I think users should be free to decide what to do with their directories as long as they don't violate labs ToU. The right to fork policy is not automatic but conditional in that the committee has to approve it, and certainly some of us only use of Labs to run a bot and whose only "original" files are those who ain't included or avalaible to fork or our privacy would be compromised. Given that use, it makes perfect sense to have a directory closed notwithstanding your problem in that if you ever run into problems you cannot be helped so much. But that's the owner's choice. In the case a tool is misbehaving or being harmful, any admin can shut it down and look into it, which are really the people we trust to help mantain Tool Labs run smoothly and that can have access already in a need-to-know basis. Thank you.

In T164272#3228379, @MarcoAurelio wrote:

our privacy would be compromised.

See ticket description:

Unless a tool labs very good reasons to prevent reading every single file/directory in the tool home directory altogether (which I can't think of any), tools may hide individual files/directories in case of secret data.

There is no problem with chmodding private data (anything privacy/security related) with o-rwx, but there is absolutely no reason I can think of that require the entire tool dir to be read-proof.

In T164272#3228379, @MarcoAurelio wrote:

certainly some of us only use of Labs to run a bot and whose only "original" files are those who ain't included or avalaible to fork

My interpretation of that policy is that: Tool authors should make it easy for others to fork a tool (adding license/publish code/code-data separation/write documentation). And if the author does not comply with releasing the code when asked by the "forker", they may ask the committee for the code after the committee review it.

All the setups are included in forking, so if the "forker" only got the code but cannot replicate the environment, it still defeats the purpose of the policy. If the tool author chmod their tool dir o-rx without writing the docs on the setup, few can fork it.

In T164272#3228379, @MarcoAurelio wrote:

if you ever run into problems you cannot be helped so much

Yeah, the docs could be something like: if you don't want help, few will help you.