7 ms·

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 align

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 7y 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 7y 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.
ultim8k 7y ago
Hmm based on this, the .org tld and the server providers can have control over the project too. Right? If so, we should use an open source distributed protocol.
- progval 7y ago
  For what it's worth, the conditions for termination from the Public Interest Registry (.org's registry) are slightly better than Github. PIR has a five-items list of possible reasons: https://pir.org/policies/org-idn-policies/takedown-policy/ https://pir.org/policies/org-idn-policies/takedown-policy/ while "GitHub reserves the right to refuse service to anyone for any reason at any time."
  - int_19h 7y ago
    "Deems necessary, in its discretion ... to protect the integrity and stability of the registry" sounds extremely vague, though.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 7y ago
  > Hmm based on this, the .org tld and the server providers can have control over the project too. Right? No, pretty obviously not. For the domain, this has already been answered. For the servers, it's trivial to move your setup to a different hoster with no visible effects to the outside. > If so, we should use an open source distributed protocol. Like ... git and email? Yeah, we should.
  - pbhjpbhj 7y ago
    Git and email isn't sufficient, surely you need a repository as well, a listserver in your implementation I guess?
    - zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 7y ago
      A respository and a listserver are not protocols. Also, with git you have a repository as soon as you start using it. If you mean something like a centralized repository server: No, you don't actually need that. You can serve a git repository from your workstation just fine for others to pull from. Or you can just move changes around via email. Also, there are way more ways to use email than for mailing lists. You could also use it as a transport for machine-readable messages between git frontends or whatever. In and case, I don't get what point you are trying to make.
      - pbhjpbhj 7y ago
        It sounded like you were saying "instead of using GitHub (with git obviously), you can use just git and email". My comment was basically trying to say "without a repository how will people find you, how will they catch up on recent dev, how will they view past emails, etc., unless you have a central repository of some sort". I'm not sure how "just give people direct access to my local git" fills that massive hole, so I assumed your mention of email included implicitly something like a listserve. Otherwise your suggestion seems entirely unworkable to me? So one of us is missing something. Are you really proposing p2p git + email alone with no other infrastructure? Do you think that's at all optimal?
skybrian 7y ago
Even if it were true, this isn't the "entire point", or at least not to everyone. You're talking about communities that have diverse interests, and only a subset of those people are into avoiding all dependency on commercial software in the FSF or Debian sense. "FOSS" includes Windows developers, Mac developers, iOS developers, Java developers, people working for bigtech corporations, and some bigtech firms themselves. (Some parts of these firms some of the time, anyway.)
- jraph 7y ago
  it seems you confused commercial with non free software. Java may be a commercial product, but it is also free software and the FSF and Debian are happy with that. They do not reject commercial software quite the contrary. That said, your point still stands.

RhodesianHunter 7y 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 7y 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.

ultim8k 7y ago

Hmm based on this, the .org tld and the server providers can have control over the project too. Right? If so, we should use an open source distributed protocol.

progval 7y ago
For what it's worth, the conditions for termination from the Public Interest Registry (.org's registry) are slightly better than Github. PIR has a five-items list of possible reasons: https://pir.org/policies/org-idn-policies/takedown-policy/ https://pir.org/policies/org-idn-policies/takedown-policy/ while "GitHub reserves the right to refuse service to anyone for any reason at any time."
- int_19h 7y ago
  "Deems necessary, in its discretion ... to protect the integrity and stability of the registry" sounds extremely vague, though.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 7y ago
> Hmm based on this, the .org tld and the server providers can have control over the project too. Right? No, pretty obviously not. For the domain, this has already been answered. For the servers, it's trivial to move your setup to a different hoster with no visible effects to the outside. > If so, we should use an open source distributed protocol. Like ... git and email? Yeah, we should.
- pbhjpbhj 7y ago
  Git and email isn't sufficient, surely you need a repository as well, a listserver in your implementation I guess?
  - zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 7y ago
    A respository and a listserver are not protocols. Also, with git you have a repository as soon as you start using it. If you mean something like a centralized repository server: No, you don't actually need that. You can serve a git repository from your workstation just fine for others to pull from. Or you can just move changes around via email. Also, there are way more ways to use email than for mailing lists. You could also use it as a transport for machine-readable messages between git frontends or whatever. In and case, I don't get what point you are trying to make.
    - pbhjpbhj 7y ago
      It sounded like you were saying "instead of using GitHub (with git obviously), you can use just git and email". My comment was basically trying to say "without a repository how will people find you, how will they catch up on recent dev, how will they view past emails, etc., unless you have a central repository of some sort". I'm not sure how "just give people direct access to my local git" fills that massive hole, so I assumed your mention of email included implicitly something like a listserve. Otherwise your suggestion seems entirely unworkable to me? So one of us is missing something. Are you really proposing p2p git + email alone with no other infrastructure? Do you think that's at all optimal?

skybrian 7y ago

Even if it were true, this isn't the "entire point", or at least not to everyone. You're talking about communities that have diverse interests, and only a subset of those people are into avoiding all dependency on commercial software in the FSF or Debian sense. "FOSS" includes Windows developers, Mac developers, iOS developers, Java developers, people working for bigtech corporations, and some bigtech firms themselves. (Some parts of these firms some of the time, anyway.)

jraph 7y ago
it seems you confused commercial with non free software. Java may be a commercial product, but it is also free software and the FSF and Debian are happy with that. They do not reject commercial software quite the contrary. That said, your point still stands.