Hi Nik,
thanks for the email. I think it's going to take some time to properly read and digest all of that. For now I'll mainly reply to the pygame repo moving to github, and the exclusion. (It would be nice to talk about other things like German language needs on the website+docs, teaching resources, and also the Debian things.)
I think this is worth taking up with the PSF, Raspberry PI, and also with github.
Excluding people is not nice, and I think it's against what everyone wants. (not sure about github, but I guess for them too). Perhaps with some more voices asking for change they will come to a solution quicker.
Having said that, I think we're in a theoretical problem space with regards to accepting patches for *pygame itself*. Whilst there have been, and are people who could submit patches, none have. For example, there was a child who co-authored a book about pygame with his dad. Then there was the european digital girl of the year award winner who has made some pygame programs. To mention only two people.
It's important for people wanting to participate in the python community, and in digital culture at large. Excluding any person from that is not on in my opinion.
To work around it, have you considered getting parents to to submit
any contributions they made? Of course this means children give the
legal rights to their parents. It would probably be a good lesson about
free and libre software in the process ;)
Luckily if they want to share any work they make with python, they can do that on other websites (launchpad, bitbucket, and several hundreds of others). I think this is a much more common case (100% in the last 17 years), that people want to make things with pygame, and python, and not change python or pygame itself. So we are safe from that perspective - they are not excluded from that.
However, that they are excluded from anything is not good.
If the FSF says it's compatible, I'm inclined to follow them since I don't have the knowledge or resources to find out otherwise. But as you say the GPL/LGPL is only one(two) of dozens of FLOSS licenses. Additionally, I assume that the PSF also ok'd it, since they are on there now too.
The reasons for moving to github:
It's become very common in the python community. pygame has tiny resources, and every hour we spend trying to explain bitbucket and hg for potential collaborators is wasted effort. Managing issues is harder, CI integration is harder, and even things like searching for source code via the web is not there on bb.
The pygame_sdl2, and pygame_cffi projects are on github. These are other pygame projects I'd like to collaborate with, and it makes it easier to do so if we are in the same place. Tom, from pygame_sdl2 made some compelling arguments on the usability of the interface compared to others. I've since seen this in practice on other projects - it makes it easier to collaborate. I was serious about it taking an hour or so of close attention to teach people the basics of bitbucket and hg at sprints. I could basically work with one or two people and other people got stuck on things and gave up. So the collaboration benefits are not theoretical - I've witnessed them multiple times in practice, and have heard from others who have had the same experience.
When people decide to use their very limited free time, they don't want to learn a new website and version control system - they'd rather work on what they are interested in. It's a big barrier to put in front of people.
CPython has moved their operations to github. Which means that pretty much every single python developer has a github account to collaborate. Not only that but out of the top 400 projects (by downloads) on pypi the vast majority are on github. Most of the ones on bitbucket had a dual setup. I did the analysis a few months ago. There's 7000+ pygame related repos on github, and 400ish on bitbucket - even though pygame has been on bitbucket for a long time. A large number of past contributors (pygame has been on cvs, svn, hg, and now git) didn't have bitbucket accounts. Only one past pygame repo contributor didn't have a github account (out of 50) and now they do.
Finally, the pygame project has been on the verge of death for some years. Anything we do to reduce maintenance effort, and make collaboration easier the better. Actually I think pygame died, and some sort of zombie pygame is walking around eating brains... (well it would eat brains if it could get that gamepad out of its mouth). I really do see strong evidence that moving to github will allow more people to contribute, but also reduce the work load for maintainers, such that pygame has more of a chance to exist.
I'm with you on this issue, and am happy to help raise it with the PSF and Raspberry PI if you haven't already. It would be good to hear other peoples opinions here, and especially from the PSF and Raspberry PI (who are both on github and have policies of not excluding people).
But I'm uncertain we should stop moving the pygame repo to it.
I hope we can find a solution.
cheers,