years ago

You should be including --mirror to get all refs pushed.

monksy2• 6 years ago

Nice I had no idea about that arguement.

notsureaboutpg• 6 years ago

I feel good for Joey because he's really been one of the few who stuck to his principles and kept from hosting on Github even though it probably would have been way easier to do so.

The git-annex project (and I'm sure many of his other ones) have been going strong without Github and I appreciate him for that. He's finally being vindicated I believe (and eventually many of the warners against these free-as-in-beer but not free-as-in-software services have been proven right)

hashtagmarkup3• 6 years ago

You just turned a completely defensible innocent act into premeditated destruction of a livelihood.

joeyh2• 6 years ago

If you feel that losing access to Github would mean the destruction of your professional life, I'd encourage you to take steps to prevent that corporation from being able to do that to you.

hashtagmarkup3• 6 years ago

I don't feel that... the author feels that. It was the first line of the article.

timmit• 6 years ago

publish to gitlab :)

mlindner• 6 years ago

Gitlab is the most awful mess of javascript you could ever invent though. I use it every day for work and I wish I could avoid it.

dx0345• 6 years ago

Why's that? I've been using it for a while (on prem) and like the interface more than Github by now. I never problems in either Firefox or Chrome.

INTPenis• 6 years ago

I don't see it, and I'm a long time noscript user.

Also been using Gitlab off-prem, on-prem, for more than 6 years. When someone says Gitlab problems all I can think of is resource issues with Sidekiq when I was self-hosting it.

All this drama is only bringing to light how unsafe it is for projects to host their code on a closed platform.

Better be on the safe side and use something you can easily migrate away, like Gitlab.

erling• 6 years ago

Totally down with the potential conflict of interest or implications of GitHub, but it’s not GitHub specifically that’s zealous about DMCA. Any server and any host of that server is going to be subject to it. The only appeal of a smaller or private server is less visibility, but legally it’s the same. DMCA isn’t going anywhere.

judge20203• 6 years ago

Well, GitHub/Microsoft could go on a PR campaign and say "we're not going to honor this RIAA DMCA since we know yt-dl isn't violating the DMCA!" but then GitHub/Microsoft would opening themselves up to a lawsuit against (basically) the entire music industry. The amount of goodwill MSFT loses over this (hopefully isolated) incident has to be worth a few orders of magnitude less than the tens of millions of dollars that would be burned to actually fight the RIAA.

Smaller hosts could get away with not honoring DMCAs since the RIAA likely isn't going to waste resources actually filing a lawsuit, but this yt-dl situation seems like the perfect setup for the RIAA to set a precedent outlawing video/music downloaders if someone were to actually fight them on it (and until then, they can continue to take down video/music downloaders until someone does counter it).

ponker2• 6 years ago

Microsoft is much wealthier than the “entire music industry” but this still might not be a hill they want to die on.

pxeboot• 6 years ago

Microsoft is actually a member of the RIAA [1].

[1] https://www.riaa.com/about-riaa/riaa-members/

gisishskdlt• 6 years ago

How deep is the RIAA's pockets? Has this most recent tactic held up in court? What are you basing this on?

mayneack• 6 years ago

Does github actually have to honor every request that comes in? I thought the youtubes of the world did that because of the volume, but hypothetically, couldn't they do some due diligence and push back on requests they don't think are valid instead of just taking them down and requiring the repository owner to appeal. I'm sure it would be more expensive for them, but it's still a choice.

adrianN• 6 years ago

It is my understanding that DMCA requests have to be honored immediately unless the hoster wants to expose themselves to large legal risk. The uploader of the banned content can file a counter request, upon which the copyright holder either withdraws, or things land in court. But if the hoster doesn't honor the request they lose their hosting privilege and can be sued for copyright infringement themselves.

feanaro6• 6 years ago

DMCA is not a worldwide law.

aequitas• 6 years ago

You can consider it a worldwide law:

  - a lot of big tech companies are based in the US
  - a lot of companies want to do business in the US
  - DCMA can become part of a trade agreement with the US, I don't know if the E.U. will save us at this point.

mschuster912• 6 years ago

It may not be legally, but practically. Almost all major content-hosting companies are headquartered in the USA and thus bound to the DMCA: Facebook/Twitter (social networks), Google/Amazon/Microsoft (clouds), Github/Gitlab/Sourceforge (code repositories), StackOverflow, Automattic (Wordpress), Akamai/Cloudflare/Fastly (CDNs), Wikimedia/Fandom (wiki hosting). The only major exception is Atlassian who are headquartered in Australia.

