GNU Ethical Repository Criteria Evaluations

We maintain this evaluation report presenting the compliance level of repository services with the GNU ethical repository criteria. There are some criteria that we can't possibly verify, in which case we accept the site maintainer's word on the matter. This evaluation is done by volunteers coordinated by the Free Software Foundation, and you are welcome to contribute.

Site	Grade	Date	Criteria Version
savannah.gnu.org	A	2015-10-01	1.1
GitLab	C	2015-11-05	1.1
GitHub	F	2016-04-13	1.1
sourceforge.net	F	2015-10-07	1.1

savannah.gnu.org — A

savannah.gnu.org has already achieved the highest grade for ethical hosting; these are the issues that would need to be addressed for it to earn extra credit. If you would like to volunteer to help make some of these changes, please join the Savannah team.

• There are normal Web access/download logs which sometimes include IP addresses. (A+1)
• It follows EFF's criteria only partially; complying with the rest remains in progress. (A+2)
• HTML_CodeSniffer reports dozen of errors and warnings related to WCAG 2.0 compliance on every page. (A+3)
• There is no WAI-ARIA markup in its pages. (A+4)
• There is no way of exporting data contributed by project owners or contributors. (A+5)

GitLab — C

Things that prevent GitLab from moving up to the next grade, B:

• All JavaScript code served to the client is free, but does not work with LibreJS enabled. (B0)
• Encourages bad licensing practice, including no license; failure to state the license on each source file; and failure to say which GPL versions apply. (B2)

GitHub — F

Things that prevent GitHub from moving up to the next grade, C:

• Important site functionality does not work without running nonfree JavaScript. (C0)

The worst thing that GitHub does is to encourage bad licensing practice: failure to include a license, failure to state the license on each source file, and failure to specify “version 3 or later” when using the GNU GPL. (B2)

Here are additional reasons to avoid GitHub.

sourceforge.net — F

Things that prevent sourceforge.net from moving up to the next grade, C:

• Important site functionality doesn't work without JavaScript, or with LibreJS enabled. (C0)
• Rejects users from certain countries. (C2)