41–50 of 119 posts
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.
Seriously, I like the idea. It will give visibility for who contribute and might bring some new contributors.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What does "punished socially" even mean? Unable to attract as many contributors? The cold reality is that most open source projects aren't really TRYING to attract contributors. Small-time hobbyists often don't want to play with others in their personal project sandboxes, and big-time projects with high profile usually put up high barriers to contribution. Unable to attract as many end-users, or as much public mindsh…
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…
Some of these replies are pivoting to talk instead about the fate of abandoned projects on SourceForge. That's a great discussion, but is a DIFFERENT discussion. The parent comment talked about consequences that reduce engagement with active projects. By definition that becomes irrelevant when the projects are inactive and long abandoned.
Anyway, nothing in this lengthy post is really all that compelling. Developers didn't shift from SourceForge to GitHub because SourceForce became shady. The timeline was the other way around, SourceForce became shady because everyone left. That initial shift happened because tastes changed, people legitimately preferred what GitHub was doing interface-wise... and once a critical mass has moved, it pulls everyone else who wants the social advantages of being in the popular destination.
If GitHub turned evil (or worse yet... "uncool"), then I just don't see the migration pain you're talking about. Pushing a git repo to a new remote is trivial. Learning a new issue tracker ticket system takes about 10 minutes (they all work basically the same), and SOMEONE will write a script to automatically migrate GitHub issues to the new thing. Wiki content? Sheesh... it's just Markdown.
The biggest risk is that you've used your GitHub URL as your exclusive web presence, rather than spending $10/yr on a real domain name. But if you've made that mistake, then you'll probably make the same mistake with ANY solution that isn't self-hosted.
By all means, host your own personal open source projects wherever you like. But telling everyone else to stop doing what everyone else is doing, on the basis of some Richard Stallman-esque principles that don't hold water, seems like a waste of time and energy.
this is pretty significant; so far the only git presence of Python was a "semi-official readonly mirror" on github: https://github.com/python/cpython now does this mean that Python will completely switch away from Mercurial? this was one of the major projects still using hg what does this mean for mercurial's global adoption vs git? also, i don't understand why the free software aspect of gitlab wasn't an important a…
this is pretty significant; so far the only git presence of Python was a "semi-official readonly mirror" on github: https://github.com/python/cpython now does this mean that Python will completely switch away from Mercurial? this was one of the major projects still using hg what does this mean for mercurial's global adoption vs git? also, i don't understand why the free software aspect of gitlab wasn't an important a…
Mozilla, Octave, and Hedgewars are a few remaining projects that still use hg. For them, I will continue to improve, promote, and use Mercurial.
Their reasoning for using Github have nothing to do with the technical merits of git or hg or with the freedom of the software or platform. They want more contributions and they figure using the popular platform is the way to obtain them.
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.
I'm not sure why it's a problem though. If they decide to go down that path, it's not that hard to move off. They don't have the lock-in that would scare me like having terabytes of data in an oracle database.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What does "punished socially" even mean? Unable to attract as many contributors? The cold reality is that most open source projects aren't really TRYING to attract contributors. Small-time hobbyists often don't want to play with others in their personal project sandboxes, and big-time projects with high profile usually put up high barriers to contribution. Unable to attract as many end-users, or as much public mindsh…
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…
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, and you can host your own Wikipedia mirror with exactly the same software setup, and in fact a lot of people have done so, but mantaining your own fork/mirror of a project on this scale is a lot of work. Unless you have unlimited free time (you don't) 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.
Platform choice is ultimately an economical decision. Github has significant incentives not to "go rogue", i.e. they don't want to shoot themselves in the foot. They currently provide very significant value to the community, and are in a very comfortable position, but that could change really fast if they take the Source forge route.
While the more code that gets open sourced the merrier, I personally don't believe open sourcing Github would, at this point, bring a lot into the table, especially since gitlab is so fully featured already. Their secret sauce isn't really the software, but the service they provide.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure why it's a problem though. If they decide to go down that path, it's not that hard to move off. They don't have the lock-in that would scare me like having terabytes of data in an oracle database.
There are some things you simply can't do on GitHub: * block trolls from interacting with an organization, short of filing a support ticket * install pre-receive hooks without using the pull request infrastructure * set up status checks (the PR equivalent of pre-receive hooks) for pull requests that require force pushes, allowing some external check to replace git's usual fast-forward check * have status checks apply…
That would be one hell of an open source project: a github like UI + ticketing system but federated rather than hosted by a central authority with some kind of single sign-on mechanism.
Earlier 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…
My question was what it means for an open-source project to be "socially punished" by not hosting on GitHub. My conclusion is that it doesn't mean much of anything in terms of actual software development, and only matters in terms of P.R. and marketing. Some of these replies are pivoting to talk instead about the fate of abandoned projects on SourceForge. That's a great discussion, but is a DIFFERENT discussion. The…
If those pages were to disappear or if the decision was made to become less benign then the damage would be substantial and it would take many years to heal the rift.
The web never really recovered from Yahoo's bad stewardship of Geocities (untold backlinks broke, including many from Wikipedia causing those links to point to nothing which led to articles becoming unsourced, or -worse- being changed by bots to point to linkfarms instead).
If github turned evil the migration pain would make the Geocities demise look like a veritable walk in the park.