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> Obviously, I'm a bit biased, as I run a project for creating transparent open source infrastructure. But I do think this is a important issue, and I'm getting

• diggan 7y ago
  I love the UX of GitHub and don't get me wrong, I use and depend on GitHub for my day-to-day work and also my own hobbies. I do understand that people like it as well. It's so easy to get started and it just works, most of the time. But it just doesn't sit well with me, that we as open source developers, are depending on a platform that is closed-source for so much. I think I could see past that, if GitHub in itself was sustainable. But with the new owner who sees GitHub as a way to get marketshare of developers, and not as it's own entity, it's hard to continue to cheer on them. When Microsoft have to either increase profits/decrease expenses and they choose between Azure and GitHub, I'm pretty sure the effort will either be to decrease the expenses of GitHub, or increase the profits of Azure. None of those two ways are good for the users of GitHub in the long-term.
• grx 7y ago
  > This point is brought many times. Why use GitHub if we can host git repositories anywhere? (A: GitHub providers discovery). Why use GitHub PRs if we have mailing lists? (A: GitHub has better UX). Using Github as a git repo hoster is okayish in the sense that it does not lock your code in. Using Github as a central management tool is problematic, but still manageable. But this introduces money into the game, and it's dangerous. Github will be the gatekeeper for money flows. It's the same for Patreon, but Patreon has less incentives to lock the whole Open Source ecosystem into their products (Github: hosting, code, issues, PRs, pages with CNAMEs!, package registry and now financial transactions). My bet is that due to the current state of the ecosystem, people will jump on it and forget that Microsoft is behind all of this. We need organisations which are forced to be open and collective to handle Open Source, not privately owned corporate.
• lasagnaphil 7y ago
  (I made this comment in another Github related post, but to repeat:) If you view Github as just a Git (and occasionally static site) hosting service, then there's not lock-in whatsover; you can always move to somewhere like Gitlab or host your own. But the point is: Github isn't just a Git website anymore; it creates a community around it. Right now the reason why people aren't easily moving out of Github is because by moving to somewhere else, they have to risk getting less views, less recognition, and less pull requests for their libraries. Also, if you were a Sponsor in Github and earning $30000 a month and then had disagreements with Github's policies and want to get out, you now have to risk shaving off all your sponsors to switch to a different service like Liberapay. Maybe some of your passionate existing patrons will go towards the extra effort to switch alongside you, but the reality is: most won't. There were lots of promises and hopes for the patron economy (or I would extend this to call it a "distributed economy"), where people can directly give money as reward for their work while avoiding the traditional hierarchical structure of corporations. However, because of the nature of the current society we live in, the ideal version of this economy would never come to fruition. Think of examples such as Patreon, Youtube, and recently Github; they're an enabler for diverse communities, rich subcultures, and innovative ideas, but the users still have to live under the guise of huge capitalistic forces. It seems that the distributed economy still has to live under the current technocratic system (where huge tech corporations have much higher leverage than small companies or non-profit organizations). To see this relationship between users and corporations as either symbiotic or exploitative is up to your choice, but I think the status-quo will stay for quite some time.