18 ms·

It confuses me why so many traditionally pro-FOSS projects move to a not-free-nor-open tool like GitHub. Do they think that they’ll get enough new contributors

by snazz 8y ago

It confuses me why so many traditionally pro-FOSS projects move to a not-free-nor-open tool like GitHub. Do they think that they’ll get enough new contributors this way to offset the (more than slight) irony?

saagarjha 8y ago
I wonder if there are plans to mirror GitHub’s supplemental content (issues, etc.)
- snazz 8y ago
  I’ve heard that GitHub makes that intentionally hard. Have you seen a repository that comes from Google Code? All the issues are always messed up that way.
atonse 8y ago
Better participation. A lot more people know how to use GitHub's tools. It'll likely increase the amount of development, participation, pull requests, etc that ASF projects get. Does it matter that GitHub themselves is not open source?
- dijit 8y ago
  > Does it matter that GitHub themselves is not open source? It matters a lot actually; a lot of free-software/open source software are licensed that way because the projects themselves are ideologically predisposed. While that does not hold true for certain (even large) projects like Linux, it certainly holds true for Apache (historically) and GNU. To put it another way; if you found out GNU coreutils were hosted on Window machines using IIS web servers then you would probably consider that the people making the software (or, certainly those hosting it) are ideologically at odds with the project and are hypocritical. So, I mean, you get to choose, if you go the Linux way and say "we are open source for pragmatic reasons" then there's no doublethink. If you say "we believe that all software should be free" while simultaneously forcing your users to contribute using closed source software on a proprietary platform then then you're not practicing your ideology, and worse; you're forcing that non-practice on your developers and users.
  - TallGuyShort 8y ago
    I think the ASF, being non-copyleft, is much less ideological than you're thinking. They're big on having rules to foster healthy community and community based decisions, but the license is really just a laissez faire BSD-ish license with some particular edge cases addressed. It's open-source but flexible and friendly to businesses with hybrid models. Something like GitHub that promotes input from people involved with other projects to participate is not a surprising move for them at all.
    - xorcist 8y ago
      > the ASF, being non-copyleft, is much less ideological than you're thinking Do you somehow consider copyleft style licenses "more ideological" than those which are not? That is probably more telling about your own views on licensing than it is on ideologies. FreeBSD is not copyleft, and they work actively on eliminating GPL from their base. Debian mostly under the free software umbrella, but welcomes BSD code in their base. Stallman is about as idelogical as you can get but has been known to argue for the MIT license in some cases. Just to mention a few examples.
      - TallGuyShort 8y ago
        Sure there are counterexamples, but I certainly don't hesitate to say copyleft does tend to be more ideological. In every instance I can think of, every serious discussion I've had with a company about project licensing that ended with anything other than the GPL, the concerns are virality, even when they like open-source (which is a practical concern overriding an ideological one), and a lack of any real interest in how it's licensed, just wanting it put out there with very few strings attached.
        mikekchar 8y ago
        There is a very practical reason for choosing a copyleft license as an author. If you choose a non-copyleft free software license, then downstream users actually have more options than you do. They can take your code, add small modifications and then release the result under a non-free license. Even if you implement those features as well, you aren't playing on a level playing field. You have to support all of the software and they only have to support their small additions. The end result is that they can offer a product with a value-add at a lower cost than you can. You are essentially competing with yourself. Of course you can decide not to release your code under a free software license, but that rather defeats the purpose of running a free software project ;-) Looking at it another way, more permissive licences grant more options to downstream users than copyleft licenses. It doesn't make sense to argue that you are offering only copyleft licenses to benefit those downstream users individually (and I know of nobody who makes that claim). Instead, the argument is that it is better for the group that everybody has equal restrictions and can't use proprietary code to gain an advantage over everyone else. This is actually one of the reasons why if anyone asks me to assign copyright for my side projects over for work, I'm happy to do so: on the provision that all of my work is licensed under the GPL. It barely matters to me at that point who owns the copyright (though to protect yourself further you should ensure that no one person has copyright over the entire work). IMHO, although the choice to write free software at all is often ideological, the choice of using a copyleft license or not is usually pragmatic -- at least among those who understand why copyleft licenses are written the way they are.
- chii 8y ago
  while that's true, a big project like apache could push gitlab instead, as that's _more_ free and open-source.
  - craigsmansion 8y ago
    They could even consider HN darling and 100% Free Software Forge SourceHut, but it seems major FOSS brands are looking for maximising network effects (and associated lock-in) these days
    - Boulth 8y ago
      As much as I like SourceHut using it now by org as big as ASF would mean a lot of troubles. I guess Apache, like Mozilla recently, was looking for product not semi working proof of concept.
