The move to GitHub

A couple of weeks back, I finally bit the bullet and opened a GitHub account, and moved my linkware, available scripts over there. In addition to that, I also moved my scripts to GPLv3 licensing. There were a lot of thinking and internal debating over these actions, which have “visibly” started when I posted about choosing between GPL and BSD licensing (the choice I took is obvious now, of course).

These changes are both exciting and bittersweet. I’m psyched about GitHub (peering at other people’s code in such a sexy interface is exciting! really!). I’m a little sad, as well. Putting the scripts on GPL for me symbolized a kind of letting go. It’s not throwing in the towel and giving up on these scripts of mine–I still want to work on them–but I feel that this should have been done a long time ago, if I only knew how loooong it would take me to get updates and new features out. By now, Enth codebase (or any of my other scripts’ codebase) is probably close to monolithic. It certainly looks quite dated! But putting it on GitHub means it’s easier to get changes out, faster, and less of an “event” as it is when I was hosting it.

What does this mean, though? It means if you have a hacked version of Enthusiast (for example) you’ve been wanting to release but couldn’t, you’re free to now, however and wherever you like, as long as I’m credited and it’s released under the same license. You’re now free to offer services to install and configure Enthusiast, as I’ve heard a couple of people doing. You don’t need to ask my permission to do either of the above.

It also means I’m free-er to iterate on my work without needing to bundle them into nice and shiny organized releases. It means that if there are updates, they get out there faster (hopefully!). It means less management on my part, and more coding.

Here’s to more git repos in the future! (Again, if you want to get to the scripts, they will be at github.com/angelasabas.)