It’s not free software if you can’t easily fork it (and how to fix it)
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It’s not free software if you can’t easily fork it (and how to fix it)
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Re: It’s not free software if you can’t easily fork it (and how to fix it)
#2my software is a 1 man show, easy to fork and self-host, though still a bit green and only text and images for now
Re: It’s not free software if you can’t easily fork it (and how to fix it)
#3This is one of those things that bothers me too. And especially when it comes to software development, I'm genuinely afraid of the fact that a lot of open source development is dependent on a system that none of us can understand or ever hack on. We're also gradually being weaned away from the idea that you should assume we will want to exercise our rights as part of it being open source. People increasingly treat open source solutions like proprietary ones: inflexible and unfixable.
I don't know what to do about how people treat open source, but at least with the open source development situation, I try to support and help develop a simple free and open source solution: Pagure[1]. Unlike most Git forges, Pagure has features that support decentralized development. For example, Pagure supports submitting pull requests with Git repos on any server (regardless of whether it's running Pagure or not) with its remote pull requests feature. Issues and pull request metadata are all stored as git repos using JSON files as data, making it easy and portable to other Pagure instances and easy to convert for any other system. There's development ongoing by one of the other contributors to build an extension for Pagure to support Forgefed[2], a protocol to federate and decentralize code project management. And unlike most Git forges, Pagure is really easy to deploy, update, and modify. Naturally, this means Pagure is packaged in virtually all major distributions[3][4][5][6], too. :)
I wish more folks actually cared about this sort of thing. Maybe then solutions like Pagure would get more adoption and contributors. At least there are some people who care, and that's why Pagure hasn't died yet in the face of GitLab. :)
[2]: https://forgefed.peers.community/
[3]: https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/pagure
[4]: https://build.opensuse.org/package/show/openSUSE:Factory/pag...
Re: It’s not free software if you can’t easily fork it (and how to fix it)
#4yeah let's discuss this on a closed-source board run by VCs.
great way to own the point of your article.
Re: It’s not free software if you can’t easily fork it (and how to fix it)
#5I encountered a similar problem with technically open source MAPS.ME app ( https://github.com/mapsme/omim ).
I tried building it and I kept failing. Eventually I gave up.
I am not sure why it is even published as an open source project.
Re: It’s not free software if you can’t easily fork it (and how to fix it)
#6yeah let's discuss this on a closed-source board run by VCs. great way to own the point of your article.
Good point. I'm going to comment on the site itself!
Re: It’s not free software if you can’t easily fork it (and how to fix it)
#7Posted comment on your blog, should be awaiting moderation, but let me know if not.
Re: It’s not free software if you can’t easily fork it (and how to fix it)
#8TL;DR, always use GPL-3.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point....
Re: It’s not free software if you can’t easily fork it (and how to fix it)
#9Posted my reply here: https://davidsterry.com/blog/2020/09/on-difficult-free-softw...