GitHub's reign over public open source programming is a bit terrifying. But, it's been mostly benevolent so far, but I do find it troubling to trust a private company to keep dev's in mind, and not profit.
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Python moves to GitHub
81–90 of 119 posts
Re: Python moves to GitHub
#82GitHub's reign over public open source programming is a bit terrifying. But, it's been mostly benevolent so far, but I do find it troubling to trust a private company to keep dev's in mind, and not profit.
especially given some of their behavior in the last couple of years...
Re: Python moves to GitHub
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is incredibly shortsighted, but the rebuttal is simple: > This being the case, who cares if GitHub is dominant? Or SourceForge, or whatever the next popular thing might be. For one, I do , and for two - why was sourceforge changing their business model to shady predation a problem? It was not because they were a website on the Internet - there are millions of URLs of clickjackers or other malware you could visit…
> a proprietary software project must eventually act against your interests because you are not in control of it Being open source doesn't mean that won't happen. A lot of open source projects have acted against their users' best interests. A good example is Firefox with the whole "Pocket integration" controversy. Another example is Wikipedia, with its editorial policies that drove away editors. You can fork Firefox,…
> open source doesn't inherently remedy the issue that other people will do things that you do not agree with, and that may cause problems to you.
It's not a remedy. It's just a lifeline. Some of us do take Icecat or Iceweasel. With proprietary software, you have no recourse at all. Wouldn't you prefer some safety net to none at all?
Re: Python moves to GitHub
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is incredibly shortsighted, but the rebuttal is simple: > This being the case, who cares if GitHub is dominant? Or SourceForge, or whatever the next popular thing might be. For one, I do , and for two - why was sourceforge changing their business model to shady predation a problem? It was not because they were a website on the Internet - there are millions of URLs of clickjackers or other malware you could visit…
> a proprietary software project must eventually act against your interests because you are not in control of it Being open source doesn't mean that won't happen. A lot of open source projects have acted against their users' best interests. A good example is Firefox with the whole "Pocket integration" controversy. Another example is Wikipedia, with its editorial policies that drove away editors. You can fork Firefox,…
You don't have to maintain your own fork, though. When Firefox implemented pocket, Iceweasel saw a ton of uptick involvement. I'm not sure of any popular more free to edit clones of Wikipedia though, but that is only because I have never had to seek one out. I imagine they exist. Wikimedia has not gone aginst my interests yet - if they ever put ads on wikipedia, for example, that would be justification for forking. But that would not be your own clone, it would be a community divide. And most projects of scale realize that those kinds of forks are dangerous and act to bring the community back together by resolving a problem that is so bad it schisms the ecosystem.
This has happened before. Gnome 2 and 3 schismed, and Gnome 3 became more user friendly and configurable to bring back its users. Libva and FFMPEG split because FFMPEG was very contributor unfriendly, and then it started merging all the libva changes so contributing to libva got your changes in everywhere. Open and Libre office forked because of Oracle changes, and now Libreoffice is pretty much the only name left in town, and is more successful for it. It happens all the time in branches and private forks and message boards before it even reaches end users.
But that is the difference between MS Office and Libreoffice. When a problem is huge to the OpenOffice community, they fork and start LibreOffice, and when its substancial enough the community overrides the original developers and takes over when terrible decisions are made. If Microsoft fucks up their office (and the early ribbon was a great example of that) you are stuck, and have no power. When the version you like goes end of life, you either sit on decaying software or forfeit your preferences because Microsoft has complete control.
If Gitlab jumped the shark, you would not be spinning up your own gitlab clone to maintain yourself - the gitlab community would fork away from Gitlab Inc and create Librelab, and mindshare would drive products to it because its a seamless transition. And that is more unlikely to happen with Gitlab in the first place because the power of the user can keep the company in check from making extremely user hostile moves like Google, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, etc can do with impunity because users are trapped and they hold all the keys to the castle.
> Their secret sauce isn't really the software, but the service they provide.