- robbyt 8y ago
  And a likely increase of people posting "+1" comments on bugs...
- im3w1l 8y ago
  They give up their autonomy in moderation - Github will now have the power to say "you are not allowed to contribute to Apache projects". This will lead to a) Github will have leverage over the project. b) They make themselves vulnerable to the outrage du jour. If an outrage mob forms against someone in the Apache Project, Github may kick them off their platform - they are known to have done so in the past. Apache will then have to decide what to do. The path of least resistance will be to just let them go. People who anticipate such a course of events will have to live in constant fear of all their effort coming to waste and their community being pulled from them by an outsider. And people who anticipate such fear may never join in the first place.
  - wDcBKgt66V8WDs 8y ago
    To all you who think this idea is unfounded or dramatic, remember that this is the entire point of FOSS. Whether this idea holds water is irrelevant, it's aligned to FOSS and it's strange that they don't appear to care or have valued other things over it.
    - RhodesianHunter 8y ago
      It's likely that they care, but consider the provable improvement in contributions to open source and thus a demonstrable benefit to the community to be worth more than a theoretical possible eventuality that most would consider unlikely at best.
      - cndx 8y ago
        All projects that I have closely observed that went to GitHub for FOMO have NOT gotten more contributions afterwards. Among the real reasons are: 1) Every OSS project has its bureaucrats who contribute a modest amount of code but want to have an immodest amount of power. For these bureaucrats GitHub is like heaven: They appear productive, have power to silence discussions etc. 2) They work for someone or know someone who is associated with GitHub or in the Microsoft embracing strike force. 3) Legitimate reason: They want to show their employers a metric how much they contribute. I'm pretty cynical about the current state of OSS. Major idealistic contributions are a thing of the past. It is all about attaching oneself to a project, get hired somewhere and then stop contributions.
- jlokier 8y ago
  > Does it matter that GitHub themselves is not open source? That's for Apache to decide, but consider: Git itself was written, by Linus Torvalds, because Linux (the kernel) was using non-open source version control at the time called BitKeeper, and the non-open source nature of it was causing increasing problems in the Linux developer community, both ideological and eventually practical problems too, caused by the licensing preventing some devs from building tools. When Git was written and the Linux kernel devs jumped to it en masse, it was like a breath of fresh air. BitKeeper has credit for many of the ideas found in Git before Git. (Aside: credit also should go to Mercurial for ideas). One of the things that made Git better than BitKeeper was people were free to build more tools on it, which is entirely due to the open vs. closed source licensing, as well as a general attitude of welcome vs. unwelcome towards those tools. GitHub is different because it already builds on Git, and works with tools that anyone can build on top of Git. But some things which are really essential to thriving developer community are locked away in GitHub, so it's still limiting what people can build with it. (For example, can you innovate on how Issues are handled? Somewhat, but not in every way that is useful.) In some ways GitHub is like any other walled garden. You can't fork it yourself.
  - xorcist 8y ago
    Just for the historial record: Bitkeeper is much older than both git and Mercurial, hence Bitkeeper can not be said to have taken ideas from Mercurial. Both was sprung in large parts from Linus' description of what requirements he had in order to consider using a version control system for Linux.
    - robaato 8y ago
      I think the comment meant that git took ideas from Mercurial rather than BK taking ideas from Mercurial.
      - j16sdiz 8y ago
        Git start before mercurial.
- gstein67 8y ago
  Not to us here at Apache. We wanted the GitHub tools to be available to our projects. Why try and recreate all that on our own? Waste of resources. The ASF is for creating software for the public good; having a great version control tool website is not in that mission. We chose to leverage GitHub instead. And yes, lots of our communities have been asking for better GitHub support (read: access to its tools). So we made it happen for them. -- Greg Stein
ebg13 8y ago
> Do they think that they’ll get enough new contributors this way to offset the (more than slight) irony? Absolutely yes. In another thread, someone mentioned that MediaGoblin is basically dead now. I went to look at their repo and it's hosted on Savannah. That definitely hurts involvement.
- paule89 8y ago
  I never even heard of Savannah. And after seeing the website i am glad they will be on github soon.
- jordigh 8y ago
  I'm kind of cynical about this sort of thing and I don't think the hosting really changes the quality of contributions. The amount, maybe, but you get a lot of crappy drive-bys that are about one particular but very enthusiastic person's pet peeves, which probably don't affect the wider userbase. The drive-bys require a lot of work to integrate for relatively little profit. Mediagoblin is dying not so much because it's on Savannah but because basically there are other things that got ActivityPub before it and could replace it (Pixelfed, Mastodon, Write Freely). Nobody really wants to work on Mediagoblin now because the alternatives are pretty much all better.
  - coldpie 8y ago
