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Give up GitHub: The time has come

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Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#571

Post by sshine »

I've given up GitHub for the startup I joined.

We're self-hosting Gitea and run CI with Drone.

My main concern was exactly Copilot. The concern is mostly principal.

I don't hate Microsoft like I did when I was younger. I think VSCode is a great editor. I still think GitHub is the best social network I know. But I've quit every other social network.

But when your values don't align with an organisation's, you will eventually run into conflicts of interest.

I still push changes to open-source projects that I host on GitHub, but I don't create new ones. The latest project I started runs in a local git directory that will get pushed to a self-hosted Gitea.

When necessary, I'm seriously considering contributing to Gitea to make this transition easier for others.

Gitea is an ~100MB self-hosted binary that mimics GitHub, runs its own SSH server, and it looks GREAT!

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#572

Post by loganabbott »

CRConrad wrote: post #565
loganabbott wrote: post #314

SourceForge CEO here. The first paragraph of this article is wrong. SourceForge has been built on Apache Allura since 2011. https://allura.apache.org

Yeah, because that was the substantive point about your company, its business model, and its relationship to the FOSS community that was made in the article. Not.

Publishing wrong information is wrong.

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#573

Post by TheRealPomax »

quadrifoliate wrote: post #544
TheRealPomax wrote: post #541

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'll want to pick your analogies carefully, because burning garbage for energy when the alternative is a US style landfill is literally better in every way. But let's not strawman: first mover advantage is very real, but it's been literal decades of competition, and plenty of folks moved off of MS products. Hundreds of millions, however, have not. And still voluntarily install them. Because for them, they work the…

That's the thing though, burning coal works fine as well and doesn't cause any more gripes than hydroelectric or solar. Without voluntary moves to other products, or regulatory changes, it would have taken likely much longer before we stopped doing it. It's not an exact analogy, but there are parallels – the linked article is suggesting voluntarily stepping away from Microsoft code hosting, and others in the thread h…

Indeed. A number of other places in Europe looked at the economics of landfills and went "yeah: no. Even with the cost of gas filters, literally burning garbage for energy is cheaper and more environmentally friendly than making a time bomb by burying it".

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#574

Post by TheRealPomax »

nequo wrote: post #260
TheRealPomax wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean two of the most successful pieces of commercial software in the history of modern computing? Because as easy as it is to pretend they're terrible: to millions of users and orgs, they simply aren't.

Being successful as a business has as much or more to do with market power than with code quality. I am lucky that I can avoid their products. But millions of users and orgs can't because that's what others around them use. So they're stuck with it no matter how much worse it is than open-source alternatives.

In 2022, it really isn't "you're stuck". Even if your org uses MS prodcucts, there are interoperable open source suites these days. The problem is that they're shit. Yes, they work for small documents, but star/sun/open/libre/EtcOffice all fall over when you do something as simple as trying to sort a 30,000 row spreadsheet on several column criteria.

(and yes, that is trivially simple. If your software can't do that in a performant way, you don't understand what product you're trying to out-compete)

It's not that there's no alternative, it's that the alternatives are just not good enough when it comes to "I need this stupidly complicated thing, thanks to 20 years of spreadsheet formula history at my organization that I have zero power to even remotely change, done in seconds. Not minutes".

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#575

Post by nunez »

seadan83 wrote: post #176

As a leader of a FOSS project that is on github, and migrated off of sourceforge because SVN and email patches were not scaling - I'm a bit confused by this article. Co-pilot has issues, ergo github is going the way of sourceforge, and so now we must abandon github? Do I have that reasoning correct? We need to: - migrate the bug queue - have all links in commit history break - application integration with githib for…

Teaching people how to use Git is a BIG one.

Git is confusing for just about everyone. It is really easy to shoot yourself in the foot once you step away from git add/git commit/git push. Hell, you can foot-gun yourself even with the usual workflow.

GUIs help with bridging the gap, but because the GUIs make everything that's actually happening opaque, troubleshooting gets really complicated when something goes wrong (GitHub also sells professional services).

Github and Gitlab have done a lot to make Git easier.

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#576

Post by nunez »

Uninen wrote: post #291
seadan83 wrote: post #176

As a leader of a FOSS project that is on github, and migrated off of sourceforge because SVN and email patches were not scaling - I'm a bit confused by this article. Co-pilot has issues, ergo github is going the way of sourceforge, and so now we must abandon github? Do I have that reasoning correct? We need to: - migrate the bug queue - have all links in commit history break - application integration with githib for…

That list is a perfect example why GitHub is so problematic. Forget Copilot. Even without that you’ve put all of those services in one centralized basket, fully controlled by a for-profit company (with proven track record of unethical behavior). And not only that, but this is true for the vast majority of FOSS projects!

I guess we should cancel Level3, Equinix, AT&T and Verizon while we're at it?

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#577

Post by nunez »

rglullis wrote: post #214
seadan83 wrote: post #176

As a leader of a FOSS project that is on github, and migrated off of sourceforge because SVN and email patches were not scaling - I'm a bit confused by this article. Co-pilot has issues, ergo github is going the way of sourceforge, and so now we must abandon github? Do I have that reasoning correct? We need to: - migrate the bug queue - have all links in commit history break - application integration with githib for…

Forget Copilot for a second. Do you think it is healthy for the industry to be so dependent on one single service provider, and a closed one on top of that?

I don't think so.

If GitHub didn't provide value, then it wouldn't be where it's at. Considering that collaborating on FOSS before GitHub was a mess if you weren't technical, I'd say GH has earned their spot.

Also, there's no way to avoid centralization. At some point somewhere, you're relying a mega-corp for critical services, and if not you, someone else.

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#578

Post by gerikson »

bilekas wrote: post #466
naikrovek wrote: post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft is not the author of the software that copilot helps produce. the person sitting at the keyboard using copilot is the author.

This is a bit like saying if you hire a freelancer to do some work then you're the author of that work. I'm not too sure i agree with that.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/work_for_hire

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#579

Post by adli89 »

CRConrad wrote: post #566
Aeolun wrote: post #418

Ugh, is this the next big thing? Ragging on Github and Copilot due to some nebulous claims of freedom? I think I’ve seen 3 articles about this in just the past week…

What's "nebulous" about having your chosen license for your project ignored – in practice, rescinded – when it's uploaded to GitHub by someone who may or may not be you?

Then find that someone and deal with them.

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#580

Post by bilekas »

gerikson wrote: post #578
bilekas wrote: post #466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a bit like saying if you hire a freelancer to do some work then you're the author of that work. I'm not too sure i agree with that.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/work_for_hire

Kind of interesting.. I would like to point out this seems to be specific for the US.

But also.. In that case, when I commission an artist to paint my portrait, surely I can't claim to be the artist.. But I'm no lawyer.

I'm not sure there is a contractual agreement in GitHub's co-pilot that says: "Any code you write here is commissioned work". But honestly I didn't read the T&C's.

So I think you MAY have debunked my analogy, but not the main reason for the analogy.

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