Github ToS and Open Source

[Paul Smith]

On Fri, 2017-03-03 at 16:57 +0100, Ralf Mardorf wrote:
> On Fri, 03 Mar 2017 16:35:31 +0100, Xen wrote:
> > Colin Law schreef op 03-03-2017 15:24:
> > > Can anyone explain the significance of this in words that the
> > > relatively uninitiated can understand?
> > > https://www.mirbsd.org/permalinks/wlog-10_e20170301-tg.htm  
> > 
> > What it appears to say is that Github hosted projects can only be
> > forked on Github, all projects must allow to be forked, and
> > attribution-style licenses are forbidden.
> 
> Wouldn't this be a discrepancy? If something is GPL'ed and provided
> at Github, why should somebody forking it, provide it via Github,
> too? This would be an addition to the GPL. The GPL allows to fork a
> project and to distribute it, without the restriction of being forced
> to distribute it using Github. Right?

I agree that blog post is unfortunate in that it has a "scare" headline
but doesn't provide a clear, understandable statement of the problem.

If you have a subscription to LWN there's a good discussion there (if
you don't then you should get one, assuming you have a bit of
disposable income--it's important to support good journalism!)  Or you
can wait for a week or two for the content to become free for all.

It's not the forking that's the problem: clearly if the code is under a
free software license you _expect_ it to be forked.  I'll quote a bit
of a particularly useful comment from user dunlapg
(link https://lwn.net/Articles/716200/ for those who have a
subscription):

> So, this clause attempts to address the issue, by saying that you, as
> a submitter, agree to give every other user on GitHub a license to
> "perform, display, and reproduce" your code "as permitted through
> GitHub's functionality". This is a separate and additional license to
> whatever license might already be in the repository. In the post
> above, I call this the "GitHub Hosting License".
>
> What the clause actually says is that if you submit code to GitHub
> under the GPL, you are actually dual-licensing the code: You're
> putting it under both the GPL, and the GHL. 

That's potentially very bad, because the GHL actually can be argued to
work around the copyleft nature of the GPL (e.g., if you obtain the
code under the auspices of the GHL not the GPL, you may not need to
follow the requirements that you publish the source for binaries that
you distribute).

That's the concern.