[Brett]
>> If GitHub turns evil, it will be most likely by selling this >> nicely packaged information to recruiters. It's too late to move >> away then, the statistics will have been collected already.
Do their terms of service even allow for that, or is this just speculation
on your part?
When exploring a worst case scenario, some level of speculation is probably inevitable. The guideline "if a service is free, you are the product" is pretty well established -- I cannot think of an example where it has actually been refuted.
I do not know whether explicit permission to resell data that is technically public is required in the U.S. Note that while the data is "public", data mining GitHub by third parties seems to be forbidden.
GitHub's TOS appear to be entirely silent on the subject, but they are already publishing aggregate data like
which by my (European) privacy point of view is already stretching and exceeding the limits of good taste.
Stefan Krah
On Sat, 28 Nov 2015 at 11:35 Stefan Krah skrah.temporarily@gmail.com wrote:
[Brett]
>> If GitHub turns evil, it will be most likely by selling this >> nicely packaged information to recruiters. It's too late to move >> away then, the statistics will have been collected already.Do their terms of service even allow for that, or is this just
speculation on your part?
When exploring a worst case scenario, some level of speculation is probably inevitable. The guideline "if a service is free, you are the product" is pretty well established -- I cannot think of an example where it has actually been refuted.
But the service is free to open source only. GitHub makes all of their money from private hosting services to large companies. So it's a freemium model of "try our service out for free as long as you make your code public, and if you like it and want to use it at work then pay us". So I don't view this as the same model that Google et. al. uses where you are the product to advertisers, but more like mobile games where people are trying to entice you to buy "upgrades".
I do not know whether explicit permission to resell data that is technically public is required in the U.S. Note that while the data is "public", data mining GitHub by third parties seems to be forbidden.
GitHub's TOS appear to be entirely silent on the subject, but they are already publishing aggregate data like
I believe you have to make your profile public for that to be viewable.
-Brett
which by my (European) privacy point of view is already stretching and exceeding the limits of good taste.
Stefan Krah
core-workflow mailing list core-workflow@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/core-workflow This list is governed by the PSF Code of Conduct: https://www.python.org/psf/codeofconduct
Brett Cannon <brett@...> writes:
I believe you have to make your profile public for that to be viewable.
I've just created a test account and cannot find any setting to hide the profile.
On the other hand, there's a setting "Jobs profile: available for hire"...
Stefan Krah
Looks like I was wrong and what you can hide is your organization memberships. As for the job profile, it basically shows job posting in your news feed. Details on both options can be found at https://help.github.com/categories/user-accounts/
On Wed, 30 Dec 2015, 06:18 Stefan Krah skrah.temporarily@gmail.com wrote:
Brett Cannon <brett@...> writes:
I believe you have to make your profile public for that to be viewable.
I've just created a test account and cannot find any setting to hide the profile.
On the other hand, there's a setting "Jobs profile: available for hire"...
Stefan Krah
core-workflow mailing list core-workflow@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/core-workflow This list is governed by the PSF Code of Conduct: https://www.python.org/psf/codeofconduct
Brett Cannon <brett@...> writes:
Looks like I was wrong and what you can hide is your organization
memberships. As for the job profile, it basically shows job posting in your news feed. Details on both options can be found at https://help.github.com/categories/user-accounts/
Ok, thanks. But this means that GitHub already *is* in the job/recruiting business. They start small with a news feed, at some point the feed will become targeted, after that -- once people (esp. age group 14-18) get used to it -- they can get even more "creative".
Additionally, they strongly encourage a single user account both for work and volunteer projects, so they have a perfect history of every developer's activities.
I don't care if they have been profitable by selling private repos on a small/medium scale, the direction they're heading in is quite clear:
Get people (esp. young ones) to work for free on OSS projects using gamification, cute icons, "social" coding, and a fake hero-of-work ethos fueled by "longest streak" statistics. When these people are ready to enter the job market, they can <euphemism>be brought in contact with</euphemism> employers.
Stefan Krah
On 30.12.2015 20:03, Stefan Krah wrote:
Brett Cannon <brett@...> writes:
Looks like I was wrong and what you can hide is your organization
memberships. As for the job profile, it basically shows job posting in your news feed. Details on both options can be found at https://help.github.com/categories/user-accounts/
Ok, thanks. But this means that GitHub already *is* in the job/recruiting business. They start small with a news feed, at some point the feed will become targeted, after that -- once people (esp. age group 14-18) get used to it -- they can get even more "creative".
Additionally, they strongly encourage a single user account both for work and volunteer projects, so they have a perfect history of every developer's activities.
I don't care if they have been profitable by selling private repos on a small/medium scale, the direction they're heading in is quite clear:
Get people (esp. young ones) to work for free on OSS projects using gamification, cute icons, "social" coding, and a fake hero-of-work ethos fueled by "longest streak" statistics. When these people are ready to enter the job market, they can <euphemism>be brought in contact with</euphemism> employers.
FWIW: This business model is already being used by other companies scraping Github repos, analyzing checkins and then matching what they find against recruitment offers (basically automated head hunting).
The same could be done with any other DVCS repo system, but Github is currently the most popular one out there. Ohloh, now renamed to Open Hub, has been doing such analysis for quite a while (with a different focus, though):
https://www.openhub.net/p/python/contributors
That's simply a consequence of having repos out in the open and not really specific to Github.
