So you want Github to open source where they put your git repo and issues? Who cares about that? It's unimportant because regardless they're still the central endpoint to many open source projects, opened or closed source. If you want open source use Gitlab or any other service that sprinkles extra features around git.
I'll never understand this outrage of dependence on Github when you have a distributed version control system. It's not like it should be on github to setup third party repositories for you.
Ofc, Github isn't to blame for this, rather the ones that thought Github would be great to use as a CDN.
Honestly if anyone is working on something important enough where they must be able to rebuild at a moment's notice then they should either be checking in dependencies from these package managers or setting up their own copies of what they need. But that's like backing up; most don't realize they needed to be doing that until they have an issue so I can understand the anger when Github does go down.
Rust program building, for example, seems to require that Github be up.
When I worry about dependency on GitHub, I'm thinking about not the inconvenient hours of downtime but the larger threat that they might disappear or turn evil.
What I would like to see even more than opensource github would be a standard for spreading over more services. For instance, syncing code, issues, pull requests, wiki, pages, etc between self-hosted gitlab and gitlab.com, or between gitlab.com and github.com. Further, I'd like to see it be easier to use common logins across services.
I don't think we can rely on Github giving us this, but if GitLab would add it between gitlab.com and gitlab ce, that would be a compelling reason to think of switching.
That said we probably don't need to solve it - we just need a way to keep read remotes online that's separate from any one server. The DHT git project was a good move in the right direction.
I don't think outages at GitHub are very frequent. This one was lengthy, so it's definitely been on a lot of peoples' minds, but this conversation always comes up when it happens.
But then the conversation stops within days because, the fact is, hosting your own git servers and getting people to actually use them is a huge pain in the ass. More simply put: people just like using GitHub.
Furthermore, GitHub's a business. They're selling private repositories. They do open source quite a bit of code, but they're not going to open source their actual product.
I just wanted to point that now that you guys are well stablished and have huge impact in the open source community, adopting a more open approach with your end users can be very beneficial for both, GitHub and the user base. I'm sure that lot of people would contribute to your codebase and thing like this: https://github.com/dear-github/dear-github would be less frequent and notorious.
But if the enterprise edition is really the source of income, open sourcing it doesn't have any sense. I agree on that. Maybe, another way to be more open to contributions from the community ? I dunno
Given that this is the case, I fell like GitHub is entrenched enough that they could open source their codebase and not lose any customers. People are paying them for the convenience of someone else hosting their git repository.
But yes, most of us are most comfortable with the central repository model.
I don't think outages at GitHub are very frequent
What would you rather have? A dependency on a bunch of projects with variable hosting of whatever means or all your dependencies hosted with the uptime of GitHub? Having an install fail because some host is down somewhere deep in your nest of dependencies is going happen a lot more if you have more hosts to worry about.