    > I'm kind of cynical about this sort of thing and I don't think the hosting really changes the quality of contributions. Yeah. We've had this topic come up a number of times in the Wine project. We still use a mailing list and git-am patches for our contributions. We have a few hard-liner FOSS types who would strongly reject a GitHub solution (including myself), but a self-hosted Gitlab solution may be accepted. But in the end there just isn't much evidence that the change would be beneficial for the project. If you can't be bothered to figure out how to send an email or attach a patch to the bug tracker, are you really going to usefully contribute to Wine? It's an active topic of debate, but just being "easier to contribute" isn't clearly a good thing.
    - 8y ago
mises 8y ago
I think it has more to do with the ethos of Apache vs., say, Gnu. Namely, Apache tends to be much more permissive and not really view commercial, proprietary software as a "bad thing" like Gnu tends to.
pawelmurias 8y ago
It lowers the barrier to entry by using something people are already familar with.
batbomb 8y ago
Well, they've been using Jira forever. Usually when people say this they are referring to either Gitlab or Gitea. Well, it's not like all of Gitlab is fully open source, it's just Open Core, but I'm sure that's a sizable amount of the code, but I would imagine there's a decent chunk of gitlab.com source code that's proprietary (I'm sure somebody will quibble with this in a following comment, but the original argument is an argument of purism of being free and open). Gitlab CE and Gitea doesn't solve the hosting issue, though of course Apache could probably pay somebody to manage that, but then you've introduced extra overhead for collaboration that most people aren't that inclined to solve.
- dijit 8y ago
  > Well, it's not like all of Gitlab is fully open source. I think this is not a fair assessment, GitLabs community edition is fully open source and is a full product. The fact you can add proprietary elements for a licensing fee (which are also "open" in that they are readable, debuggable, etc;) is not at all the same as hosting on a platform which is entirely proprietary.
  - batbomb 8y ago
    You are also not being fair to github then - you can run Github Enterprise Server and it is also "open" in that it's readable (non-obfuscated), debuggable, etc... It's basically a snapshot of what they run at github.com with added features for enterprise (like AD integration). You can't distribute the code. How easy it is to actually do that depends on your ruby skills and your wallet.
    - jeena 8y ago
      I don't think that people are drawn to the specific github implementation (code), it's that they're drawn to github.com the domain where you can't do what you propose.
  - linuxftw 8y ago
    I feel the same. If Gitlab released the community edition as MIT license (not sure what the license is offhand) with no proprietary version, there's nothing stopping some 3rd party from creating proprietary versions/extensions of their own product.
meddlepal 8y ago
The number of hard line FOSS folks is really quite small. Personally I would be hard pressed to bother contributing to a project not on GitHub at this point. There is a certain workflow and interaction model that GitHub projects use that non-GitHub ones do not and it is simply not worth the time investment to learn those other projects. Not only that but it allows me to easily point at my work and go "I did that" when talking with folks.
- rocqua 8y ago
  What about a gitlab based project?
  - pas 8y ago
    I guess gitlab is the same. The important flow is that there's a very easy way to fork and send a pull/merge request.
    - colbyrussell 8y ago
      "Easy" like: git diff master..bugfix > bugfix.patch # or `format-patch` # now attach/upload bugfix.patch Instead of: # make sure you click around github.com to create third fork git remote add unnecessary-third-fork $THIRDFORK git push unnecessary-third-fork bugfix firefox $THIRDFORK # now click around to file a PR # now wait for your PR to be merged # now click around on github.com to delete $THIRDFORK # ... unless you just leave things laying around What makes the second sequence easier than the first?
      - diminoten 8y ago
        Are you honestly taking the position that graphical user interfaces are harder to use than CLI?
        colbyrussell 8y ago
        Let me ask, do you think that the content of my message reduces to "graphical user interfaces are harder to use than CLI"?
johannes1234321 8y ago
When we moved PHP to git we made sure we have our own infrastructure and keep our control there. Reality however is that people love doing "pull requests" on the GitHub mirror and use git.php.net only as push target.
- johannes1234321 8y ago
  And if anybody looks at git.php.net and thinks "well ugly, no wonder we anybody isn't using it" that's true. And moving to self-hosted GitLab was brought up, but won't solve it. We still have many pass-by PRs from people who wouldn't submit if it was on GitHub.
briandear 8y ago
If a non-profit buys food from a for-profit grocery store, is that ironic? Just because a project is open source doesn’t imply any requirement that all of the products and services used for that project must be.
tnolet 8y ago
Probably because UX and adoption trumps FOSS purism.
PopeDotNinja 8y ago
I won't argue that GitHub is better. I simply like the experience of contributing on GitHub: my pull requests are available for all to see, it's familiar, it works well enough. Using GitHub is also one less thing I need to learn, which is nice when I'm feel pretty maxed out on learning new things, which feels like most of the time these days.
scarejunba 8y ago
It costs money, dude. Lots of people have all these philosophical opinions about what FOSS projects should do but few people give money for infra.
- gstein67 8y ago
  And we save money by relying on GitHub's excellent tools, rather than wasting it, trying to recreate or stand up a similar platform. The communities wanted closer integration with GitHub (what they knew/used elsewhere), so we made it happen. -- Greg Stein

