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> a proprietary software project must eventually act against your interests because you are not in control of it Being open source doesn't mean that won't happ

> a proprietary software project must eventually act against your interests because you are not in control of it Being open source doesn't mean that won't happen. A lot of open source projects have acted against their users' best interests. A good example is Firefox with the whole "Pocket integration" controversy. Another example is Wikipedia, with its editorial policies that drove away editors. You can fork Firefox, and you can host your own Wikipedia mirror with exactly the same software setup, and in fact a lot of people have done so, but mantaining your own fork/mirror of a project on this scale is a lot of work. Unless you have unlimited free time (you don't) open source doesn't inherently remedy the issue that other people will do things that you do not agree with, and that may cause problems to you. Platform choice is ultimately an economical decision. Github has significant incentives not to "go rogue", i.e. they don't want to shoot themselves in the foot. They currently provide very significant value to the community, and are in a very comfortable position, but that could change really fast if they take the Source forge route. While the more code that gets open sourced the merrier, I personally don't believe open sourcing Github would, at this point, bring a lot into the table, especially since gitlab is so fully featured already. Their secret sauce isn't really the software, but the service they provide.

jordigh 11y ago
> open source doesn't inherently remedy the issue that other people will do things that you do not agree with, and that may cause problems to you. It's not a remedy. It's just a lifeline. Some of us do take Icecat or Iceweasel. With proprietary software, you have no recourse at all. Wouldn't you prefer some safety net to none at all?
zanny 11y ago
You don't have to maintain your own fork, though. When Firefox implemented pocket, Iceweasel saw a ton of uptick involvement. I'm not sure of any popular more free to edit clones of Wikipedia though, but that is only because I have never had to seek one out. I imagine they exist. Wikimedia has not gone aginst my interests yet - if they ever put ads on wikipedia, for example, that would be justification for forking. But that would not be your own clone, it would be a community divide. And most projects of scale realize that those kinds of forks are dangerous and act to bring the community back together by resolving a problem that is so bad it schisms the ecosystem. This has happened before. Gnome 2 and 3 schismed, and Gnome 3 became more user friendly and configurable to bring back its users. Libva and FFMPEG split because FFMPEG was very contributor unfriendly, and then it started merging all the libva changes so contributing to libva got your changes in everywhere. Open and Libre office forked because of Oracle changes, and now Libreoffice is pretty much the only name left in town, and is more successful for it. It happens all the time in branches and private forks and message boards before it even reaches end users. But that is the difference between MS Office and Libreoffice. When a problem is huge to the OpenOffice community, they fork and start LibreOffice, and when its substancial enough the community overrides the original developers and takes over when terrible decisions are made. If Microsoft fucks up their office (and the early ribbon was a great example of that) you are stuck, and have no power. When the version you like goes end of life, you either sit on decaying software or forfeit your preferences because Microsoft has complete control. If Gitlab jumped the shark, you would not be spinning up your own gitlab clone to maintain yourself - the gitlab community would fork away from Gitlab Inc and create Librelab, and mindshare would drive products to it because its a seamless transition. And that is more unlikely to happen with Gitlab in the first place because the power of the user can keep the company in check from making extremely user hostile moves like Google, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, etc can do with impunity because users are trapped and they hold all the keys to the castle. > Their secret sauce isn't really the software, but the service they provide. The services are the problem. Its the same problem with Facebook - Google+ is feature equivalent, but it was dead in the water to start and its free clones like StatusNet (albeit thats more twitter) are completely dead because they aren't just personal software, they are platforms. And platforms with mindshare and the users are insurmountable. Its not about the wiki, or issue tracker, or pages. Those are replaceable - painfully, but doable. But replacing the community of developers is not a solvable problem, because they are already on github. You have already lost. And that gives github overwhelming and dominant power in how you conduct and host free software now, with no recourse.

jordigh 11y ago

> open source doesn't inherently remedy the issue that other people will do things that you do not agree with, and that may cause problems to you. It's not a remedy. It's just a lifeline. Some of us do take Icecat or Iceweasel. With proprietary software, you have no recourse at all. Wouldn't you prefer some safety net to none at all?

zanny 11y ago

You don't have to maintain your own fork, though. When Firefox implemented pocket, Iceweasel saw a ton of uptick involvement. I'm not sure of any popular more free to edit clones of Wikipedia though, but that is only because I have never had to seek one out. I imagine they exist. Wikimedia has not gone aginst my interests yet - if they ever put ads on wikipedia, for example, that would be justification for forking. But that would not be your own clone, it would be a community divide. And most projects of scale realize that those kinds of forks are dangerous and act to bring the community back together by resolving a problem that is so bad it schisms the ecosystem. This has happened before. Gnome 2 and 3 schismed, and Gnome 3 became more user friendly and configurable to bring back its users. Libva and FFMPEG split because FFMPEG was very contributor unfriendly, and then it started merging all the libva changes so contributing to libva got your changes in everywhere. Open and Libre office forked because of Oracle changes, and now Libreoffice is pretty much the only name left in town, and is more successful for it. It happens all the time in branches and private forks and message boards before it even reaches end users. But that is the difference between MS Office and Libreoffice. When a problem is huge to the OpenOffice community, they fork and start LibreOffice, and when its substancial enough the community overrides the original developers and takes over when terrible decisions are made. If Microsoft fucks up their office (and the early ribbon was a great example of that) you are stuck, and have no power. When the version you like goes end of life, you either sit on decaying software or forfeit your preferences because Microsoft has complete control. If Gitlab jumped the shark, you would not be spinning up your own gitlab clone to maintain yourself - the gitlab community would fork away from Gitlab Inc and create Librelab, and mindshare would drive products to it because its a seamless transition. And that is more unlikely to happen with Gitlab in the first place because the power of the user can keep the company in check from making extremely user hostile moves like Google, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, etc can do with impunity because users are trapped and they hold all the keys to the castle. > Their secret sauce isn't really the software, but the service they provide. The services are the problem. Its the same problem with Facebook - Google+ is feature equivalent, but it was dead in the water to start and its free clones like StatusNet (albeit thats more twitter) are completely dead because they aren't just personal software, they are platforms. And platforms with mindshare and the users are insurmountable. Its not about the wiki, or issue tracker, or pages. Those are replaceable - painfully, but doable. But replacing the community of developers is not a solvable problem, because they are already on github. You have already lost. And that gives github overwhelming and dominant power in how you conduct and host free software now, with no recourse.