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Comment by geogra4 | Hacker News Reader

Is anyone else worried about the mass centralization of Open Source projects at one central point of failure on github?

especially since it's owned by an American company and I assume hosted within the United States

Not me. The fact that it's in git makes it easy to mirror and export, so I don't consider github to be a central point of failure. Issue tracking and PR handling lives in the github UI, but the significant change here is a change from Mercurial to Git, which I hold as a positive development.

Fundamentally git is a data storage format that is very well-defined, with a standard command-line interface which is fine, not great. Mercurial has an arguably better command-line interface, but a data structure that is not well-defined or documented, and the main interface to hg is through python-based plugins, which is just awful.

Agreed, if it were not for the nature of how git works I would then be a little worried.

You even see GitHub mirrors for got projects hosted privately, which is good.

If github went away, tons of projects would need to rework their workflow, but very few people would actually lose their code, which is the most expensive asset to restore.

It's definitely an improvement to figuring out which "Download" button on the Sourceforge page gets you the code rather than BonziBuddy.

It has its trade-offs I guess.

But I think people are forgetting what a nightmare it was before websites such as GitHub.

Just browsing the source of open source projects used to be a terrible experience. Let alone the issue trackers - Bugzilla!

I'll take unfortunate centralisation over source code browsing like https://hg.openjdk.java.net/jdk/jdk/ and pull requests like https://cr.openjdk.java.net/~ngasson/8251923/webrev.1/.

And the issue trackers, which is what most people complain about on GitHub, weren't distributed before, so we haven't lost anything there.

In some ways I think it’s a pity that none of the attempts to store issues in the git repo itself have taken off. It would be an interesting world where the state of a bug was tied to the state of the source.

not in git, but relevant: vcs with issue tracker built in. Fossil.

https://fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/index.wiki

Not really, since everybody who cloned a repo has a full copy of everything.

Reminds me of the saying that writing git was just a backup strategy for Linus Torvalds: FTP-mirrors were the first step to ensure that the kernel was never lost, git was needed to mirror the source-history as well.

Except all the proprietary lock-in tools they add to Git like the issue tracker, PR's, discussion, wiki, released binaries, container registry, access control settings, etc.

I think you mean Github, those features are not part of git.

That's what they said - 'add to Git'.

> proprietary lock-in tools they add to Git

Git + their other stuff = GitHub.

Of course the immediate parent meant GitHub. It is the grand-parent comment that conflated the two:

> one central point of failure on github?

>> Not really, since everybody who cloned a repo has a full copy of everything.

(everything != Git repo)

I am, pepperidge farm remembers and so do i a couple of years ago the US leveraged their power to block access to Iran and a couple of other countries afaik

Bandwidth is expensive, the only way you get hosting like this for free is that a company makes profits other ways. We cannot afford to self host.

Entirely depends on how much. Bandwidth is not very expensive, and once you're at-scale it goes to 0.

No bigger problem than someone is using software developed by an American company and hosted on platform of another company

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