by snazz 8y ago

saagarjha 8y ago

I wonder if there are plans to mirror GitHub’s supplemental content (issues, etc.)

snazz 8y ago
I’ve heard that GitHub makes that intentionally hard. Have you seen a repository that comes from Google Code? All the issues are always messed up that way.

atonse 8y ago

Better participation. A lot more people know how to use GitHub's tools. It'll likely increase the amount of development, participation, pull requests, etc that ASF projects get. Does it matter that GitHub themselves is not open source?

dijit 8y ago
> Does it matter that GitHub themselves is not open source? It matters a lot actually; a lot of free-software/open source software are licensed that way because the projects themselves are ideologically predisposed. While that does not hold true for certain (even large) projects like Linux, it certainly holds true for Apache (historically) and GNU. To put it another way; if you found out GNU coreutils were hosted on Window machines using IIS web servers then you would probably consider that the people making the software (or, certainly those hosting it) are ideologically at odds with the project and are hypocritical. So, I mean, you get to choose, if you go the Linux way and say "we are open source for pragmatic reasons" then there's no doublethink. If you say "we believe that all software should be free" while simultaneously forcing your users to contribute using closed source software on a proprietary platform then then you're not practicing your ideology, and worse; you're forcing that non-practice on your developers and users.
- TallGuyShort 8y ago
  I think the ASF, being non-copyleft, is much less ideological than you're thinking. They're big on having rules to foster healthy community and community based decisions, but the license is really just a laissez faire BSD-ish license with some particular edge cases addressed. It's open-source but flexible and friendly to businesses with hybrid models. Something like GitHub that promotes input from people involved with other projects to participate is not a surprising move for them at all.
  - xorcist 8y ago
    > the ASF, being non-copyleft, is much less ideological than you're thinking Do you somehow consider copyleft style licenses "more ideological" than those which are not? That is probably more telling about your own views on licensing than it is on ideologies. FreeBSD is not copyleft, and they work actively on eliminating GPL from their base. Debian mostly under the free software umbrella, but welcomes BSD code in their base. Stallman is about as idelogical as you can get but has been known to argue for the MIT license in some cases. Just to mention a few examples.
    - TallGuyShort 8y ago
      Sure there are counterexamples, but I certainly don't hesitate to say copyleft does tend to be more ideological. In every instance I can think of, every serious discussion I've had with a company about project licensing that ended with anything other than the GPL, the concerns are virality, even when they like open-source (which is a practical concern overriding an ideological one), and a lack of any real interest in how it's licensed, just wanting it put out there with very few strings attached.
      - mikekchar 8y ago
        There is a very practical reason for choosing a copyleft license as an author. If you choose a non-copyleft free software license, then downstream users actually have more options than you do. They can take your code, add small modifications and then release the result under a non-free license. Even if you implement those features as well, you aren't playing on a level playing field. You have to support all of the software and they only have to support their small additions. The end result is that they can offer a product with a value-add at a lower cost than you can. You are essentially competing with yourself. Of course you can decide not to release your code under a free software license, but that rather defeats the purpose of running a free software project ;-) Looking at it another way, more permissive licences grant more options to downstream users than copyleft licenses. It doesn't make sense to argue that you are offering only copyleft licenses to benefit those downstream users individually (and I know of nobody who makes that claim). Instead, the argument is that it is better for the group that everybody has equal restrictions and can't use proprietary code to gain an advantage over everyone else. This is actually one of the reasons why if anyone asks me to assign copyright for my side projects over for work, I'm happy to do so: on the provision that all of my work is licensed under the GPL. It barely matters to me at that point who owns the copyright (though to protect yourself further you should ensure that no one person has copyright over the entire work). IMHO, although the choice to write free software at all is often ideological, the choice of using a copyleft license or not is usually pragmatic -- at least among those who understand why copyleft licenses are written the way they are.
chii 8y ago