M.-A. Lemburg <mal@...> writes:
On 30.12.2015 20:03, Stefan Krah wrote:
I don't care if they have been profitable by selling private repos on a small/medium scale, the direction they're heading in is quite clear:
Get people (esp. young ones) to work for free on OSS projects using gamification, cute icons, "social" coding, and a fake hero-of-work ethos fueled by "longest streak" statistics. When these people are ready to enter the job market, they can <euphemism>be brought in contact with</euphemism> employers.
FWIW: This business model is already being used by other companies scraping Github repos, analyzing checkins and then matching what they find against recruitment offers (basically automated head hunting).
The same could be done with any other DVCS repo system, but Github is currently the most popular one out there. Ohloh, now renamed to Open Hub, has been doing such analysis for quite a while (with a different focus, though):
https://www.openhub.net/p/python/contributors
That's simply a consequence of having repos out in the open and not really specific to Github.
GitHub takes this to a new limit: When you create an account, you are being told (gamification-style) how to get dark green squares in your statistics, how to promote yourself using a picture, how to use a single account for private and public repos, how to keep the single account *even when switching companies*!
If you happen to work for a company that's on GitHub *and* contribute to volunteer projects there, they basically have a major part of your life on their servers. I don't think OpenHub can match that in any way.
I'm not anti-corporate: If Microsoft would make us an offer to manage our infrastructure, I'd rather have a Microsoft account for Python development that a GitHub account.
Stefan Krah
On 31 December 2015 at 10:00, Stefan Krah skrah.temporarily@gmail.com wrote:
M.-A. Lemburg <mal@...> writes:
On 30.12.2015 20:03, Stefan Krah wrote:
I don't care if they have been profitable by selling private repos on a small/medium scale, the direction they're heading in is quite clear:
Get people (esp. young ones) to work for free on OSS projects using gamification, cute icons, "social" coding, and a fake hero-of-work ethos fueled by "longest streak" statistics. When these people are ready to enter the job market, they can <euphemism>be brought in contact with</euphemism> employers.
FWIW: This business model is already being used by other companies scraping Github repos, analyzing checkins and then matching what they find against recruitment offers (basically automated head hunting).
The same could be done with any other DVCS repo system, but Github is currently the most popular one out there. Ohloh, now renamed to Open Hub, has been doing such analysis for quite a while (with a different focus, though):
https://www.openhub.net/p/python/contributors
That's simply a consequence of having repos out in the open and not really specific to Github.
GitHub takes this to a new limit: When you create an account, you are being told (gamification-style) how to get dark green squares in your statistics, how to promote yourself using a picture, how to use a single account for private and public repos, how to keep the single account *even when switching companies*!
If you happen to work for a company that's on GitHub *and* contribute to volunteer projects there, they basically have a major part of your life on their servers. I don't think OpenHub can match that in any way.
I'm not anti-corporate: If Microsoft would make us an offer to manage our infrastructure, I'd rather have a Microsoft account for Python development that a GitHub account.
I actually share a lot of Stefan's concerns regarding the potential for exploitation of community volunteers that is involved in GitHub's business model - being a late-entering competitor in an already crowded Enterprise VCS market (where version control is just one piece of the larger Application Lifecycle Management puzzle) doesn't justify the kind of VC investment that GitHub has been receiving, while GitHub's potential as the preferred platform for connecting open source contributors with large organisations adopting and creating open source software *does* justify that kind of investment. "Going where the developers are" is certainly the justification I see used to advocate for even established open source organisations setting up shop there rather than hosting their own repositories on a more obviously company or project branded site.
However, it's also important to acknowledge that corporate exploitation of open source community volunteers is *already happening* - it's a cultural norm for profitable companies to deploy and run open source software without allocating even a single hour of their employees' time to contributing back to the projects they use, figuring out a way to compensate existing contributors to improve the sustainability of upstream projects, or paying a non-profit foundation or commercial redistributor to handle those problems on their behalf (and even community non-profits and commercial redistributors aren't as good at handling those tasks on behalf of sponsors, customers and contributors as we should be).
As such, I've come to the conclusion that the potential for exploitation of community members isn't a strong argument against community projects like CPython adopting GitHub for code hosting and review, as making contributions more readily visible actually has the potential to *reduce* exploitation by helping contributors to strengthen their negotiating position in various commercial contexts.
Since I'm also a strong advocate for tackling that problem at the employer/employee boundary [1] rather than the vendor/customer one, the case can even be made that GitHub's approach to changing that dynamic (i.e. baking it in as an inherent feature of the way their free-as-in-beer software hosting platform works) may prove to be more effective than asking people to do it voluntarily [2] or leaving it to foundations and companies to invest in their own data gathering [3,4].
Regards, Nick.
[1] http://community.redhat.com/blog/2015/02/the-quid-pro-quo-of-open-infrastruc... [2] https://docs.python.org/devguide/motivations.html [3] http://stackalytics.com/ [4] https://www.rdoproject.org/stats/browser/
participants (4)
-
Brett Cannon -
M.-A. Lemburg -
Nick Coghlan -
Stefan Krah