Subject: [bug#76503] [GCD] Migrating repositories, issues, and patches to Codeberg: Terms of Use

From: Tomas Volf <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 02 Mar 2025 18:09:18 +0100

Ludovic Courtès <[email-masked]> writes:

> [..]
>
> First, everyone will have to create an account and accept [Codeberg’s
> Terms of
> Use](https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/org/src/branch/main/TermsOfUse.md)
> before they can contribute, which can be seen as a step back compared to
> the email-based workflow.

I went through the Terms of Use and picked few points I considers
problematic and/or note worthy.

§ 2 (1) 3. looks pretty annoying for occasional contributors.

§ 2 (1) 4. forces us to rewrite repository history in case of
compromise, instead of just reverting the malicious commits.  I do not
know what the Guix's current policy is for such a case, but it is worth
to keep in mind that we would no longer have a say in the matter.

§ 2 (4) is annoying for people not familiar with German law (which
includes me).  Savannah is in the US, where the rules (possibly aside
the copyright laws) are bit less strict (at least that is my
impression).

§ 2 (5), especially the "its reputation" part, can easily lead to
loosing Codeberg account, and therefore ability to contribute to Guix,
over, for example, Mastodon toot complaining that Codeberg it down
again.  After all, that could very well be considered "Action intended
to damage the [Codeberg's] reputation".

§ 3 (4) is pretty WTF.  They could at least send an email.  I plan to
keep working from the Emacs, so I am pretty sure I will not check the
dashboard for announcement messages regarding ToU changes every three
months.

§ 4 (4) is the typical "we can nuke your account at any time for any
reason".  Nice.

And the "You must make sure that we have a way to contact you by keeping
the email address of your account up-to-date." is just a final middle
finger, because while I *have* to keep mail address up to date, they
cannot be bothered to use it to send me information that ToU did change.

I am not sure I agree to these (definitely not to all of them), so I
would probably be precluded from further contributions (since I would
need an account on Codeberg, which I cannot get without agreeing to the
ToU).

Also, there is a pretty nasty failure state when they do change the ToU,
and none of the committers would agree to the change.  At that point
they (per the ToU) have to close their accounts and the whole repository
would be just stuck in the void with no way to migrate it away.  I agree
this is pretty unlikely though.

All of this would be solved by self hosting, but I definitely understand
your reasons for wanting to avoid that.

Tomas

-- 
There are only two hard things in Computer Science:
cache invalidation, naming things and off-by-one errors.