while that's true, a big project like apache could push gitlab instead, as that's _more_ free and open-source.
- craigsmansion 8y ago
  They could even consider HN darling and 100% Free Software Forge SourceHut, but it seems major FOSS brands are looking for maximising network effects (and associated lock-in) these days
  - Boulth 8y ago
    As much as I like SourceHut using it now by org as big as ASF would mean a lot of troubles. I guess Apache, like Mozilla recently, was looking for product not semi working proof of concept.
robbyt 8y ago
And a likely increase of people posting "+1" comments on bugs...
im3w1l 8y ago
They give up their autonomy in moderation - Github will now have the power to say "you are not allowed to contribute to Apache projects". This will lead to a) Github will have leverage over the project. b) They make themselves vulnerable to the outrage du jour. If an outrage mob forms against someone in the Apache Project, Github may kick them off their platform - they are known to have done so in the past. Apache will then have to decide what to do. The path of least resistance will be to just let them go. People who anticipate such a course of events will have to live in constant fear of all their effort coming to waste and their community being pulled from them by an outsider. And people who anticipate such fear may never join in the first place.
- wDcBKgt66V8WDs 8y ago
  To all you who think this idea is unfounded or dramatic, remember that this is the entire point of FOSS. Whether this idea holds water is irrelevant, it's aligned to FOSS and it's strange that they don't appear to care or have valued other things over it.
  - RhodesianHunter 8y ago
    It's likely that they care, but consider the provable improvement in contributions to open source and thus a demonstrable benefit to the community to be worth more than a theoretical possible eventuality that most would consider unlikely at best.
    - cndx 8y ago
      All projects that I have closely observed that went to GitHub for FOMO have NOT gotten more contributions afterwards. Among the real reasons are: 1) Every OSS project has its bureaucrats who contribute a modest amount of code but want to have an immodest amount of power. For these bureaucrats GitHub is like heaven: They appear productive, have power to silence discussions etc. 2) They work for someone or know someone who is associated with GitHub or in the Microsoft embracing strike force. 3) Legitimate reason: They want to show their employers a metric how much they contribute. I'm pretty cynical about the current state of OSS. Major idealistic contributions are a thing of the past. It is all about attaching oneself to a project, get hired somewhere and then stop contributions.
jlokier 8y ago
> Does it matter that GitHub themselves is not open source? That's for Apache to decide, but consider: Git itself was written, by Linus Torvalds, because Linux (the kernel) was using non-open source version control at the time called BitKeeper, and the non-open source nature of it was causing increasing problems in the Linux developer community, both ideological and eventually practical problems too, caused by the licensing preventing some devs from building tools. When Git was written and the Linux kernel devs jumped to it en masse, it was like a breath of fresh air. BitKeeper has credit for many of the ideas found in Git before Git. (Aside: credit also should go to Mercurial for ideas). One of the things that made Git better than BitKeeper was people were free to build more tools on it, which is entirely due to the open vs. closed source licensing, as well as a general attitude of welcome vs. unwelcome towards those tools. GitHub is different because it already builds on Git, and works with tools that anyone can build on top of Git. But some things which are really essential to thriving developer community are locked away in GitHub, so it's still limiting what people can build with it. (For example, can you innovate on how Issues are handled? Somewhat, but not in every way that is useful.) In some ways GitHub is like any other walled garden. You can't fork it yourself.
- xorcist 8y ago
  Just for the historial record: Bitkeeper is much older than both git and Mercurial, hence Bitkeeper can not be said to have taken ideas from Mercurial. Both was sprung in large parts from Linus' description of what requirements he had in order to consider using a version control system for Linux.
  - robaato 8y ago
    I think the comment meant that git took ideas from Mercurial rather than BK taking ideas from Mercurial.
    - j16sdiz 8y ago
      Git start before mercurial.
gstein67 8y ago
Not to us here at Apache. We wanted the GitHub tools to be available to our projects. Why try and recreate all that on our own? Waste of resources. The ASF is for creating software for the public good; having a great version control tool website is not in that mission. We chose to leverage GitHub instead. And yes, lots of our communities have been asking for better GitHub support (read: access to its tools). So we made it happen for them. -- Greg Stein

