Not all Internet protocols are HTTP. If you're running a service where long-lived connections are the norm, "simply fronting a bunch of servers with a load balancer" can require a pretty smart load balancer. E.g. IMAP connections often last hours or even days, and are required to maintain a degree of statefulness.
Couple this with amerine's suggestion to allow release packages from private repos, and developers could also use GitHub to sell closed-source software.
True. If your ISP won't remove your IP from the blacklist, you could probably use a commercial service (a la Amazon's SES) for outbound SMTP while running your MX and mailstore at home. That would have somewhat different privacy tradeoffs, but it's not that different if you expect most of your email recipients to be hosted elsewhere... I may try this.
> if you interact with the repository you probably know which language(s) it is coded in, and if you don't you probably don't care.
I don't care about language per se, but I do care about managing the operational complexity of our stack. The programming language is a relevant factor on that score. A project in a new language may require new staff expertise, a new interpreter, a relatively high number of new dependencies, a relatively high investment in new monitoring systems, etc.
That said, I don't like the language color bar so far, because I'm having trouble confidently identifying which color is which language. For example: the reddish/orangish color space has JavaScript, Ruby, and the various JVM languages. The appearance of these various reds and oranges frequently shifts due to f.lux and differences between the three monitors I commonly use at work and home. Maybe I'll learn the colors better as I get used to the new repository format, but then maybe I won't.
In practice, I look first at the project description and the beginning of the README to see how the project describes its own strengths and weaknesses. Many projects describe their major language choices and runtime requirements as a part of that description, so I never look at the language color bar unless I need to.
> In practice, I look first at the project description and the beginning of the README to see how the project describes its own strengths and weaknesses. Many projects describe their major language choices and runtime requirements as a part of that description, so I never look at the language color bar unless I need to.
And even if they don't clearly spell those out in the readme, metadata/packaging files are usually at the top level of the library.
There are such laws on the books in at least some U.S. jurisdictions, but it doesn't really cause anybody to lose their tax status because there are legal workarounds. It is very common for a nonprofit organization's Articles of Incorporation (and any other legally-binding statements of purpose) to be written like this:
"This benevolent, charitable and eleemosynary institution has been organized [...under the appropriate state law for a charitable organization...] and shall be operated exclusively for charitable, religious, educational, literary, or scientific purposes within the meaning of §501(c)(3) of the U.S. Internal Revenue Code of 1986 as the same may be amended from time to time. Within the foregoing purposes and not by way of limitation, [the organization shall perform its core mission]."