No matter if your content may be legal under e.g. European law (e.g. right to repair, right to interoperability, right to reverse engineer), you are going to have a hard time hosting it. And even if you get it hosted at an European provider (remember, we don't have anything that competes with any of the three US cloud giants in terms of functionality!), you will have issues with accepting donations easily - Paypal, Stripe and all credit cards are under US regulation.

And it's not just theoretical, just look at what happened to Kim Dotcom/Megaupload (or, tangentially related, Julian Assange). If the US deems you a danger to their business interests, you are going to get hunted down, no matter where in the world you are and if what you are doing is legal under the jurisdiction of that country.

vfclists2• 6 years ago

Why not call Github Microsoft knowing that Microsoft owns Github?

Microsoft has refused to challenge a highly dubious DMCA notice when they have more than enough resources to do so. Isn't Microsoft the party at fault given that their lawyers know the DMCA notice doesn't have a leg to stand on.

kkarakk2• 6 years ago

probably doing the ol' delayed switcheroo like facebook is doing with whatsapp - maintain product as is for a couple of years to avoid immediate backlash while slowly enmeshing and branding all the tools in the product.

then boom one day it's called azure officeserver or some similar microsoft style name and monetised like crazy with github being a deprecated sub-project left to wither and die.

it is NOT in their interest to defend github in any way. any negative press attached to the product literally doesn't matter to them since it's not associated with microsoft

vfclists2• 6 years ago

It turns out Microsoft is a member of the RIAA - https://www.riaa.com/about-riaa/riaa-members/. I should have known that. It figures.

m0zg• 6 years ago

I think we need to work towards the future where DVCS's are _distributed_ and federated. Every time you give anyone centralized control, they will abuse it. I'm not aware of any exceptions.

slimsag2• 6 years ago

Others probably have not fully realized this yet, but with GitHub one can:

1) Publish arbitrary commits under your https://github.com/my/project URL, e.g. a fake https://github.com/my/project/blob/<faked_commit>/README.md in your project describing how to install it that actually describes installing malware.

2) Publish those commits under your name, with your email address, and GitHub will prominently display it as if you made the commit (most do not use GPG signatures, and most do not know to look for "Verified" anyway)

It seemed only a matter of time before this behavior got abused for something (anti-DMCA action is perhaps the best outcome of this situation I can imagine..)

eslaught2• 6 years ago

I'm not quite sure what you're saying here. Are you claiming that you can push a commit to userA/project and then view it under the Github web interface for userB/project (assuming one repo is forked from the other)?

If so it seems like that's a relatively easy fix for Github, just check if the commit is actually contained in userB's fork of the repo.

slimsag2• 6 years ago

Quick demo: go to https://github.com/slimsag/linux/tree/5895e21f3c744ed9829e3a... then try replacing "slimsag" with "torvalds"

These are "known issues" I believe GitHub doesn't intend to fix:

1. With youtube-dl[0] (and probably long before?) we know you can push a commit and view it under the web UI under another user, GitHub hasn't indicated this is a vulnerability at all.

2. Many people know you can impersonate another user through Git email addresses[1] (GPG signing is supposed to solve this, but a lot of people don't use it and even when they do others don't really know they should look for "Verified" in GitHub's web UI.)

Combine these two known-issues and you get a really convincing phishing attack.

I really hope this doesn't become a common-place thing. Hopefully this raises some awareness that, basically, you should not trust any GitHub URL with a commit SHA in it - only trust ones with branch names - because it could be a phishing attack otherwise.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24882921

[1] https://bounty.github.com/ineligible.html#impersonating_a_us...

tkfu• 6 years ago

I'm not quite sure what you're saying here. Are you claiming that you can push a commit to userA/project and then view it under the Github web interface for userB/project (assuming one repo is forked from the other)?

Very close to that, yes. There's actually just one more step you need to take: you have to also open a pull request from userA/project to userB/project. As a convenience feature, GitHub automatically makes PR commits available under a special namespace. You can try it yourself with any pull request that comes from another repo--just `git fetch origin pulls/<PR #>/head.

Since the foreign commit is there in this special 'pulls' namespace, it can be viewed in the web UI by its commit ID. That's how people are adding youtube-dl to github's DMCA notice repo; they're just opening a PR containing youtube-dl's commit history.

Denvercoder9• 6 years ago

If so it seems like that's a relatively easy fix for Github, just check if the commit is actually contained in userB's fork of the repo.

It's not that easy. First of all, you'd need to define "contained in". The naive choice would be anything reachable by a named ref. However, all pull requests also create a ref in your repository, so you'd need to exclude those. But that would mean that if you make a PR and then delete the branch the PR is made from, the PR contents aren't visible anymore.

