Mel - thanks for doing the brunt of the work for me on this, these are important supplemental data points. I added a few comments inline.
> * open source projects can get public repositories for free on github > already; the advantage of these edu accounts is that they let you create > private repositories (you'd usually have to pay for an account with this > functionality). > > Your concerns about licensing might preclude this point/concern, but I was thinking that the private repositories could be exactly the difference that allow some institutions to use github. It seems that IP regulations in academia may prefer (read: "require") private repos as compared to the necessarily public repositories that accommodate the free accounts provided to open source projects. > * github itself isn't FOSS - this will matter to some people here, myself > included - but I think I'd personally be under "strong preference" rather > than "hard requirement" here. (If the non-FOSS product is better, I would be > fine with using it and then sending the best FOSS competitor a note saying > "hey, here are the things that are keeping us from using you," maybe helping > them with budget for a hackathon to implement some stuff on the list, and > re-evaluating in a year or so.) > > * Its competitor gitorious is FOSS - there are some feature tradeoffs > between the two; gitorious has nice merge request functionality etc, but > private repos seems easier on github (I'm unclear whether it exists in > gitorious - I think "no" but found some patches for it under review for > merging - we could ask the devs) and I know that's important for this group. > > Great points regarding github, gitorious, and FOSS status. My only addition here is that there are a lot of open source projects using github, as well as a lot of open source-friendly organizations who use github for their VCS. In light of these facts (I'm using 'facts' - although I don't have a source to cite), if we are trying to promote open source participation, and effectively teach people how to get started/involved, I think being able to offer hands-on github experience will be a great addition. -- Nicholas
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