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Comment by BjoernKW | Hacker News Reader

Ironically, GitHub is a prime example of why centralisation is harmful. If GitHub suddenly disappeared tomorrow (or even just went offline for a few hours), many software build processes in the world would grind to a halt. Sure, because Git is a decentralised protocol eventually it'd all be brought back up again but it'd cause a major disruption and at the very least create enormous costs.

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I would disagree with that. Github shows a lot of the benefits of centralization, where they get network effects from forks and pull requests when these do not have to cross git server boundaries.

Using external services in your build process has little to do with centralization. People that do not realize that having an external dependency in there is bad, will also not realize that having two or more of them is bad. That does not mean that you are not allowed to sync stuff in from github, but your release should be buildable without internet connection from local data.

You could easily move tomorrow to another git based service. The only stuff missing would be issue management.

And your wiki, and all links leading to your project and all tooling you've built around.

No idea about the other things, but the wiki is just an additional git repo that you can check out like any other one.

And then you still need the infrastructure to run it on a site where contributors already have an account or don't mind the extra burden of registration.

People moved away from sf fast enough im pretty sure the same thing would occur if things turn sour for github.

Many rely on Github for more than source control hosting and issues. It's really not a non-issue.

I would like to have some basic issue tracking in git like in fossil (www.fossil-scm.org if you don't know, by the creator of sqlite). It's a shame that git has eclipsed all other options.

You can use distributed bug trackers with git, like https://github.com/tst2005/nitpick or http://www.bugseverywhere.org

Care to elaborate ?

There are a lot of projects that use github-pages for hosting the main site and documentation, as well as fairly tight links with continuous integration/release pipelines.

I don't necessarily think this is a bad thing, but it is a valid concern.

Except there are a lot of OSS and side projects hosted on github. It will take a long time for these to find their backups and move to another service. And some will lose source code due to faulty or outdated backups.

When you do a git clone you should always have a copy of the whole git on your dev computer so I am not sure why they would have to look for their backups.

A an enterprise Github subscriber, we would lose user authentication and authorization.

Fair enough but dont other github alternatives provide that?

Or if GitHub became Sourceforge.

Didn't GitHub jump the shark already after that notorious faux diversity presentation?

Not really, SourceForge bundled adware with downloads which effected all end users, GitHub did some daft presentation that had zero impact on anyone who didn't see it and not much on those of us who did.

Did it have zero impact? I wonder if white men at GitHub have the same promotion opportunities; I wonder if they face subtle forms of discrimination in the workplace.

I am certain that some white men don't even bother applying there, because they don't wish to handle a prejudicial environment.

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