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Comment by jraph | Hacker News Reader

Sure, let's lock the open source community in GitHub, a private company owned by Microsoft (who loves open source as long as it's not for its flagship products), even more. We need this. The open source community isn't already too locked in as is.

GitHub perpetually seems to praise open source developers and community but can't seem to want to put their actions where their words are by making their flagship product open source.

It's cool as long as it's not us.

I'm sick of this hypocrisy.

Of course they should propose such a private space. They'd be stupid not to. But don't be dumb yourself and stay out of this prison.

I'm done ranting. Happy day everybody.

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I’m a full time open source maintainer/dev, and I have no particular gripe with GitHub or Microsoft’s management of it. That’s it, I’m not ranting. Cheers to you too though!

This "lock-in" you are speaking of is "building useful things that people voluntarily want to use, who then need these things so much that they don't want to leave".

Okay it's within your rights to define lock-in this way. But it seems odd to me to blame Github for this. The reason why switching costs are high is because alternatives aren't as good.

What do you want Github to do? Stop buding useful things so that they're not better than alternatives?

There was a time (before acquisition by MS) that Github was exactly like that. Gitlab was threathening to eat its lunch. But I can't say that those were better times.

Lock-in is if the amount of work you need to put in to transfer your stuff to $competitor is big when you want to leave.

When there is one company that maintains a rooms media tech rack with media switchers and DSPs of another company that only provides access to "certified" companies and the first company sits on the source code they programmed for you, so you have to run to them with any slight change of the system you use, because you neither own the source code, nor do you have access to the softwar used to program the devices, that is lock-in.

Yeah you could swap out that media switcher with one from a more open company, but then you'd have to swap out 50k€ of other gear, that is "compatible" to that switcher (and to nothing else).

I am sure github is making it totally easy to migrate all of what you do on their platform to e.g. gitlab. /s

One way to reduce switching cost is by not making use of much of the value provided by $CURRENT_VENDOR. For example you can treat AWS as merely a virtual machine and object storage provider, and not making use of their managed databases, AI services, message queues, etc. When you need those latter things, you build them yourself on top of virtual machines and object storage.

But of course, most people take one look at this calculation and decide that it's not worth it to build so much things yourself just so that you can easily switch to another cloud provider. They rightly view it as a waste of time. I've seen many companies who had the aspiration to be "multi-cloud" from the beginning and being able to switch to another provider with ease, and every time this aspiration fails due to business pressures. There's always something more important to do than building your own cloud-agnostic database orchestration system, or your own cloud-agnostic message queue.

You're complaining that Github provides features. Yes making use of those features lock you in in the sense that it makes switching to another provider harder. But the world is not better when Github doesn't provide those features at all.

> voluntarily want to use

No. As an open source user, developer and maintainer, I'm in perpetuity forced to use GitHub because open source companies and projects choose GitHub because they believe GitHub is the place to be / they won't have a community if they are elsewhere (even if they'd otherwise be inclined to use something else). Which I believe is false, but it does not matter, GitHub succeeded in creating this social network with this network effect.

> What do you want Github to do? Stop buding useful things so that they're not better than alternatives?

I want open source infrastructure for the open source world [1].

GitHub could put their actions where their mouth is and be and actually open source company.

[1] https://drewdevault.com/2022/03/29/free-software-free-infras...

> I'm in perpetuity forced to use GitHub because open source companies and projects choose

Frankly, calling this "forced" comes over to me as a selfish and entitled view of "freedom". Freedom is not unlimited or without conflict. Someone else's freedom to park at a spot means that you can't park there. Someone else's freedom to choose Github means that you can't choose it for them.

> I want open source infrastructure for the open source world [1]. GitHub could put their actions where their mouth is and be and actually open source company.

Okay. Great aspiration. But someone has to do it, and there must be sufficient political power from multiple parties to do it.

Github owes you nothing. Unless you pay, in which case they owe you what is specified in the contract.

The alternative is that either you build this open source infrastructure yourself, or you fund someone to do it. That seems to me like a much better use of your time than complaining that Github isn't doing it for free.

There's a reason why such an open source infra that's superior to the Github ecosystem doesn't exist: because it's hard to build and it takes time and resources. Nobody owes the community this: the community has to be lucky that enough people happen to have the right scratch that they're itching for themselves.

