Topic on Talk:GitLab/2020 consultation

Nemo bis (talkcontribs)

The consultation mentions «guiding principle of Freedom and open source». Good, but it is still missing a clear statement that only solutions based on fully free software will be considered, including whatever SaaSS they rely on. Is it considered obvious? If so, no reason to avoid spelling it out. Is it not obvious? Then we need a frank conversation about it.

This is not a theoretical issue; we already know that some things can be problematic, for instance ReCaptcha. In other software migrations by WMF in the past, features to handle spam and abuse proved inadequate well too late in the process and we ended up disabling of core workflows for months, sometimes years.

Please don't ignore what other people are doing, write a summary of other free software orgs experiences and studies; otherwise, the only available resource remains https://libreplanet.org/wiki/Fsf_2019_forge_evaluation (which is rather negative about GitLab) and it will look like you're dismissing freedom as a concern, even if it's not true.

AKlapper (WMF) (talkcontribs)
BBearnes (WMF) (talkcontribs)

Re: ReCaptcha, it doesn't appear to be enabled by default in the Community Edition. Thanks for raising the larger point about needing to mitigate spam/abuse without relying on unacceptably invasive 3rd-party services.

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