Comment by longrod | Hacker News Reader

Comment by longrod | Hacker News Reader

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I find it very strange that the same HN crowd that loves open source and wouldn't touch anything proprietary with a 10 foot pole has so many reservations against moving off of GitHub. I am not generalizing here, just surprised. According to what I have seen in my short experience, HN should have ditched GitHub long since.

Anyway...

I have always been curious as to why the largest hosting for OSS isn't open source itself. Maybe I am not intelligent enough to realize the reasoning behind this. Imagine if git wasn't open source! That's like an OS that only runs open source software but isn't open source itself. It just doesn't make sense for people to trust such an obviously flawed service...and yet they do.

And if that wasn't enough when GitHub got acquired by Microsoft very few people thought it amiss. Indeed, even now a lot of people are happy that Microsoft is running their digital homes. I think if GitHub was measured on the FOSS scale it would fall short on every measure.

Co-pilot isn't even that big of a deal. That's just the icing on the top. GitHub is untrustworthy top-to-bottom even before there was Co-pilot.

But I suppose convenience always trumps openness and freedom. It's especially sad because the whole point behind FOSS was this. Is the whole FOSS idea getting old?

The worst thing is that GitHub has monopolized the open source world. We can't even think of moving off of GitHub because of what we'll lose. But how about we do this:

We create a dummy repo on GitHub for our project that has all the fancy README, releases, issues, actions etc. but we keep the actual code out of GitHub on an open source service. Would that work? Is that feasible?

Basically, we use GitHub's wide adoption for what it's meant to be used: to market/share your project but keep the source code on a separate platform. This would create a new host of problems but I think it can actually work.

As a strong Free Software supporter on HN that uses Github I'll take a shot.

I use Github to publicly host my projects. I use github as I want them as public as possible and that is where all the people are.. I.E. it has the lowest friction for others. The tradeoff is a bit of extra work on yourself to make sure you keep the 'git' part of your repo the central thing. Use the hosting as extras appropriately, but don't rely on them. All relevant context, reasoning, etc. needs to be in the git commit messages. The git repo should stand alone and tell the complete story.

IMO following this simple rule you can keep your project git repo whereever is easiest for the users without lockin. Github's added features over basic git hosting are decent but none of them are irreplaceable if you keep your repo up properly.

Hosting your projects on Github is not an issue. The issue is hosting your projects only on Github, or depending on it for anything other than visibility.

I have my own gitea for private projects, but the open source one I host primarily on Gitlab. It's where I set up the CI, it's where I have pages, docs, etc. I do have a mirror on Github, but on the "Contributing" section from the README I make it clear where I prefer to receive PRs.

My primary hosting for all my personal projects in my laptop. Github is the mirror of my local git repo.

If you are not expecting other people to collaborate with you and if you do the same local hosting for your CI and issue tracking, etc... Fine, I guess?

I only worry about collaboration via github. I don't need an issue tracker or CI on my local repo. Github issues and PRs are discussions, not records. That's the point of the self contained repo commit messages.

You seem to be under the impression that OP was criticizing your approach. Your usage of Github is not representative of the majority of cases. You are only in Github for visibility, and the commit history/repo hosting are already distributed, which is fine. You can move away at any time.

What OP was criticizing was these larger FOSS projects who don't seem to mind that they are doing all their work on a closed platform, and that they have a lot to lose if Github decides to pull the rug from under them.

I went off a bit into more personal cases in the thread. But my original post was aimed at other/larger projects. If they maintained a proper git repo and used the platform tools as secondary tools (eg. discussion oriented instead of record oriented) then they wouldn't be locked into Github. I agree that a bunch of ones don't do it correctly and put the context that should be in the repo/messages into the PRs or issues. That is a mistake. But switching from Github won't help that... they'll just do the same thing elsewhere and lock themselves into that site or tool (ie. lockin doesn't require a service, just tools that do more than manage the repo).

> But I suppose convenience always trumps openness and freedom. It's especially sad because the whole point behind FOSS was this. Is the whole FOSS idea getting old?

It seems so---I read the post above saying essentially "I don't care about any of this criticism, I'm going to keep using GitHub because switching would cause too much churn" and did a double-take.

I get the impression that people no longer understand what it is to boycott something.

The whole point is to punish the boycottee which may cause inconvenience. Much easier to dogpile on twitter I suppose.

I can’t really think of a universally sustained boycott since South African apartheid to be honest. Even the current Russian stuff is too inconvenient for the majority of the world so they keep buying their oil and gas.

> and wouldn't touch anything proprietary with a 10 foot pole

Consider Macbooks...

The problem with a lot of other proprietary platforms is that you don't own your data, so it's not easy to migrate to something else. With git, it's trivial to `git push` to a different platform if you decide to move off of GitHub. And you can at least get your issues out via the API. I think for this reason, as well as network effects, is why many people here are more accepting of GitHub over other proprietary platforms.

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