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If GitHub goes down, you can still use a different remote; however, you lose issues, PRs, and code review. If your remote goes down but you have an email based

by Seirdy 6y ago

If GitHub goes down, you can still use a different remote; however, you lose issues, PRs, and code review. If your remote goes down but you have an email based workflow, you can continue as if nothing happened. One could argue that your mail server might go down, but it’s better than having your centralized GitHub-like forge go down for two reasons: 1. If not all contributors use the same mail server, it’s much less of an issue since not everyone goes offline at the same time. Additionally, your maildir doesn’t care whether or not you’re online; both the git repo and all mailing lists have offline copies distributed to all collaborators out-of-the-box by default. 2. GitHub’s reliability is significantly poorer than the vast majority of email providers. The great thing about decentralization is that getting good uptime on a small mail server for under 1000 users is much easier than getting good uptime on a centralized forge re-implementing email’s features for millions of users.

gregmac 6y ago
You still have a single, centralized mailing list server. That's what you should be comparing to GitHub -- not the individual mail servers for each user. If your mailing list server goes down, no one can use the mailing list. Taking it a step further, if its data is lost, everyone has to re-subscribe. On top of that, you have a mailing list archive. If that's down, or not operating, you've made thing even less open, because now any non-subscribers can't even read what's going on, and if they do subscribe, they only get to see new messages. Existing long-time subscribers have an archive, sure, but it's very possible no one user has a complete archive, and it's a certainty that most users don't. Someone can run a redundant mailing list archive server, but then someone can also mirror the GitHub repository, PRs and issues. --- That said, the mailing list server and archive are likely simpler to run, less likely to go down, and easier to move somewhere else. Transferring from github.com to something else is going to be painful, and I suspect most FOSS authors simply don't think about it or see the ease and benefits of using it as outweighing the risk. Companies should look at that risk much more closely, but ultimately it's the same situation as if they decide not to have fire insurance: if their building burns down, they're SOL, but that was the decision they made.
- Seirdy 6y ago
  Sorry, I wasn't clear enough. I meant that you still have an offline copy of the mailing list and can see the full picture of what's publicly going on, and you have everybody's contact info. You can see who's involved with what problems and get to work during the downtime.

by Seirdy 6y ago

gregmac 6y ago

You still have a single, centralized mailing list server. That's what you should be comparing to GitHub -- not the individual mail servers for each user. If your mailing list server goes down, no one can use the mailing list. Taking it a step further, if its data is lost, everyone has to re-subscribe. On top of that, you have a mailing list archive. If that's down, or not operating, you've made thing even less open, because now any non-subscribers can't even read what's going on, and if they do subscribe, they only get to see new messages. Existing long-time subscribers have an archive, sure, but it's very possible no one user has a complete archive, and it's a certainty that most users don't. Someone can run a redundant mailing list archive server, but then someone can also mirror the GitHub repository, PRs and issues. --- That said, the mailing list server and archive are likely simpler to run, less likely to go down, and easier to move somewhere else. Transferring from github.com to something else is going to be painful, and I suspect most FOSS authors simply don't think about it or see the ease and benefits of using it as outweighing the risk. Companies should look at that risk much more closely, but ultimately it's the same situation as if they decide not to have fire insurance: if their building burns down, they're SOL, but that was the decision they made.

Seirdy 6y ago
Sorry, I wasn't clear enough. I meant that you still have an offline copy of the mailing list and can see the full picture of what's publicly going on, and you have everybody's contact info. You can see who's involved with what problems and get to work during the downtime.