powers of four

Over the last decade, free software developers have been repeatedly tempted by development tools that offer the ability to build free software more efficiently or powerfully.

The only cost, we are told, is that the tools themselves are nonfree or run as network services with code we cannot see, copy, or run ourselves. In their decisions to use these tools and services -- services such as BitKeeper, SourceForge, Google Code and GitHub -- free software developers have made "ends-justify-the-means" decisions that trade away the freedom of both their developer communities and their users. These decisions to embrace nonfree and private development tools undermine our credibility in advocating for software freedom and compromise our freedom, and that of our users, in ways that we should reject.

This is a good point, and one that I think deserves some scrutiny. The open source KForge project provides an opportunity to escape hosts like SourceForge, Google Code, GitHub and Bitbucket, but it is relatively difficult to deploy on commodity hosting. (This week I had the opportunity to talk to someone who had deployed it.) I'm guilty of storing many of my scientific projects on Google Code and Bitbucket, but one of my main projects is hosted privately on a server I pay for, using only Free Software.

One of the issues I see with scientific programming endeavors is that often the self-hosting option presents some red tape, whereas the hosted option is much simpler and easier -- particularly if the project itself is cross-institutional. This is one of the reasons I pushed for our primary simulation platform to be hosted at Google Code, rather than on a local, university-hosted server.