Dear Jerry Van Baren,
as usual, you are asking a lot of very interesting and important questions.
The situation is that I already discusses this matte with Jon at length in private mail, and I have made myu mind up I do not attempt to register at github.
In message 49BF008F.5090608@gmail.com you wrote:
On the plus side
- It costs denx.de nothing to mirror the master to github
This is not clear. It may be free at the moment. But did you read the Terms of Service? "Logical Awesome reserves the right to update and change the Terms of Service from time to time without notice. ... Continued use of the Service after any such changes shall constitute your consent to such changes." That means that you they can change the terms from "free" to "$$$" any time they like, without even noticing you - you will just receive a bunch of invoices and have to pay them, because you agreed to these terms, and to the changes by continuing to use github (as you didn't even have a chance to learn about the changes).
- It spreads the load (although denx.de seems to be responsive to date)
We can cope with the load, I think.
- What questions haven't I asked?
Why should we support github? It is them who want to save storage space by having a local "master" repository. What prevents them to create one? If they want, they can clone it from git.denx.de - they don't need our help for that. They can also keep it up to date easily, either through a simple cron job that periodically pulls from us, or by registering to the rss feed and reaction on that or ...
I see no reason to support them, and I see lots of reasons not to accept their terms of service.
Best regards,
Wolfgang Denk