On both points, every problem has its own set of best solutions. If your problem is running a big community around a big project where running listserv+debbugs

On both points, every problem has its own set of best solutions. If your problem is running a big community around a big project where running listserv+debbugs (or the like) is just minutiae, that's the best way to go. If you're medium-to-big, there are umbrella projects that can adopt your project and supply you these tool (e.g. GNU and Apache do this), but your project would need to be useful to some bigger audience and comply with the umbrella project. Otherwise you can just put a the source code up your server as tarballs or VCS repos maybe using one of the readymade web interfaces (viewvc, cgit, gitweb, hgweb, etc.) and hosting your discussions on sth. like librelist.com or google groups; or just use sth. like GitHub or Gitlab without much worry. Principles are best when they are abstract and a few. Then we apply them to concrete situations. If that makes the best answer to perpetually be "it depends", be it so, for its better than cargo cult answers. Also, the discussion does not seem to be around Github alternatives, as the arguments against it in the article could equally be made against Gitlab (a private instance or the public one), Bitbucket or similar. The article is comparing two models, and is not about a post-Github world.