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Comment by jcoffland | Hacker News Reader

I think it's funny how kids these days think it's too hard to access the source code of a project of it's not on GitHub. Self hosting used to be how it was done. Open source software has been popular at least since the 80s. GitHub is just a baby really.

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What's also funny is how adults these days can so easily misconstrue a point, then blame imagined generational differences for their own failure.

that's not really got anything to do with how nethack development was 'closed'. Previously, while nethack releases were available under an open-source license, there were only a small number of developers which did not discuss nor release in-progress development publically.

Why are they obligated to? The software is still open source. Fork it if you want to.

They're clearly not obligated to do anything. And there were many forks, especially when the dev team went silent for about 12 years, and were basically presumed dead by some.

Services like github lower the barrier of entry to the OS development, and make things a lot easier. I think they provide a lot of value. Of course things were also possible without github earlier, but I think the barrier to open source development was higher.

GitHub is great but the barriers were never that high. It's like the difference between getting up to change the channel and using the remote. Once you've had the remote you feel like you cannot change the channel with out it.

You can also change more channels per second without moving your laptop and chips.

Already forgot about sourceforge?

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