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I notice from your blog that you have links to a number of commercial services including Keybase. Keybase is another really great example of the disconnect betw
by vertis 4y ago
I notice from your blog that you have links to a number of commercial services including Keybase. Keybase is another really great example of the disconnect between the underlying open source (GPG, etc) and something that is easily approachable and just lets people get on with the things they want to do.
We shouldn't use Keybase, but the nearest alternative open-source, Keyoxide, is not functional unless you're an engineer. Keybase on the other hand is perfectly usable without being an expert in the underlying cryptography.
Similarly Github has a huge number of features that a usable by people that aren't developers (PRs etc).
If you want a point to your side, GIMP is a bad hill to die on. Blender is a much better example of a tool that we should be teaching as opposed to Autodesk Maya (etc).
That's the thing with Blender though, it has feature parity with the things it's competing with and a community and network effect. For something open source to compete with GitHub it would need to be so much more than Git and offer the community and discovery that forms a big part of the "open" GitHub.
In the meantime people need to get things done. NOT teaching them the tool they're inevitably going to use is just a pointless battle to fight. Better to create the alternative first and lure people with straight up feature benefits.
- toastal 4y ago> I notice from your blog that you have links to a number of commercial services including Keybase... Blog has been under redesign-rebuild for a long time--other priorities. Said services were planning on being removed and replaced with alternatives as mentioned. Blender is a better option I agree.
- vertis 4y agoThey always are the last to be updated (mine also). We don't disagree in principle about open tools being better. I do however think that there isn't a viable alternative to GitHub at this point. The same could have been said about ExpertExchange at one point, and while StackOverflow isn't perfect, they do at make everything Creative Commons. Tackling GitHub would require building a platform where all of the other tools such as Pull Requests, Actions, Issues were also represented in a portable format. Recognising that Git is just one interface to GitHub now rather than the main part of it.
- toastal 4y agoTruth. Vendor lock-in is a concern when it comes to platforms. One thing that can help is writing shell scripts (or Nix building those scripts) for CIs to run minimally. With the merge request model having issues scaling, I'm curious how long til we push to a different model, or a different tool like darts/Pijul.