ebg13 8y ago

> Do they think that they’ll get enough new contributors this way to offset the (more than slight) irony? Absolutely yes. In another thread, someone mentioned that MediaGoblin is basically dead now. I went to look at their repo and it's hosted on Savannah. That definitely hurts involvement.

paule89 8y ago
I never even heard of Savannah. And after seeing the website i am glad they will be on github soon.
jordigh 8y ago
I'm kind of cynical about this sort of thing and I don't think the hosting really changes the quality of contributions. The amount, maybe, but you get a lot of crappy drive-bys that are about one particular but very enthusiastic person's pet peeves, which probably don't affect the wider userbase. The drive-bys require a lot of work to integrate for relatively little profit. Mediagoblin is dying not so much because it's on Savannah but because basically there are other things that got ActivityPub before it and could replace it (Pixelfed, Mastodon, Write Freely). Nobody really wants to work on Mediagoblin now because the alternatives are pretty much all better.
- coldpie 8y ago
  > I'm kind of cynical about this sort of thing and I don't think the hosting really changes the quality of contributions. Yeah. We've had this topic come up a number of times in the Wine project. We still use a mailing list and git-am patches for our contributions. We have a few hard-liner FOSS types who would strongly reject a GitHub solution (including myself), but a self-hosted Gitlab solution may be accepted. But in the end there just isn't much evidence that the change would be beneficial for the project. If you can't be bothered to figure out how to send an email or attach a patch to the bug tracker, are you really going to usefully contribute to Wine? It's an active topic of debate, but just being "easier to contribute" isn't clearly a good thing.
  - 8y ago

mises 8y ago

I think it has more to do with the ethos of Apache vs., say, Gnu. Namely, Apache tends to be much more permissive and not really view commercial, proprietary software as a "bad thing" like Gnu tends to.

pawelmurias 8y ago

It lowers the barrier to entry by using something people are already familar with.

