What if collaboration on opensource projects (i.e. hosting, issues and their comments) was decentralized instead of relying on a central entity like Github? That would keep the developer base active and make DMCA takedowns ineffective.
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Git seems like a great candidate for hosting through TOR; it's super low bandwidth. I often find myself wondering why DMCA'd fan projects don't just switch to anonymous TOR hosting. Obviously it's not bulletproof, but if it's just copyright holders you have to worry about and not state actors then it seems like a great solution.
Sure, youtube-dl could be hosted on TOR, but how many of its users will follow it to TOR?
The RIAA would score a great victory if it could essentially force youtube-dl development to go underground.
> a great candidate
Not just a candidate. Torsocks + Git works perfectly. There's no mainstream free Tor Git hosting I know of, so that's a market ripe for picking.
Check out Radicle https://radicle.xyz/
In light of this DMCA, this seems like a site that needs to exist...but I don't know of one? Seems like as trivial a build as anything cryptographic actually
Well, there's git over SSB (Secure Scuttlebutt) and got over IPF (Interplanetary Filesystem)... That should be distributed uncensorable git...
Yes, we do need this. I feel that the first step would be to move ytdl to a self hosted repository. But even this has the potential for takedowns.
If we rename it and add some open license video as an example instead of music videos, can they still ask for a takedown?
They should rename it to open-license-content-dl, paste warnings all over the readme about how it should NOT be used to download copyrighted content, post it to github, and see what happens.
> some open license video
Perhaps 'Copying Is Not Theft'[1]?
they could create a youtube channel and upload some test/example videos to that
Since git is already decentralized, this definitely seems doable.
My thought exactly. It even incorporates functionality for turning any local git repo into a shared git repo.
Mainly what they need besides that is a place to co-ordinate, collaborate and track tickets. Solutions abound.
The RIAA's actions are annoying but won't kill the project.
> What if collaboration on opensource projects (i.e. hosting, issues and their comments) was decentralized instead of relying on a central entity like Github? That would keep the developer base active and make DMCA takedowns ineffective.
But decentralisation would also make it harder to verify the code is legitimate.
Would you trust a copy of something like this from an anonymous server?
Well, git commits can be signed by they're authors, verifying authenticity.
This would prove if malicious commits have been added to a mirrored repository.
keybase.io provide decentralized crypto solution, it's better to open source community to move on to such crypto soluion
Keybase is extremely centralized, and they were bought by Zoom a few months ago.
Stop using Keybase.
I too thought of this, but keybase is bulky, software-wise. I'm not a fan of having to run its service just to access public git repos.
They got bought by Zoom. Hard pass.
Git-on-the-Blockchain?
https://github.com/cryptix/git-remote-ipfs#readme is pretty close, I think