There are countless web frontends[^1] to expose a git tree on the internet, without the community/social aspect of github.
[^1]: https://git.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Interfaces,_frontends,...
I posted it on Freecycle, and found someone who was interested within a day or so. But, in communicating with them, it turned out they didn't just want a free calculator. They wanted me to drive an hour out of town to drop it off at their house, and to spend time teaching them how to use it, and to share my phone number so that they could call me if they had any questions. And, when I tried to set some boundaries and say, "Look, I'm just giving away a calculator, that is all," they started getting abusive.
When I put stuff up on GitHub, it's like that. I'm just trying to share some code. I'm really not interested in doing much beyond that, and I'm definitely not interested in people assuming that, just because I've decided to share some code, I'm also giving away product and project management services, or training, or anything like that.
You get to feel better about not creating waste and helping someone else -- if that was worth nothing to you, you'd throw it away. They get a calculator at the expense of having to deal with a human, coordinate details and potentially troubleshoot a device that may not be in perfect condition. In that sense you've reached a market price for the transaction. The person on the other end is just trying to negotiate a better deal for themselves after you thought the agreement was already done. Being aggressive can be very effective because avoiding conflict is also pretty valuable for a lot of people.
The fundamental issue seems twofold:
1) that a more fragmented society results in more transactional thinking versus feeling like we're all on the same team.
2) we're in an increasingly disposable society where the cost of second hand goods can be higher than new items, depending on how valuable your time is (again, if the calculator malfunctioned they might spend a few hours troubleshooting at greater opportunity cost than the price of a new one).
Evidence: I ultimately did get rid of the calculator, by selling it for $1. It's the same trick that many of my acquaintances have set on. Any transfer of cash at all seems to eliminate this kind of behavior.
If it were really just about rational economic agents trying to negotiate a better deal, then you would expect the opposite. The person, having now given money in exchange for the item, would expect to get even more in return.
“Economic man” was a 19th century concept, where philosophers dreamt of a society where everything was broken into transactions and property. This is still the dream of some libertarians, and is one of the delusions that made the US so economically successful for so long in spite of its social and environmental costs.
However, we are an increasingly interconnected world, isolated disposable transactions certainly still happen at scale, but I see a lot of evidence this is being curtailed.
An interesting observation: most successful enterprise software companies have a large portion of their sales as “not” transactional, and these tend to have the highest repeatable revenue streams.
Consumers are also incredibly studying how the organization would use a contribution. Who they politically donate to, etc. Vs, just letting price and features dictate a purchase decision.
Putting the code on Github also makes the project easier to discover and makes the source code easy to navigate.
Finally, note that the author of this post still welcomes bug reports and feature requests.
Seriously, that progress bar is hiding the read problem here: some timeout of a 50X error or something. We --GH users-- are devs! We know that your hiding this, it's not very respectful I think.
Oh, and, we pay for GH.
I think because having a project on github aids discoverability. Also, the project mentions that they would stop accepting pull requests, not that there would be no interaction with users whatsoever. Quite the contrary, it is stated that the author is thankful for bug reports and feature requests. Having the issue tracker is still of importance then.
I didn't study your cited list extensively but it looks like a list of tools instead of free repo hosting. E.g. Gitweb and WebGitNet are not analogous to "github.com".
Most devs are not interested in self-hosting a git repo so looking at a list of web frontends for git isn't solving the problem.
>, without the community/social aspect of github.
There are at least 3 categories of social interactions on github:
+ Issues
- PRs
+ Discussions
... and for the repo of this particular thread, the developer is still using +Issues and +Discussions. He just wants to opt out of PRs for the reasons stated in README.md.
I mean, the _old_ way of sharing source code was to upload it to an FTP mirror, and then once the Internet got "modern," a personal website. GitHub is not the only way to get a project on the Internet, it's just the most popular way at the moment.
The fact GitHub itself has become one of the easiest ways to setup a personal website says a lot about the availability of good, free, managed static hosting without ads.
(2) The maintainer _wants_ the community/social aspects like Issues and Discussions. They just don't want code contributions. Of course, one can run their own bug tracker and forum... but... see (1).
(3) GitHub has been branding itself as more and more of a package manager too (and in many areas it has become the de-facto one). Placing things on Github v.s. self hosting can also be seen as an SEO/advertising move for an FOSS project.
Plus at the end of the day you still need to host the repo itself somewhere (not just the web UI), which means you will need a hosted place you can write to via Git's push mechanisms... It's not impossible but finding free managed hosting for this seems nontrivial too.
Github does a great job of indexing your content on Google.
Also, the fact that the code is hosted on Github is, for me personally, a good indication that the code is probably valid. I have never, so far, pulled a package which source code was not on Github.
The discoverability I admit. Authority is debatable.
> Github does a great job of indexing your content on Google.
Really? Every single time I compare search inside github vs outside (google, ddg, anything), the difference is massive towards more and better results from github itself.
Github provides a number of things:
Git hosting Collaboration with your team Community collaboration CI Issue tracking
It is reasonable to still want most of these and not want one.
2. The code part of github (a git tree on a webpage) isn't even the key functionality. It's PR's, CI. You may accept feature requests and bug requests but still not want PR's.
3. Having collaborative development with a small team of e.g. 2 people means internal pull requests, reviews, discussions etc are important (and could still be useful to see or contribute to by external users), so taking away PR's isn't the same as going under ground with the project.
4. GitHub is a well known site, people will find your project there.