But even if you have the set of refs that you consider to be in a repository, that means every time an object is requested you'll have to walk the whole graph backwards to find if an object is reachable from a ref. That's an expensive operation, and Git is usually pretty fast because it tries really hard to avoid this.

tirz• 6 years ago

When I first read this article, I was really sad.

"If you use one of my open-source repository, you can get in trouble, mouhahaha"

It feels like a dick move to me. But then, I realize that the RIAA bans can now be used as an anti RIAA partnership against GitHub and others, which is... pretty cool.

Definitively a feature that we need \o/ !

rendall• 6 years ago

joeyh, if you're reading this, some feedback: on Android Chrome, at least, your top navbar overlays your article. Suggest you update your CSS for mobile views

Qwertious2• 6 years ago

This sounds like that social engineering challenge one guy did - where he said "I lose if you convince me to post <token> anywhere in my github repo", and someone won it by saying "you should put that challenge on your website" since the website code was in his github repo.

joshenders• 6 years ago

Why are we shooting the messenger?

lk23jlkoij• 6 years ago

So why not just write a tiny script that goes through all youtube-dl commits, recommit them with an added a space character to some file. So you will have a clone with different hashes, but the same content.

pwdisswordfish0• 6 years ago

Since Git's DAG is a hash tree where each commit points to its parent(s) and its own hash is derived from that, then presumably it would suffice to do this only with the first commit.

jbb67• 6 years ago

first if all GitHub is nobodies "résumé" and secondly you can put a git repo anywhere you like there are any number of hosting sites or easy ways to just host it yourself.

I mean really. what a stupid article

kkarakk2• 6 years ago

There are a LOT of companies just spamming github repo owners with job interviews nowadays

my last job was through an automated email i got about my github resume hashtags. iirc all they look for is certain tags and a regular commit history after which the recruiter takes a brief look at the repo and fires off the email if the criteria is met.

seems enough to call github a resume to me.

woofie11• 6 years ago

Has anyone read github's terms of service? Github is the one violating them, not the users.

Yes, github is disabling accounts to people who post youtube-dl. No, this is not in compliance with github's ToS.

github says: “Please note that re-posting the exact same content that was the subject of a takedown notice without following the proper process is a violation of GitHub’s DMCA Policy and Terms of Service." Ref: https://torrentfreak.com/github-warns-users-reposting-youtub...

github's DMCA policy says: "One of the best features of GitHub is the ability for users to "fork" one another's repositories. What does that mean? In essence, it means that users can make a copy of a project on GitHub into their own repositories. As the license or the law allows, users can then make changes to that fork to either push back to the main project or just keep as their own variation of a project. Each of these copies is a "fork" of the original repository, which in turn may also be called the "parent" of the fork.

GitHub will not automatically disable forks when disabling a parent repository. This is because forks belong to different users, may have been altered in significant ways, and may be licensed or used in a different way that is protected by the fair-use doctrine. GitHub does not conduct any independent investigation into forks. We expect copyright owners to conduct that investigation and, if they believe that the forks are also infringing, expressly include forks in their takedown notice." Ref: https://docs.github.com/en/free-pro-team@latest/github/site-...

youtube-dl doesn't fall under any of the restrictions in github's ToS either. ref: https://docs.github.com/en/free-pro-team@latest/github/site-...

I have very little sympathy for github here. They ought to follow the DMCA process. Per the DMCA process, I can't dispute the takedown of the main Youtube-dl repo, since I'm not a party to the process. If I post youtube-dl to github, it should stay up, pending a DMCA notice from RIAA. If such a notice is sent, I should then have the right to then dispute that.

mlang23• 6 years ago

Its no longer relevant to me nor him, but I can't help but think the attitude of this article kind of violates the DFSG. If the stance is to insist that free software should be allowed to be redistributed by anyone, flaming those which have in the past wanted to mirror your code on github by indicating you could get them banned by fiddling with the hashes in your repo is pretty aggressive. I totally get the frustration, but when I learnt the DFSG, this was the biggest lesson for me. Freedom means freedom to anyone. Restricting your code to, say, non-military use, isn't compliant with the DFSG. So, now that we have perceived hostile code hosters, do we really want to go there? "You're not going to push my stuff to x.y.z, or I will make you feel the pain."

lolc• 6 years ago

What do you make of an author who only provides tarballs?

booleandilemma• 6 years ago

illegal number

This is why aliens don't visit us.

blitblitblit• 6 years ago

Github. Which, as we know, is your resume.

There in lies the problem. Encouraging people to put their resume on centralized platforms (Be it Facebook, LinkedIn, or Github) is putting your entire career at risk. It's better to have your own domain and self-host, that way you aren't locked in and at risk of loosing your entire professional history if you get banned or a service goes offline.

How to publish Git repos that cannot be republished to GitHub

Related Stories