Privacy expectations in private repositories hosted on public forges

[realaravinth]

Great write-up!

@dachary

The moderation process requires to go over private repositories and ask their authors to add a Free Software license. This approach is also problematic because a license is only effective when a software is distributed. Which is not the case, by definition, for software that is not accessible to the public because it resides in a private repository. In other words, adding a license to a private repository has no effect.

For moderation of private repositories, I believe the moderators should also consider if there are any users of the repositories in question. If they have users and the repository is private, then the user should be informed about the forge’s policy regarding Free Software exclusiveness.

But if the project doesn’t have any users and is only used by the owner, it is technically Free Software as all the four rights available to its owner.