Comment by throwawayaway11 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwawayaway11 | Hacker News Reader

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throwawayaway11

OP (from github) here.

I apologize. I didn't understand Github welcomed this sort of use. Common cases of hosting other people's infrastructure (e.g. Sourceforge, freedesktop.org, Atlassian, ...):

    * Charity (free) for open source
    * Pay-for-use commercial users

I haven't seen a lot of companies volunteering to host other profitable companies' infrastructure before. So, I posted that with my knee-jerk reaction to the situation.

That being said, I take issue with your assessment of the situation and the criticism. I object to the designation "whiteknight" — I believe I am actually acting quite selfishly. It is in my best interest for Github to continue to be in business as long as possible, to keep hosting open source software for my projects and projects I consume.

The net gains/costs of Github hosting Valve's issue tracker are pure speculation without an insider's view, and I can't pretend to have that. I'm guessing you don't either? I'm not saying you're wrong, just that your claim is drawn out of thin air.

> I object to the designation "whiteknight"

You're behaving in the very definition of the term, no matter how much people might dislike its over-application, and how it's almost applied to anything one does online - you'll excuse my generalization about as easily as you'll accept the term, I'm sure.

You're behaving as if you know what's best for resources you don't even own, nor operate yourself. Why not just let Valve and Github work out policies between each other.

Your knee-jerk is the very essence of vigilantism, albeit online social justice: hence whiteknight. You might not like the pejorative, but it fits perfectly for the action.

Maybe think before you speak? Not everyone needs an activist. Valve and GitHub are big boys, they can fight with eachother - though by the sounds of it they're not fighting at all.

I don't think my actions are as significant as you make them out to be.

> You're behaving as if you know what's best for resources you don't even own, nor operate yourself.

I don't know best — so I file an issue to start the question. This is how you start discussions. An issue/bug report does not always mean "this is a software bug, fix it now!"

> Your knee-jerk is the very essence of vigilantism

Really? Vigilantism is filing a github issue? Lollerskates. I see things that go against my intuition, I file bugs, this is how you make software better. Sometimes the bug reports are invalid shrug. My intuition is usually good. Sorry it was wrong in this case.

> Maybe think before you speak?

This phrase gets thrown around a lot but only when talking to other people. What makes you think that I didn't think before I wrote that? Or that somehow your snide suggestion is more likely to convince me to "think more" before I file future bugs than Github and Valve's professional responses ("we're cool with this, closing")?

> Not everyone needs an activist.

I still think you're making out filing a two-sentence GH issue as waaaaaay more involved or significant than it really is. I'm not a Github activist. I just write code.

Aside from the fact that whiteknight is a pretty stupid term, I think the point is exactly that you lack an insider's perspective. Github is perfectly capable of managing their own policies.

If you were really that worried about it, reporting it to github's CS more privately might have been a better way to go about it. After all, you're in no position to tell either valve or github what to do with each others' resources.

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