GitHub, Firewalls, and Freedom

June 9, 2009 in Uncategorized by Benjamin Mako Hill | 4 comments

GitHub has a complicated relationship to software freedom and network services: It is a proprietary centralized service, built using free software, used by many free and open source software projects (and a whole lot of proprietary ones as well) to make using a piece of free software designed to support distributed work on users’ local computers easier.

Last week, Logical Awesome — the company that makes GitHub — announced GitHub:FI (Firewall Install). The new product is designed for those that, “wish to enjoy the benefits of GitHub, but are unable to do so because of corporate restrictions or laws that prevent you from hosting your code with a third-party service.” Essentially, GitHub:FI is a version of GitHub that can be installed on a company’s own computer inside a private network.

The GitHub:FI announcement reveals a number of interesting issues around autonomy and network services. First, the product is a symbol of recognition by GitHub of the business limitations of a purely service-based business. Not everyone will be willing or able to hand their data or computation over to a third-party. GitHub:FI exists to serve a group of people that want a level of autonomy that, while far from Franklin Street Statement style autonomy, is more than the centralized version of GitHub can provide. It marks a guarded step toward increased autonomy by a cloud poster-child.

Second, it’s interesting to see this reluctance to centralized services being described as motivated by organizations under strong institutional pressures — groups like large firms and governments. Although it certainly makes sense that these groups would be reluctant to “outsource” to centralized systems, GitHub:FI shows that these groups may provide an unlikely ally in at least part of the fight for autonomy.

Third, in Logical Awesome’s words, GitHub:FI, “is well over the cost of our most-expensive hosted plan.” In this pricing structure, the distributed option presented in GitHub:FI is framed as a form of tax on autonomy. We suspect there will be much more of this going forward. Of course, as GitHub remains proprietary software, users of GitHub:FI get only buy partial autonomy.

Finally, the product’s name is interesting. Not so long ago, we treated network services as exceptional and local software as normal. The idea of calling distributed software a “firewall install” is an explicit attempt to reframe conceptions of normal and exceptional in terms of where we expect software to reside or, perhaps, a reflection of just how entrenched services have already become.

This post was written with Dafydd Harries.

  1. CiaranG on June 9, 2009 at 6:17 am

    There are several genuinely free alternatives to GitHub, including Gitorious. It saddens me that respected people and projects that claim to support/understand free software get themselves locked in to GitHub, and inevitably drag others in with them.

  2. Benjamin Mako Hill on June 9, 2009 at 6:46 am

    Thanks for posting this Ciaran. I use Gitorious myself and, on reflection, should have mentioned this at least briefly in the text of the article.

  3. Philip Hofstetter on June 9, 2009 at 7:48 am

    Another point:

    We are a very small company in Switzerland and while I really like github’s user centric view (as opposed to gitorious’ project centric) and the featureset in general, I feel really uncomfortable to upload any of our code to a server of a third party company in a foreign country I’m not familiar with its legislation.

    (yes. we are doing proprietary software – mainly because it’s closely tied into our customers ERP systems and I could not opensource that without their permission which I would never get. We do try, though, to push all our modifications to open source software we use upstream – with various levels of acceptance by these projects).

    I was quite excited about the prospects of having the functionality of GitHub and the security of something I control myself (assuming that their binary does not still upload the code somewhere).

    Naturally, I used their form to request a quote, but I have not heard back from them since. Maybe because we are “just” 6 developers at this time.

    In my request to them I made clear that I will never be able to / comfortable with using any of their subscription models.

    I never heard back from them, so I assume fear of cannibalizing their subscription model is larger than the prospect of gaining one more (admittedly) small customer.

    But I would still have loved to at least get a reply from them.

    Philip

  4. Matt Zimmerman on July 2, 2009 at 1:05 pm

    “Firewall install” may be one of the first in a wave of cloud computing retronyms. “On site” versions of popular cloud services may be a common theme as the industry reconfigures itself.