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In my country, at least, once upon a time, upper middle class people would use a person/business called "dhobhi" to wash and iron 90% of their clothes. Reasons
by abdullahkhalids 6y ago
In my country, at least, once upon a time, upper middle class people would use a person/business called "dhobhi" to wash and iron 90% of their clothes. Reasons included convenience, unreliable supply of water at home, low quality consumer detergents etc. For small communities, the dhobhis formed an oligopoly of centralized services.
When washing machines became available, people didn't buy them because they were expensive, unreliable, and required a lot of repair and maintenance. Ultimately, the washing machines became cheap, reliable, and low maintenance, and now most people use washing machines.
I think the analogy to github and personal servers is clear.
- xyzzy123 6y agoI'm not sure this analogy holds, exactly, for project hosting. Washing isn't inherently collaborative, and the more one looks at the specifics, the more divergent the situations seem. For example, Git(hub/lab) offer free project hosting while running one's own server would incur costs. This can be a big deal for open source, because paying bills or handling money tends to force a more complex structure on your "organisation". For project hosting, there are network effects in terms of project discoverability, user account management, operational convenience (data durability, patching, ensuring uptime), consistency of interface and third party integration which tend to make using a centralised service more attractive than running your own, all else being equal. It seems to me that only quite bad mismanagement of the major project hosting services could reverse this trend.
- abdullahkhalids 6y agoYou are right that the analogy fails in a number of ways. My point is that, besides legal issues that you point out, personal adoption of these services will grow a lot more, if hosting your server was actually easy. Right now, it is not, not by a large margin.