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Apache Software Foundation joins GitHub open source community

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Re: Apache Software Foundation joins GitHub open source community

#31

Post by snazz »

linuxftw wrote: post #28
dijit wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Well, it's not like all of Gitlab is fully open source. I think this is not a fair assessment, GitLabs community edition is fully open source and is a full product. The fact you can add proprietary elements for a licensing fee (which are also "open" in that they are readable, debuggable, etc;) is not at all the same as hosting on a platform which is entirely proprietary.

I feel the same. If Gitlab released the community edition as MIT license (not sure what the license is offhand) with no proprietary version, there's nothing stopping some 3rd party from creating proprietary versions/extensions of their own product.

Yes. BSD-derived licenses do not stop someone from distributing a proprietary version, while the GPL does (although you can still charge for your version even with the GPL, you just have to distribute your source with the package and make it available under the GPL).

Re: Apache Software Foundation joins GitHub open source community

#32

Post by paule89 »

ebg13 wrote: post #11
snazz wrote: post #8

It confuses me why so many traditionally pro-FOSS projects move to a not-free-nor-open tool like GitHub. Do they think that they’ll get enough new contributors this way to offset the (more than slight) irony?

> Do they think that they’ll get enough new contributors this way to offset the (more than slight) irony? Absolutely yes. In another thread, someone mentioned that MediaGoblin is basically dead now. I went to look at their repo and it's hosted on Savannah. That definitely hurts involvement.

I never even heard of Savannah. And after seeing the website i am glad they will be on github soon.

Re: Apache Software Foundation joins GitHub open source community

#33

Post by snazz »

saagarjha wrote: post #12
snazz wrote: post #8

It confuses me why so many traditionally pro-FOSS projects move to a not-free-nor-open tool like GitHub. Do they think that they’ll get enough new contributors this way to offset the (more than slight) irony?

I wonder if there are plans to mirror GitHub’s supplemental content (issues, etc.)

I’ve heard that GitHub makes that intentionally hard. Have you seen a repository that comes from Google Code? All the issues are always messed up that way.

Re: Apache Software Foundation joins GitHub open source community

#34

Post by meddlepal »

snazz wrote: post #8

It confuses me why so many traditionally pro-FOSS projects move to a not-free-nor-open tool like GitHub. Do they think that they’ll get enough new contributors this way to offset the (more than slight) irony?

The number of hard line FOSS folks is really quite small.

Personally I would be hard pressed to bother contributing to a project not on GitHub at this point. There is a certain workflow and interaction model that GitHub projects use that non-GitHub ones do not and it is simply not worth the time investment to learn those other projects. Not only that but it allows me to easily point at my work and go "I did that" when talking with folks.

Re: Apache Software Foundation joins GitHub open source community

#35

Post by im3w1l »

atonse wrote: post #10
snazz wrote: post #8

It confuses me why so many traditionally pro-FOSS projects move to a not-free-nor-open tool like GitHub. Do they think that they’ll get enough new contributors this way to offset the (more than slight) irony?

Better participation. A lot more people know how to use GitHub's tools. It'll likely increase the amount of development, participation, pull requests, etc that ASF projects get. Does it matter that GitHub themselves is not open source?

They give up their autonomy in moderation - Github will now have the power to say "you are not allowed to contribute to Apache projects". This will lead to

a) Github will have leverage over the project.

b) They make themselves vulnerable to the outrage du jour. If an outrage mob forms against someone in the Apache Project, Github may kick them off their platform - they are known to have done so in the past. Apache will then have to decide what to do. The path of least resistance will be to just let them go.

People who anticipate such a course of events will have to live in constant fear of all their effort coming to waste and their community being pulled from them by an outsider. And people who anticipate such fear may never join in the first place.

Re: Apache Software Foundation joins GitHub open source community

#36

Post by johannes1234321 »

snazz wrote: post #8

It confuses me why so many traditionally pro-FOSS projects move to a not-free-nor-open tool like GitHub. Do they think that they’ll get enough new contributors this way to offset the (more than slight) irony?

When we moved PHP to git we made sure we have our own infrastructure and keep our control there. Reality however is that people love doing "pull requests" on the GitHub mirror and use git.php.net only as push target.

Re: Apache Software Foundation joins GitHub open source community

#37

Post by TallGuyShort »

nevi-me wrote: post #16
atonse wrote: post #9

I found this title very confusing. I thought it was the equivalent of their non-profit being absorbed by GitHub. Meaning, the corporate structure." Why don't they just say that Apache will officially host their repositories on GitHub moving forward?

I agree, also find it confusing. I thought this meant moving from JIRA to GH, but I suppose this announces something that users and contributors of Apache projects wouldn't have thought of; that the was an active decision to move to GitHub. The move is confusing also because I thought Apache were migrating to their own git server, I think late last year or early this year.

They just finished migrating to Gitbox, but GitHub mirrors have been used for a long time and some projects have been using pull requests more in lieu of reviewing patches on JIRA.

Re: Apache Software Foundation joins GitHub open source community

#38

Post by brodock »

dijit wrote: post #23
batbomb wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, they've been using Jira forever. Usually when people say this they are referring to either Gitlab or Gitea. Well, it's not like all of Gitlab is fully open source, it's just Open Core, but I'm sure that's a sizable amount of the code, but I would imagine there's a decent chunk of gitlab.com source code that's proprietary (I'm sure somebody will quibble with this in a following comment, but the original argument…

> Well, it's not like all of Gitlab is fully open source. I think this is not a fair assessment, GitLabs community edition is fully open source and is a full product. The fact you can add proprietary elements for a licensing fee (which are also "open" in that they are readable, debuggable, etc;) is not at all the same as hosting on a platform which is entirely proprietary.

GitLab Community Edition is being used by major FOSS communities like Debian [1], GNOME [2] and Freedesktop [3].

[1]: https://salsa.debian.org/help [2]: https://gitlab.gnome.org/help [3]: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/help

While gitlab.com is based on the Enterprise Edition version, it's 100% possible to host into FOSS only if you wish.

Re: Apache Software Foundation joins GitHub open source community

#40

Post by jordigh »

ebg13 wrote: post #11
snazz wrote: post #8

It confuses me why so many traditionally pro-FOSS projects move to a not-free-nor-open tool like GitHub. Do they think that they’ll get enough new contributors this way to offset the (more than slight) irony?

> Do they think that they’ll get enough new contributors this way to offset the (more than slight) irony? Absolutely yes. In another thread, someone mentioned that MediaGoblin is basically dead now. I went to look at their repo and it's hosted on Savannah. That definitely hurts involvement.

I'm kind of cynical about this sort of thing and I don't think the hosting really changes the quality of contributions. The amount, maybe, but you get a lot of crappy drive-bys that are about one particular but very enthusiastic person's pet peeves, which probably don't affect the wider userbase. The drive-bys require a lot of work to integrate for relatively little profit.

Mediagoblin is dying not so much because it's on Savannah but because basically there are other things that got ActivityPub before it and could replace it (Pixelfed, Mastodon, Write Freely). Nobody really wants to work on Mediagoblin now because the alternatives are pretty much all better.

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