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.

That said, if I recall correctly - the whole Launchpad platform is Free and Open Source Software. (https://launchpad.net/launchpad)

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.

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.

This is a distributed source control system. Keep a clone of the repo somewhere. Your source code is now no longer bound to Github.

Business Insider agrees.[1] Github, Inc. is now valued at $2 billion.

Right. Which means we have to worry about Github's management starting to think like Zuckerberg: "All your life is belong to us."

[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/github-raises-200-million-wor...

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.

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.

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 just saying that we should use definitions correctly, and "censorship" doesn't work here.

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?

Thoughts?

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)

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?

"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.

Regardless, the term "self-censorship" is not germane to or inherent in only citizen-government interactions.