Item — HN Reader

> If you have the right to turn off PRs

Joke's on you; I already do shut down every PR automatically on my projects with the repo-lockdown bot: https://github.com/marketplace/actions/repo-lockdown

Making my code public at all is what costs me nothing. I am already writing it. I am already versioning it with Git. Giving you access to it is either a no-op or is some amount of public good. It can never be a negative. This is what Free Software is. Read Stallman: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html#four-freedoms

1 comments

Joke's not on me, that's exactly what I was suggesting. you win! and I agree with that bot as a solution.

Keep your code private if that's your attitude though. You don't want to share your code, you just want free advertisement.

You know what, you wrote your code, you didn't write github, you don't own github and you don't own the interaction github users have regarding public projects.

PRs are not your software. What you need to do is maintain a private git repo, or just make the repo private and post tarballs and builds on the releases page. that will solve the problem even better for you. you'll still be publishing source as well as executables that way. PRs are about github, it's users and their interaction with projects. When you give someone access to a repo, you can't complain when they create a feature branch and request a merge, that's all a PR is. In your case, you want to give people access to source code but not a repository, so do just that and leave people who want to publish a repository alone, or restrict access to your repo to a github organization with people you approve of to make contributions to private repos.

> Keep your code private if that's your attitude though. You don't want to share your code, you just want free advertisement.

There is no money nor mindshare to be had, so advertising is the entirely wrong way to think about it. This is a thought-process warped by the commercial sector. Even if somebody doesn't use my code they are still welcome to learn from it. They're welcome to use it, too, I just don't want to know about it :)

Fair enough. But I go back to my point that you can share source code without hosting a repository and a version control system. version control systems are intended to facilitate collaboration on code, and their exposure implies the intended audience that would perform such collaboration. Making it private shows that collaboration isn't a public affair. You can have a public repo that only hosts releases, or just host releases on your website.