batbomb 8y ago

Well, they've been using Jira forever. Usually when people say this they are referring to either Gitlab or Gitea. Well, it's not like all of Gitlab is fully open source, it's just Open Core, but I'm sure that's a sizable amount of the code, but I would imagine there's a decent chunk of gitlab.com source code that's proprietary (I'm sure somebody will quibble with this in a following comment, but the original argument is an argument of purism of being free and open). Gitlab CE and Gitea doesn't solve the hosting issue, though of course Apache could probably pay somebody to manage that, but then you've introduced extra overhead for collaboration that most people aren't that inclined to solve.

dijit 8y ago
> Well, it's not like all of Gitlab is fully open source. I think this is not a fair assessment, GitLabs community edition is fully open source and is a full product. The fact you can add proprietary elements for a licensing fee (which are also "open" in that they are readable, debuggable, etc;) is not at all the same as hosting on a platform which is entirely proprietary.
- batbomb 8y ago
  You are also not being fair to github then - you can run Github Enterprise Server and it is also "open" in that it's readable (non-obfuscated), debuggable, etc... It's basically a snapshot of what they run at github.com with added features for enterprise (like AD integration). You can't distribute the code. How easy it is to actually do that depends on your ruby skills and your wallet.
  - jeena 8y ago
    I don't think that people are drawn to the specific github implementation (code), it's that they're drawn to github.com the domain where you can't do what you propose.
- linuxftw 8y ago
  I feel the same. If Gitlab released the community edition as MIT license (not sure what the license is offhand) with no proprietary version, there's nothing stopping some 3rd party from creating proprietary versions/extensions of their own product.

meddlepal 8y ago

The number of hard line FOSS folks is really quite small. Personally I would be hard pressed to bother contributing to a project not on GitHub at this point. There is a certain workflow and interaction model that GitHub projects use that non-GitHub ones do not and it is simply not worth the time investment to learn those other projects. Not only that but it allows me to easily point at my work and go "I did that" when talking with folks.

rocqua 8y ago
What about a gitlab based project?
- pas 8y ago
  I guess gitlab is the same. The important flow is that there's a very easy way to fork and send a pull/merge request.
  - colbyrussell 8y ago
    "Easy" like: git diff master..bugfix > bugfix.patch # or `format-patch` # now attach/upload bugfix.patch Instead of: # make sure you click around github.com to create third fork git remote add unnecessary-third-fork $THIRDFORK git push unnecessary-third-fork bugfix firefox $THIRDFORK # now click around to file a PR # now wait for your PR to be merged # now click around on github.com to delete $THIRDFORK # ... unless you just leave things laying around What makes the second sequence easier than the first?
    - diminoten 8y ago
      Are you honestly taking the position that graphical user interfaces are harder to use than CLI?
      - colbyrussell 8y ago
        Let me ask, do you think that the content of my message reduces to "graphical user interfaces are harder to use than CLI"?

johannes1234321 8y ago

When we moved PHP to git we made sure we have our own infrastructure and keep our control there. Reality however is that people love doing "pull requests" on the GitHub mirror and use git.php.net only as push target.

johannes1234321 8y ago
And if anybody looks at git.php.net and thinks "well ugly, no wonder we anybody isn't using it" that's true. And moving to self-hosted GitLab was brought up, but won't solve it. We still have many pass-by PRs from people who wouldn't submit if it was on GitHub.

briandear 8y ago

If a non-profit buys food from a for-profit grocery store, is that ironic? Just because a project is open source doesn’t imply any requirement that all of the products and services used for that project must be.

tnolet 8y ago

Probably because UX and adoption trumps FOSS purism.

PopeDotNinja 8y ago

I won't argue that GitHub is better. I simply like the experience of contributing on GitHub: my pull requests are available for all to see, it's familiar, it works well enough. Using GitHub is also one less thing I need to learn, which is nice when I'm feel pretty maxed out on learning new things, which feels like most of the time these days.

scarejunba 8y ago

It costs money, dude. Lots of people have all these philosophical opinions about what FOSS projects should do but few people give money for infra.

gstein67 8y ago
And we save money by relying on GitHub's excellent tools, rather than wasting it, trying to recreate or stand up a similar platform. The communities wanted closer integration with GitHub (what they knew/used elsewhere), so we made it happen. -- Greg Stein