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Comment by noobermin | Hacker News Reader

For important projects like this (libjpeg, libpng and others) it would make sense if there was sort of place to get all of them apart from mirrors.

What am I saying, that place[0] exists. Developers shouldn't have to shoulder the burden of hosting their code if they don't want to or don't wish to weather the expense. It certainly seems in this case they couldn't pay for self-hosting (or friend-hosting or whatever this is). I do suppose it is difficult to move development to a new system though(CVS to git).

[0] https://github.com/

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I'm no Stallman, but I'm deeply uncomfortable with how readily everyone is accepting (and encouraging) GitHub as the complete overlord of open-source software. As already pointed out, Sourceforge is a cautionary tale of how these services can go very wrong due to business issues. There's also a much larger philosophical issue with basing the open-source economy on a proprietary platform with no particular intent of open-sourcing its core software.

Yes, GH does a lot of things right, including generally making it easy to export data form their apps in a reasonably vendor-neutral form. But what happens when GH runs into financial trouble like SF did? Do we want just about every project out there to have to struggle to do something with their GitHub issues?

There are issues with having open-source projects maintain their own infrastructure, but I think it's the right thing to do wherever possible. It makes them truly independent in a way that a GitHub repo can never be.

Git is decentralized. GitHub provides free hosting for Git repositories. It's not like if GitHub dies tomorrow, you would lose all your source code.

You might lose a lot of metadata around it. The comment to which you're responding mentions issues, which along with pull requests would be a particular area of concern.

Would it be any different than say a redmine gets lost? Still, the coupling to GH is still a concern.

It ameliorates the problem by making sure you have your repo and history, yes; but, you do lose the means of distribution (host) which is a loss and I think is really what happened here with libtiff.

Github is a lot easier to migrate out of, come that day.

That place existed in the past, too: https://sf.net

The question is, can we trust an entity like that to remain trustworthy through decades? Turns out SF.net wasn't trustworthy through all of that time, even if they were in the beginning, and seem to be sincerely trying to be trustworthy again. So, if we put all of our eggs in one basket, we better be really confident of that basket. We could have lost every OSS project website, rather than just one, if an entity that we trust today becomes untrustworthy tomorrow.

GitHub will rot some day as well. (I think we're already seeing it start to decline.)

This is simply a permanent problem. Archive.org and to a lesser extent IPFS are viable solutions for archiving, but _contingency_ plans are I think the missing component here. Pray for the best but prepare for the worst.

You know, come to think of it, Archive.org is sorta kinda the right place to store these things. If they offered source code control they would both get the source as well as the path to the latest version all at once, which could be an invaluable historic record.

A git HTTP archive can be crawled and archived in principle. They might well be doing this already with github and elsewhere just through the normal course of their operation.

https://github.com/joeyh/github-backup

https://github.com/joeyh/github-backup/issues/6

Pertains only to Issues, not the git repo itself.

I don't think we're seeing a Github decline. Yes they've had some internal strife not all that connected to business, but Google just moved a lot of its OSS there, Microsoft just moved a bunch of stuff there. Git repos take a single command line statement to move, but Github is only slowing if by the force of not having much left to hoover up.

Gitlab et al are growing, and now AWS has its own integrated solution, but I don't see Github going anywhere for a very, very long time. (Barring catastrophic happenings, of course.)

The issues and pull requests associated with a repository on GitHub (and often referenced in commit messages) do not move along with the code though.

There is a new project, Software Heritage [0], that specifically addresses the problem of long-term code availability.

https://www.softwareheritage.org/

I won't use github for my own projects because I don't agree with their politics. (If you're ok with them, good for you. I won't stop you.)

Mandating github for everybody is a Bad Idea.

What do you disagree with?

I am receptive to this kind of argument, I am honestly curious for specifics.

Presumably the fact that they take down repositories that disagree with their politics (or the politics of other governments). They also don't appear to put up any fight against DMCA's, and they mandate that all users must run proprietary JavaScript. LibreJS makes the site mostly work though, so it's not that bad. The biggest problem is their policies, which are not pro-free-software (no matter what they might say).

That's irrelevant, really. Just that standardizing on a particular business for all repositories will never please everyone.

See if there's a better solution.

Github had a feminism mini-scandal a couple years ago: http://www.theverge.com/2014/3/15/5512462/github-developer-l...

That place should not be a company which is known for not fighting against DMCA requests, and requires that users run proprietary JavaScript. The best place would be the Internet Archive, hopefully running an FSF approved Git front-end (GitLab or GNU Savannah -- Gogs is probably also fine but they haven't reviewed it). Nothing else is acceptable if you actually want to make sure that code will truly outlive us.

> What am I saying, that place[0] exists

One day, this will have only existed. Until then, they should host the repository on Google Code.

Google Code is dead.

I'm assuming that's their point.

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