> That seems to me like a much better use of your time than complaining that Github isn't doing it for free

Advocacy, raising issues and awareness is one of the necessary steps towards such a thing. If I'm helping build such an infra / ecosystem, I want people to use it because they think it's the right thing, not because it's technically better. Now, of course it would be nice if it is technically better and that's also necessary.

I also can't be everywhere. I'm already giving my time to other stuff, including in the open source ecosystem.

"Build it yourself" is not an acceptable / sufficient answer to a raised issue if you think it is legitimate. It's only a way to dismiss it if you don't care.

FWIW, there are good alternatives to GitHub, like codeberg.org / forgejo. Worth checking out. There, here's my second constructive contribution toward this goal in this thread.

I've participated in the open source community for 20 years and it seems to me that many people hold an opinion out of selfish reasons. Nothing wrong per se with being selfish, but it bothers me that people dress this up as something else.

Your attitude reminds me of the GPL vs BSD discussion. The philosophy behind Free Software is that all software should be Free (libre), hence the "viral" nature of GPL. But in the 2000s people started building companies based on open source technology, and many people started complaining about the GPL's "virality" as being a bad thing. They argued that this is not "truly free" because it demanded something in return, namely that your own work is also GPL-compatible. They argued that the BSD license is "truly free" but it didn't demand anything in return.

Now, 15-20 years later, the Free Software philosophy has declined in popularity, and the use of GPL has declined greatly. Nearly everything uses some sort of BSD license. But what we also see is that lots of companies build proprietary technology based on BSD-like open source technology. These companies capture a lot of value without releasing that value back to the open source community under open source terms.

And now we see an increasing number of people complaining about that. Guys... what did you expect? Then why did people complain so loudly about the GPL's virality?

Looks like "freedom" and "virality" were just rationalizations behind more selfish thoughts: "I want the world to be like whatever benefits me most". Rather than true believers in certain principles due to philosophy, many merely support these principles for their own benefit. A lot of people are not being honest with themselves.

The GPL and copyleft licenses are not about "getting in return" and selfishness. They are tools for a strategy meant to ensure end user's rights. Now, is this strategy working? Maybe. Yes for several ecosystems actually: R, QGis, WordPress, Nextcloud, XWiki… extensions are free software under GPL. De facto, or because it's a requirement. And it works, healthy businesses exist while end users enjoy the benefits of open source.

There are licenses that force you to contribute your changes back to the authors, and they are considered non-free. GPL only forces you to provide the sources to your users.

GitHub are the one benefiting from open source while not contributing their core business code. Who is selfish now? Let's not swap roles. GPL authors always have contributed their code. It feels bizarre to call them selfish.

GitHub is not giving free space and bandwidth out of their heart. It's a business strategy. It's a call product for their Enterprise edition and also a way to control the open source community like Google controls the web using Chrome. It's convenient. Even Microsoft's competitors are tied to Microsoft products. There's no mystery why they bought GitHub and about the fact they'll keep this ecosystem closed.

FWIW to me the biggest lock-in GitHub uses is not providing custom domain name / CNAME support for what is ostensibly otherwise a hosting platform. The result is that not only do github.com-infected repository URLs for your project end up in the .git/config of users who clone your repository, but they end up in .gitmodules for projects that use you as a submodule, various package manager configuration/lock files for projects that use you as a dependency, and in any number of automated build processes for distributions shipping your software to end users; even worse, because we are all developers and like looking at code a lot of times more than prose, github.com-infected repository URLs end up becoming the de facto home page even for projects that did go out of their way to buy a domain name and make a website.

The reality is that, once your project has been on GitHub long enough, the "switching costs" are actually artificially high to move to any alternative--whether another hosting provider such as GitLab or attempting to self-host your own repository--as what you are effectively doing at that point is forking your own project more-so than merely changing out a backend provider, with the result that these alternatives can't just be a better tradeoff or even merely have slightly better functionality: they frankly have to be MUCH better to get over the barrier to entry that managing to entice such a large number of open source projects to re-federate under a domain name that Microsoft was able to just waltz in an buy presents to a project hoping to make any kind of change... it isn't as easy as "the alternatives aren't as good".

You're invited to perform in The Man's space, under The Man's eyes for The Man's favor, for free.

Meanwhile The Man's using your code to make money replacing you.

Should they build a community on Mastodon? Not build this at all?

All products have a community and beta testers, from Google Docs to Airbnb. If people don't want to use the GitHub community, the don't have to?

"Developers! Developers!"

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