Bitcoin Core Github
Speakers: Greg Maxwell
Date: October 26, 2020
Transcript By: Michael Folkson
Location: Reddit
Can GitHub censor Bitcoin Core?
The event isn’t news to Bitcoin developers either, github has done this a number of times before– even taking Mozilla offline as a result of an obviously spurious DMCA complaint.
Every developer that has the repository cloned has the full history.
Not just the developers, thousands of users who build from git checkouts have the complete source code history too. There is also a live replica available over Tor at http://www.nxshomzlgqmwfwhcnyvbznyrybh3gotlfgis7wkv7iur2yj2rarlhiad.onion/ (see also, and note the date on this post– 2018)
Multiple parties also archive the issues and pull request comments.
relies on a centralized service for development coordination
The project is also coordinated on mailing lists, email, IRC, and its own website with participants all over the world.
The suggested ‘solutions’ in the article aren’t but that isn’t surprising since it’s clear that the author didn’t even bother to read any of the discussions on the subject. The article’s cowardly passive-voice “could even be said” comment isn’t just offensively ignorant: it shows a profound level of indifference to any form of being reasonable. The only sense where it “could be said” is along the lines of “a fool might say anything”.
When github eventually knocks that repository out over a fraudulent request– which I assume will eventually happen– it’ll be a little disruptive to the development work flow for a few days with some lingering issues around restoring access to old issue data in a useful way but that pretty much it.
On a number of occasions the project considered moving off github in the past due to incidents like this, but similar issues exist elsewhere and at the time it just seemed better to just take the disruption when its forced rather than self-inflicting it. I know first hand that if your project isn’t on github people will setup poorly maintained (sometimes malicious) replicas there and people will stumble into running them, so even ignoring similar takedown problems elsewhere it isn’t like “just don’t use github” would be a magical cure all solution.