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It's not primarily about the platform being open source, but relying on a SPOF. It's dangerous and empowers Github to pull all kinds of stuff while they have th
by cm3 10y ago
It's not primarily about the platform being open source, but relying on a SPOF. It's dangerous and empowers Github to pull all kinds of stuff while they have the marketshare. Today's github may not do shady things, but tomorrows can. It's irresponsible of us to put all our eggs in one basket. At the very least, helping them to be the place where 99% of projects are hosted will allow github to ignore complaints.
In fact, it's a good thing Gitlab is not a pure open source project, because there's leadership involved and business interests with real life problems to address. So, the chances of "endless experiments" is low. Sure, if Gitlab was fully open while keeping project leadership and all, it would be even better.
- benologist 10y agoThe only reason it's a SPOF is they don't allow anyone to read/run/modify their code... that's what open source covers. I think the problem is we conflate selling the only access to our code with selling access to it. If you need online hosting for your project the alternatives are almost immutable - somebody's server running project management software. No matter what Github does developers are trending towards using open source tools to the extent Microsoft's porting their company to Linux right in front of our faces...
- benologist 10y agoBelated edit I wasn't criticising Gitlab, I meant it's probably more important to Gitlab that Github be proprietary.