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Comment by rglullis | Hacker News Reader

Forget Copilot for a second. Do you think it is healthy for the industry to be so dependent on one single service provider, and a closed one on top of that?

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There is gitlab, a decent alternative. Bitbucket is a (poor) option too. I think I would quibble with that dependency statement. Github is providing a lot of services, high availability, project tracking, a web api, etc...

The money model, as is for many free to FOSS tools is that by getting devs tooo use those tools, they'll carry forward to their professional lives and recommend the adoption by their companies. That does happen in practice, so it seems like the money model will not necessarily flip like it did for sourceforge (which kinda was garbage and the only game in town)

I would disagree about the industry dependency compared to FOSS. Many companies are not on github

So, that is to say the dependency aspect is a concern. So far Microsoft has overall been a steward for FOSS and copilot is not at all nearly enough to lose that trust. It is always a bit nerve wracking to place your balls in someone else's hands... and it was concerning when MSFT bought github.. but they have not been evil, not even close yet (in the grand picture)

You say BitBucket and Gitlab are alternatives, but at the same time you can not fathom the idea of migrating away from GitHub. So it's safe to say that GitHub has a de facto control of the market, much like Windows controlled the desktop market until early 2000's.

I can fathom a migration. It's just not pretty & is expensive. The experience coming out of source forge was not pleasant, and that was before the project even had a CI/CD. The early days of Github were game changers for FOSS, no more consolidating email patches together, etc.. So, this goes to whether Github still has a reputation and a brand for being a good home to FOSS. The argument that copilot, which automates what is otherwise an available and a manual process, and lifts just lines of code and small sections - is not at all "reproducing software". It's like someone used the "pad left" functionality from someones Javascript on their web page. Being able to do that is part of the point, it is a feature of openness, it's not a corporate back-door, market monopoly enabling flaw.

I'm curious if anyone can find references, though when I researched market share of code hosting companies a few years ago (for a private company that was moving off of BitBucket), it turned out that there were more private companies on Gitlab than Github. Github though had a big advantage for hosting FOSS. We wound up moving to Microsoft Azure because the scrum boards and Microsoft integration were appealing and familiar to the company. I don't see it being analagous as Windows desktop control in the early 2000's.

GitLab, with its runners is a more than a decent alternative, which you can also host yourself, with really minimal effort.

The last thing I want to do is host it myself.

It's a single package, which handles everything, end to end. Even you can add it to auto-update list, and it upgrades when you're sleeping.

So you provide the system, it hosts itself.

You don't need to. You can just pay gitlab, codeberg, sourcehut...

github...

As an alternative to github... one of these is not like the others.

In any case... why github? What is so unique about it that you can't even consider other possibilities? I guess soon people will be non-ironically saying "no one ever got fired for hosting their code at Github" and turn a blind eye to perfectly usable, open alternatives who does not lock us in.

For what? Fear of taking responsibility for maintaining the basic tools for their job? If that is the case, you can always pay for other smaller, independent companies who can host at competitive rates.

Anyway, you do you. I'm tired of playing Cassandra, and I'm tired of seeing people giving in to convenience and general conformity.

Gitea is really nice, too. That's what I personally prefer to use.

I think it's like any social network. It grows in value with how many people use it. Yes, you can host your own public git repo or even your own gitlab, but then there's a barrier of entry to contribute to your code, and it's a lot harder for others to discover it.

disclosure: I work for github

The network grows in value with the size of the protocol, not just with a platform. Social networks can and should operate like email, not like siloed platforms. All the value ends up being captured and controlled by one single entity.

(I will not get in a tangent about web3, but that is the one thing that web3 skeptics always fail to acknowledge is how the current web is broken in that regard. We were promised open protocols, and we end up with a handful of companies building their own walled gardens)

The only way that Github would get any modicum of credibility would be if they joined the effort from codeberg/forgefed and integrated with activitypub. As it is now, github will be nothing but a mirror for my repositories that I will be hosting on gitlab and/or my own gitea.

  > barrier of entry to contribute to your code

What barrier, may I ask ?

  > it's a lot harder for others to discover it.

The vast majority of stars I got was from a HN submission, not from organic discovery through GH search.

Familiarity with the UX and conventions on that platform. Almost everyone knows how to make a PR against a GitHub repo. But some random other code hosting site? It would be a lot less familiar, and people would have to spend time making an account and figuring out how to contribute.

Even low barriers of entry can cause a big drop in user engagement.

I don't think so.

If GitHub didn't provide value, then it wouldn't be where it's at. Considering that collaborating on FOSS before GitHub was a mess if you weren't technical, I'd say GH has earned their spot.

Also, there's no way to avoid centralization. At some point somewhere, you're relying a mega-corp for critical services, and if not you, someone else.

There's no getting away from it. Unless you're RMS, you're dependent on Microsoft or Apple. Just like your phones are dependent on Google or Apple. Is it a good thing? Nope, but it's real convenient and so most people will compromise.

> Unless you're RMS, you're dependent on Microsoft or Apple

No. Stopping believing this shit. It has never been easier to not depend on any of them.

There are good, perfectly usable phones with de-googled Android. You can buy laptops and desktops that run Linux without issues out of the box for years. You can even game on Linux today better than you can on an Apple box. You have legions of people working on different open source projects that make hosting your own server a matter of point-and-clicking.

It's not an Sisyphean job to keep yourself away from bad tech products. It takes some discipline, but so does anything worth doing.

And if you really just want to pay to get rid of any "headache", why not then pay for an open source alternative so you can be safe knowing you won't get locked in?

Owned by microsoft no less

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