I think the ASF, being non-copyleft, is much less ideological than you're thinking. They're big on having rules to foster healthy community and community based decisions, but the license is really just a laissez faire BSD-ish license with some particular edge cases addressed. It's open-source but flexible and friendly to businesses with hybrid models. Something like GitHub that promotes input from people involved with other projects to participate is not a surprising move for them at all.

> the ASF, being non-copyleft, is much less ideological than you're thinking

Do you somehow consider copyleft style licenses "more ideological" than those which are not? That is probably more telling about your own views on licensing than it is on ideologies.

FreeBSD is not copyleft, and they work actively on eliminating GPL from their base. Debian mostly under the free software umbrella, but welcomes BSD code in their base.

Stallman is about as idelogical as you can get but has been known to argue for the MIT license in some cases. Just to mention a few examples.

Sure there are counterexamples, but I certainly don't hesitate to say copyleft does tend to be more ideological. In every instance I can think of, every serious discussion I've had with a company about project licensing that ended with anything other than the GPL, the concerns are virality, even when they like open-source (which is a practical concern overriding an ideological one), and a lack of any real interest in how it's licensed, just wanting it put out there with very few strings attached.

There is a very practical reason for choosing a copyleft license as an author. If you choose a non-copyleft free software license, then downstream users actually have more options than you do. They can take your code, add small modifications and then release the result under a non-free license. Even if you implement those features as well, you aren't playing on a level playing field. You have to support all of the software and they only have to support their small additions. The end result is that they can offer a product with a value-add at a lower cost than you can. You are essentially competing with yourself.

Of course you can decide not to release your code under a free software license, but that rather defeats the purpose of running a free software project ;-)

Looking at it another way, more permissive licences grant more options to downstream users than copyleft licenses. It doesn't make sense to argue that you are offering only copyleft licenses to benefit those downstream users individually (and I know of nobody who makes that claim). Instead, the argument is that it is better for the group that everybody has equal restrictions and can't use proprietary code to gain an advantage over everyone else.

This is actually one of the reasons why if anyone asks me to assign copyright for my side projects over for work, I'm happy to do so: on the provision that all of my work is licensed under the GPL. It barely matters to me at that point who owns the copyright (though to protect yourself further you should ensure that no one person has copyright over the entire work).

IMHO, although the choice to write free software at all is often ideological, the choice of using a copyleft license or not is usually pragmatic -- at least among those who understand why copyleft licenses are written the way they are.

Correct. We are pragmatic-focused. The communities asked for better integration with GitHub, so we provided it. (nothing to do with non/copyleft licensing regimes)

Mind you, we maintain private mirrors and have restrictions on some of the GitHub access/workflows (eg. ICLA on file, and 2FA required). We still need to track provenance, and must be able to operate independently, if it comes to that.

-- Greg Stein

Let me tell you, as a little data point, I use BSD licenses and I'm ideological enough not to want to host anything on a walled-garden now run by Microsoft.

> To put it another way; if you found out GNU coreutils were hosted on Window machines using IIS web servers then you would probably consider that the people making the software (or, certainly those hosting it) are ideologically at odds with the project and are hypocritical.

From a pragmatic standpoint, if (theoretically) running on Windows/IIS allowed the GNU coreutils project to save enough money to _actually further their goals_, I'd say they'd be foolish not to host that way.

When taking an ideological stance, there are practical considerations to consider. There will always be more and less effective ways to get one's point across.

I'm reminded, a bit, of this comic: https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha. Sometimes, you have to participate in the thing you're rallying against, because it's the most effective way to gain traction for your cause.

I think the point is that for hosted services the fact that Github chooses to use non-F/OSS software only really hurts Github's freedom since they're the ones limited by restrictive software licensing.

The fact that Github itself is not F/OSS matters even less as Github is the only user of Github's source code [1]; they're the copyright holder and unencumbered by any licensing restrictions.

[1] For GH's on-prem enterprise product this does not apply and has a much stronger case to be F/OSS since now GH is using copyright to restrict the freedom of others.

> a lot of free-software/open source software are licensed that way because the projects themselves are ideologically predisposed.

Does GNU audit every contributor to its libraries to ensure they only personally use open source hardware/software? If not, then I'd have a big issue the ideology stance of these organizations.

> So, I mean, you get to choose, if you go the Linux way and say "we are open source for pragmatic reasons" then there's no doublethink. If you say "we believe that all software should be free" while simultaneously forcing your users to contribute using closed source software on a proprietary platform then then you're not practicing your ideology, and worse; you're forcing that non-practice on your developers and users.

With that same rationale, it's also doublethink if every system that an ideologically-aligned FOSS isn't using FOSS based systems. And realistically, this is not how the market works and makes it extremely limiting to find contributors to maintain systems in longevity.

Kind of reminds me of the discussion around people going personally carbon-neutral. Are you going to realistically audit every interaction you have every day to ensure the level of carbon you are consuming? No, you look at the largest/most material areas that you can control and use alternatives there.

If the open source community is better served, and more free software is produced as a result of this move, then I see no hypocrisy. As in code, most things in life are a compromise.

It is definitely better-served. It was the communities asking for GitHub access/integration. So we provided it.

-- Greg Stein