Mailing lists are resistant to censorship
Ok, let's go beyond general principles about mailing lists and be more concrete in thinking and see if a truly censorship proof dev & distribute architecture is possible.<p>Let's work backwards from this desired command line:<p><pre><code>  youtube-dl -U  
</code></pre>
That command automatically downloads latest version.  (Important because Youtube, Vimeo, etc changes constantly and breaks old youtube-dl versions.)<p>We have 2 main areas to implement:<p>1) the <i>code artifacts</i>:  a source code repo (and binary releases for download) ; for Linux kernel, I think this is "www.kernel.org"[1]<p>2) the <i>workflow</i>:  the issues / bug reports / pull requests ; for Linux kernel collaboration, a popular mailing list is "majordomo@vger.kernel.org"[2]<p>If youtube-dl switches from github to mailing lists, how would the "-U" command work?  Would somebody need to setup a SMTP server (or at minimum, a SMTP email account) dedicated to youtube-dl?  Would youtube-dl then use SMTP protocol to scan the mailing list for which server has the latest code artifacts?<p>Does making youtube-dl act as a pseudo email-client make it RIAA proof?  Are SMTP servers beyond the legal reach of RIAA?<p>EDIT to reply: <i>This article is about the developer workflow, not about what the end-user software should do.</i><p>I understand that but I think it's productive to <i>go beyond that</i> and think out loud what a realistic implementation could be to help end users.  Besides, many end users are <i>also the code contributors</i>.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.kernel.org/" rel="nofollow">https://www.kernel.org/</a><p>[2] <a href="http://vger.kernel.org/vger-lists.html#linux-kernel" rel="nofollow">http://vger.kernel.org/vger-lists.html#linux-kernel</a>