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Comment by bravogamma | Hacker News Reader

Questions for whoever was involved with this decision or might know:

Why was Sourcehut chosen? Any specific appealing features?

Any alternatives considered?

The fact that it's not intended to be a free service (only free during alpha [1]) is a non-starter. Asking people to change their workflow is bad enough, asking them to stop getting it for free is a joke.

[1]: https://sourcehut.org/pricing/

If you don't pay, someone else will. GitHub is funded by private investors demanding a return, which incentivizes behavior like repurposing your code to facilitate mass license infringement. SourceHut is entirely funded by its users and is therefore only accountable to their needs.

SourceHut's fees are very cheap ($2/mo) and users who cannot pay for any reason are offered free service.

If you will only use services that you don't need to pay for, that's your choice, but you should respect the choices of others who consider these incentives and their outcomes more important.

This is the tragedy of the commons all over again, and all of us in the open source space know very well how that goes.

I agree with you that the world where open source code is not hosted by private companies is a better one. However if our plan is to rely on the already-insufficiently-supported/rewarded maintainers changing their workflow, changing tools, and paying their own money (however low), we won't get there.

Just like I think a world where all important software is open source is a better one. To get there, we just need corporations to give maintainers some of their own money. We are not getting there.

We think the workflow is better, and no one was born knowing how to use GitHub, either. SourceHut is very affordable and the price is well worth the cost. If you want FOSS to be sustainable, FOSS platforms have to be sustainable, too.

SourceHut is a corporation that donates to FOSS projects, by the way. We sponsor many projects and we're planning on building more tools to get maintainers paid for their work.

Again, I am not saying this isn't the right way or that you are doing anything wrong. I just think that if we are asking people giving away their code for free to do a migration and learn another tool for the greater good, for free, and before that they also have to put in their credit card number and pay their own money... people won't do that, righteous as it may be.

A call for action is all the more effective if that action is easy. The Software Freedom Conservancy's call has a lot of background but if the proposed action is "host it yourself" or "pay money for SourceHut", I worry that we will not move forward.

I'm not sure that we'll be moving forward if we're not willing to answer to the fact that our indulgence in free services is putting our freedoms in jeopardy. What use is it if you jump ship from GitHub to another service which is letting investors foot your bill? It'll just be the same story in a few years. SourceHut is designed for long-term sustainability and an ethical operating model.

If you feel differently, perhaps Codeberg is for you instead? SFC recommends them as well and I am just as happy to see projects move there as I am to see them on SourceHut -- we're a paying (but non-voting) member of Codeberg ourselves. Diversity is healthy for the ecosystem, but the proprietary platforms ought to be expelled.

Why do you pay Codeberg and what is your role with them?

We use them to host our status page on independent infrastructure:

https://codeberg.org/ddevault/pages

We started paying as soon as we started relying on them for this purpose. We pay one euro short of the minimum contribution for voting rights, to support them while respecting their independence. Codeberg is doing wonderful work that we (and the community at large) are depending on and we're prepared to support that without hesitation. Diversity is good for FOSS.

> Codeberg is doing wonderful work

how are they different, or better, than any other floss instance (disroot, framagit, gitgud, savannah, NotABug, pagure, etc)?

They're backed by a member-owned organization, are in good financial standing for the long term, and it is run by good people that I trust. The others may be good as well but I think that Codeberg has really got it nailed.

> I'm not sure that we'll be moving forward if

I totally agree with you! This is why I think we will not be moving forward, with things as they are.

> people won't do that, righteous as it may be

On the contrary, it means only people that really want to be on Sourcehut will do so.

Which is probably for the best, certainly while it’s still in an alpha state.

Slow and steady wins the race.

Again, not talking about SourceHut but the give-up-GitHub movement.

Only having a few committed users join SourceHut is great for SourceHut. Having only a few committed users leave GitHub is not great for GiveUpGitHub.

The others can go to Codeberg, Notabug, etc.

If a user stops paying (excepting free service for those unable to pay), will their repositories be deleted? My main concern is link rot: if a project was created on GitHub in 2012, links to it will almost certainly point to the same code today, even if the owner has long forgotten about it, so long as they haven't actively deleted their account. I've found that the same is rarely true for bespoke self-hosted Git servers. Many disappear within 3 years or less, without any redirects to a new location; I've had to copy many of these repos to my GitHub account from a local copy. So how worried do I need to be about the longevity of sr.ht links?

We will place your account into a read-only mode following a grace period if you don't pay up. I hate link rot and I have no intention of contributing to it with SourceHut.

Don’t you lose more transaction fees on $2 month than you actually receive from it?

No. Our transaction fees are 2.9% + 30c, the standard rate for Stripe. So we make $1.64 from the $2/mo plan.

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