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Seems an awful lot like perfection being the enemy of good. Github is and always has been a closed platform. It's also responsible for the largest explosion o
by oorza 4y ago
Seems an awful lot like perfection being the enemy of good.
Github is and always has been a closed platform. It's also responsible for the largest explosion of open source activity from any single source in the last twenty years. Your argument relies on the assumption that the cost of migrating away from Github is a cost a FOSS project can pay and survive, which is a pretty heavy assumption as far as those things go. Even if the alternatives were comparable in UX, and they're not, there are entire ecosystems (Node, Golang, RubyGems, brew, etc.) that explicitly depend on Github. If you measure your software's success by any metric other than how well it aligns to your ethics, it's hard to justify anything but Github for a FOSS project.
Most people, IME, write FOSS software so people can find and use it. I remember the era when SourceForge was more-or-less the best thing you could hope for as far as central repositories were concerned, but they weren't much more than free static web hosting. I remember how difficult it was to contribute to Apache projects because figuring out their esoteric source control and patch process was so daunting. I remember googling for software packages to use and not having an easy route to quickly gauge whether its quality was worth investing further research. I wouldn't like to go back to a world where everything was hosted on free software if it means losing all the knowledge that exists in that one place.
There definitely seem like more important windmills to tilt at than pointing at the engine that drives the entire FOSS ecosystem and saying it's not good enough by the most stringent of ethical standards.
- ddevault 4y agoMany projects, some of them among the most successful projects in the world (Linux, PostgreSQL, Debian, others), are not on GitHub and are doing just fine. I reject the axiomatic statement that projects cannot survive outside of GitHub -- it's plainly ridiculous and trivially disproven. Thousands of successful projects do. Arguing otherwise contradicts the facts and serves only to justify the status quo. Many people write FOSS for many different reasons. Chasing popularity is among the worst, and using GitHub is a poor way of achieving it regardless. GitHub is not good enough. Placing all of our FOSS eggs in a proprietary basket which is incompatible with FOSS values is an absolutely foolish thing to do. The alternatives exist and are equal to the task, if not exceptional.