A new free-software forge: sr.ht | Hacker News Reader

A new free-software forge: sr.ht

lwn.net

83 pointsl2dy35 comments

Previous discussion two months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18458908

There was a comment here that was seemingly downvoted or flagged into oblivion, but I think it raised a valid point about the domain name and TLD of sr.ht being a possible issue that could limit its potential growth.

As a paid subscriber and with all due respect to Drew, and as someone with a lot of experience with branding, I think it's a terrible name. It's not only not obvious how to pronounce it, but when you don't know how to pronounce it there's no real possibility of fumbling your way through it. It looks completely unpronounceable, until, of course, you add invisible vowels.

Worse, it's not particularly memorable.

All that said, developers tend to be more accepting (but not forgiving!) about weird names and unusual TLDs. So maybe it won't be an issue for sr.ht, no one can say with certainty. But if it were my project I would try to ensure I don't handicap myself from the start.

For what it's worth, I've been a paid subscriber for a few months and never really thought of this. I actually like the name, since it is such a short TLD. Not saying you're wrong though. I'm not sure how I'd pronounce it in conversation, and that might be a drawback to future growth.

I can't recall where I came across it before, but I do remember the name being discussed and some principal / authority saying "sir hat" was the intended pronunciation.

Probably in the original announcement[0], or maybe in the HN thread

[0]: https://drewdevault.com/2018/11/15/sr.ht-general-availabilit...

It's in the announcement blog post of sr.ht: https://drewdevault.com/2018/11/15/sr.ht-general-availabilit... (pronounced “sir hat”, or any other way you want), also quoted in the LWN.net article.

Honestly, the first time I read it like "sh*t". And knowing my colleagues, this kind of nickname can stick for a long time.

Edit: thinking about it, it could actually make it famous.

"shirt", "short", "shart"... which could become a memorable nickname?

I do not know what invisible vowels I could add to make me remember this.

"sir hat"

Yeah, I agree it sucks. I like the short URLs, though. I own sourcehut.org and will likely be using it to find a happy medium soon.

Is that what sr.ht stood for? Source Hut? If so, that's pretty cool :)

There's officially no official way of pronouncing sr.ht. "sir hat" is also common.

Ah, okay. Well a good compromise might be to go towards Source Hut. I like the name, and sr.ht still works for it. You could also pick up src.ht, which would probably be clearer, and still a short TLD.

Nice idea, I really like that.

You could definitely make a cute logo as well. Maybe a thatched hut with a computer screen inside, and "> SR HT" in a terminal-looking font or something like that.

Always thought it stands for "Sir Hat", because of your HN username :).

They should use a name that's straightforward to pronounce, like "PostgreSQL".

Or what about LWN or YCombinator? Both of those are pretty simple to memorize.

PostgreSQL is pronounced "post gress."

A lot of these TLDs make me nervous because it feels like suddenly Haiti could want more control and start changing rules. Or am I wrong?

Thanks to Jake for writing about sr.ht, and to l2dy for submitting it! You might have seen yesterday that I'm going to be working on this (and other open source projects) full-time from now on:

https://drewdevault.com/2019/01/15/Im-doing-FOSS-full-time.h...

Big thanks to the HN community for helping to make it possible!

Looks like a pretty solid place for software project management, not that I know too much about it.

Very interesting project.

Also, they have some pretty hard rules around emails, e.g. no HTML (only plaintext).

> HTML emails are rejected by all sr.ht services.

https://man.sr.ht/lists.sr.ht/etiquette.md

I'm not sure why this is flagged as a dupe. The previous post announced the launch of the service. This post is a review of the service.

This is pretty neat, where do you see yourself positioning among other CI tools?

Thanks! Here are some things people like about builds.sr.ht:

The Zig programming language uses it because it's the only CI with FreeBSD support. Several other users tell a similar story.

PostmarketOS uses it because it has a great API which they've built a custom integration around - you can use it more like a CI engine than a full-stack CI if you want something which really molds onto your use-case. I hear Arch Linux has similar thoughts...

And last night, I overheard some praise for it in the #sr.ht IRC channel on Freenode:

    <jpsamaroo> just want to say, builds.sr.ht being fast and reliable and easy
      has made me actually enjoy writing tests and CI build scripts for once
    <ireas> +1 and being able to test build scripts before adding them to a
      repo is *so* great
    <jackdk> hear hear. I even CI'd a dead project because it was so easy.

Yikes, Affero GPLv3... I guess that bans it for many non-personal uses.

Arguably this is the ideal case for AGPL

For AGPL maybe, but for people in general? I'm not so sure.

Why? My understanding of AGPL is that you only need to publish changes if you modify the project and open it up to the internet. A company could self host sr.ht internally, and they wouldn't have to open source anything. A company could also take sr.ht, provide it as a service, and charge for maintenance. AGPL would stop a company from taking sr.ht, changing it, hosting it as a service, and refusing to publish the changes. That's my understanding of the license anyway.

That is indeed what it does, and as such also bans partial contribution. Most of the models I've seen where time and money is spent on FOSS contributions are the kind where not all changes are upstreamed because they are kept internal or secret.

Say for example GitLab was AGPL, their model of having a Community Edition and an Enterprise Edition would no longer be possible, because the EE directly links to and consumes software from the CE code.

Having a EE and CE version of a product is one of the few remaining models that still enable fruitful enterprise and FOSS combinations. The support-only or maintenance-only models are very rarely successful. The former isn't possible with the AGPL and the latter is, but is simply bound to so much risk and so few successes that it's basically bleeding to death or an existing enterprise, with nothing in between.

Right, and to add on that this is really the perfect case for AGPL in that the company isn't a rocket-ship trajectory startup or anything, it's a single developer who maintains it as a side project and aims to bootstrap & operate at a profit (I think he recently transitioned to working on FOSS full-time so technically not a side project anymore).

In other words, the risk is closer to the risk of a side project failing than the risk of a giant corporation failing, and the need for flexibility to pivot to different funding models is lower or nonexistent. There's no venture capitalists to appease.

Presumably, if the founder decided he could only profitably run sr.ht by turning it into "open core" like gitlab or proprietary like github, he would have simply given up the project.

While in it's current incarnation it might indeed be a good case, I wonder why it must also exclude all future options right at the start. I don't think AGPL is inherently bad, but for projects of this kind it seems a bit future-limiting.

> Having a EE and CE version of a product is one of the few remaining models that still enable fruitful enterprise and FOSS combinations. The support-only or maintenance-only models are very rarely successful.

There's also the dual-licensing model, where non-free licenses can be purchased which allow things that the FOSS license doesn't, like non/partial-contribution. AGPL seems even better suited to this than GPL, precisely because many companies would rather purchase such a license than expose the custom elements of their network services. IIRC that's precisely why Affero came up with this license for their software (in collaboration with the FSF, to ensure GPL compatability).

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