The services are the problem. Its the same problem with Facebook - Google+ is feature equivalent, but it was dead in the water to start and its free clones like StatusNet (albeit thats more twitter) are completely dead because they aren't just personal software, they are platforms. And platforms with mindshare and the users are insurmountable.
Its not about the wiki, or issue tracker, or pages. Those are replaceable - painfully, but doable. But replacing the community of developers is not a solvable problem, because they are already on github. You have already lost. And that gives github overwhelming and dominant power in how you conduct and host free software now, with no recourse.
Re: Python moves to GitHub
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's the alternative? Everyone running their own little proprietary stacks with none of the features or community or ease of use?
Why would a free software project leave GitHub just to run a proprietary "stack"? You could try one of the self-hostable free software alternatives listed here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_source_code_host...
With self-hosting you don't get the broader community... With node, for example, most modules have source on github and it's easy to fork, fix/enhance something and submit a PR... with everyone self hosting, how many logins do you have to create.
I know, tracking, federation, etc... but it's much nicer only having a couple logins (google, fb, twitter, github) for most sites I access regularly.
Re: Python moves to GitHub
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even the issue tracking?
Someone will probably point out that data can be exported, but that is frankly irrelevant given that the URLs for your project are now embedded around the entire world to a domain name you don't control (github.com), and which your goal should be to "outlive". There is tons of historical content sitting on SourceForge and Google Code that has links all over the Internet pointed at, and it is a major issue that you ca…
You can use your own domain for GH pages... which many sites do use for their documentation.
Re: Python moves to GitHub
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because of how Git is a distributed model, hosting your project on Github shouldn't be a big deal. You could host your project privately and then just have Github mirror that private host with hooks. Git being distributed means that you can host your project on as many different places as you want. And making the workflow to accept pull requests for Github, Gitlab, or other providers really isn't very difficult. They…
Because of how Git is a distributed model News flash: the number of people using the "D" in "DVCS" is so tiny that it might as well not be there. Central server with central authoritative repository, where all developers push and pull and synchronize, is how people use git in the real world, and it's time to stop pretending that any distributed features will ever be used. (which is to say, if github disappeared tomor…
Wait, what?
Git doesn't do remote propagation all by itself, so if you're thinking "distributed" like DNS, then yeah of course devs don't do that. Of course we "rely" on a central repository. But if github goes down for good, we change our remotes and the migration is painless.
What else would you want? Propagation would be neat but is completely unnecessary (which is why it hasn't been done). But if the remote loses all my data, well, I and every other dev have a copy locally and we can start working from a fresh remote.
Github repositories are "authoritative" by convention. These things are a feature when you work in a team. In some of my personal projects, it's not the Github repository that's authoritative but my local repository. I really don't understand what you're trying to get at, honestly... git is popular because it covers all those use cases.
Re: Python moves to GitHub
#88If there ever was a company that became 'too big to fail' it is github. A major security breach at github would have earth shaking consequences and if they ever went out of business it would take a long time before the rift was healed.
I think that the fail of Amazon and their AWS would have far worse consequences. Half of the internet would stop working (the half that's not using Google's and Microsoft's services, anyway).
Re: Python moves to GitHub
#89GitHub is popular. More people will come in contact with the development of Python by Python being on GitHub. That's a significant benefit to any open source project; one that I believe outweighs the concerns of a private company valuing business over developer ideals.
Re: Python moves to GitHub
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because of how Git is a distributed model, hosting your project on Github shouldn't be a big deal. You could host your project privately and then just have Github mirror that private host with hooks. Git being distributed means that you can host your project on as many different places as you want. And making the workflow to accept pull requests for Github, Gitlab, or other providers really isn't very difficult. They…
Because of how Git is a distributed model News flash: the number of people using the "D" in "DVCS" is so tiny that it might as well not be there. Central server with central authoritative repository, where all developers push and pull and synchronize, is how people use git in the real world, and it's time to stop pretending that any distributed features will ever be used. (which is to say, if github disappeared tomor…
Forking a repo creates an alternative authoritative repository. That's a huge part of the D in DVCS.