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>For a while, leaving GitHub felt like a symbolic move mostly made by smaller projects or by people with strong views about software freedom. I definitely cring
by mtlynch 5mo ago
>For a while, leaving GitHub felt like a symbolic move mostly made by smaller projects or by people with strong views about software freedom. I definitely cringed when Zig moved to Codeberg! But I now see people with real weight and signal talking about leaving GitHub. The most obvious one is Mitchell Hashimoto, who announced that Ghostty will move.
I didn't understand this. I perceive the Zig project and Mitchell Hashimoto / Ghostty to be at similar levels of "weight and signal." Especially because Ghostty is written in Zig.
It feels kind of like saying, "Oh, I didn't take this seriously when it was just Fabrice Bellard, but now that an actual influential person like Guido van Rossum is doing it, it's real."
- the_mitsuhiko 5mo agoIt’s because the more visible people are, the stronger they have a pull on others. It’s not so much about person A vs person B but about what likelihood am I attributing to an individual or project to pull others along. For me projects moving off GitHub prior to Zig didn’t have that yet and even Zig itself didn’t feel that meaningful to me. But you might think about it differently.
- Izkata 5mo agoTheir own example is an example of this. I've heard the name Fabrice Bellard but don't know who he is and don't know why I'd care, but Guido is a well-known name among python users and does hold weight. Looking up what Bellard is known for, I kind of expect this to be true of more people than not.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- ioands 5mo agoYou don't care about the man, myth, and excellence himself who has created FFmpeg and QEMU, two of the most influential pieces of software ever made?
- tardedmeme 5mo agoHe's not as visible. I know those projects, not the people behind them. I don't know most of the people behind Python either, but I know Guido because his name keeps coming up when the Python project is talked about.
- latexr 5mo agoI agree with you. But I do see one crucial difference between the Zig and Ghostty announcements, namely that Ghostty did it purely for service degradation reasons while Zig did also mention ideological reasons such as GitHub’s relationship with ICE and their push for AI. Those were, naturally, much discussed points on HN. I can’t help but wonder if that contributed to the “cringing”.
- kristoff_it 5mo agoOur announcement had plenty of examples of service degradation as well. People just become blind to all reason when somebody touches one of their political pet peeves (which sometimes might even be just referencing politics in the first place).
- apitman 5mo agoZig catching strays