Re: [gentoo-dev] CI services for Gentoo & Social Contract meanings of "dependant" notifications on depgraph breakages

[Andrew Savchenko]

Hello,

On Tue, 14 Apr 2015 01:13:02 +0000 Robin H. Johnson wrote:
> Bircoph:
> mgorny has worked with infra to get something that is suitable.
> _ANY_ CI is an improvement over no CI.

Yes and no, this depends on implications of such improvement.
 
> > If travis will become essential for Gentoo development, it may
> > undermine development freedom and Gentoo social contract, which
> > states: "Gentoo will never depend upon a piece of software or metadata
> > unless it conforms to the GNU General Public License, the GNU Lesser
> > General Public License, the Creative Commons - Attribution/Share Alike
> > or some other license approved by the Open Source Initiative (OSI)."
> This argument has come up before, claiming that something one team is
> doing isn't in line with the social contract. mgorny himself complained
> about infra's repos being non-public.
>
> Let's expand that section somewhat, from the original text:
> "We will release our contributions to Gentoo as free software, metadata or
> documentation, under the GNU General Public License version 2 or the Creative
> Commons - Attribution / Share Alike version 2. ... However, Gentoo will never
> depend upon a piece of software or metadata unless it conforms to the GNU
> General Public License, the GNU Lesser General Public License, the Creative
> Commons - Attribution/Share Alike or some other license approved by the Open
> Source Initiative."
>
> I'm going to use the word 'libre' below, to differentiate between a
> 'free-as-in-freedom' license, and the 'free-as-in-beer' offering from
> commerical CI providers.
>
> Infra's repo contents are licensed libre: most scripts I've written in the
> infra repos carry a BSD license, in many cases because I wrote them for dayjob
> purposes first, and later modified them for Gentoo.
>
> We can expand this, by stating that the repos we want to test with CI must
> remain libre.
>
> It says NOTHING about the CI tools themselves. Why should we not be able to
> benefit from really good closed-source CI tools that are offered for free to
> the open-source community? As long as we can continue to function WITHOUT those
> tools, there is no direct harm [1] done in using them. They cannot force us to
> change the licenses of our repos at all.

My primary concern lies in another plane: with time we'll depend on
github, its features and companion projects more and more. Each
dependency will likely be replaceable, but with some effort. The
more features or tools we use, the harder it will be to replace all
of them, especially at once. At some moment we will not be able to
switch to another solution in practical terms without serious
damage to our workflow, particularly if immediate change will be
required. What if github will just cease to exist one day?

Right now we use and depend (in terms of convenience) upon at least
following github features ():

1. pull requests;
2. travis ci;
3. many official overlays use github widely: repositories, issue
trackers, pull requests and more.

I bet this list will expand in future with more features.

Argument about saving Gentoo Foundation financial resources by
using hardware for CI for free is heard and taken. This is a
serious one and I can't argue here. But frankly it looks like to me
that we are just selling our freedom, slowly, bit by bit.

Best regards,
Andrew Savchenko