Free Software Needs Free Tools (2010) | Hacker News Reader

Free Software Needs Free Tools (2010)

mako.cc

86 pointsbcaa7f3a8bbc9 comments

In practice it's more than "ends-justify-the-means", it's a matter of how much time free software developers have and what they want to spend time on. For every alternative tools to github, CI, test grid, audit tools, etc. you have to factor in the cost of installation, maintenance and update. It's just not realistic to expect free software developers to take on extra work and/or financial investment. The author instead of calling people hypocrites should shift the discussion to finding creative solutions to foot the bill.

>you have to factor in the cost of installation, maintenance and update.

That number is about 10 minutes a month with a one-time setup of an afternoon, seriously. I've been running my own gitlab for about 2 years. Whenever my letsencrypt certicate warnings arrive, I go update them and then do a full update sweep on the OS.

I could also automate half of that by setting up automated OS updates, but the time spent administering the system is so low it hardly matters.

That may be true for gitlab, but it's not the case for all the development tools. Like good luck running a selenium grid with 10min of maintenance per month.

Just because there are hard things out there doesn't mean you should give in on the easy things.

Why cook your own meals at home? After all, dumplings are a pain to make so why bother cooking anything? Just eat takeaway all day, we can all agree that's the sensible reaction to the existence of dumpings, right?

Oh wait, that's stupid reasoning. Do what you feel is best with your highly domain specific selenium issue, but for goodness sake, keep control of your own source code while you do it. /That/ part is easy as.

No one is asking you to host it yourself. Gitlab is open source and they provide the service as well for those that don't want to manage it.

Gitlab CE is open source, but Gitlab EE is not. EE does have some features that CE is lacking.

> Gitlab is open source and they provide the service as well for those that don't want to manage it.

Not all of the features you would use on the hosted gitlab.com are available in the open-source edition. Those are really two different products: https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/self-hosted/feature-compari....

Author's Speech: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_nK6nP_RCY

Perhaps Microsoft will open source parts of GitHub?

What better way to demonstrate a commitment to the OSS community?

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