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Comment by cryptos | Hacker News Reader

    - We will continue to use Bugzilla, moz-phab, Phabricator, and Lando
    - Although we'll be hosting the repository on GitHub, our contribution workflow will remain unchanged and we will not be accepting Pull Requests at this time
    - We're still working through the planning stages, but we're expecting at least six months before the migration begins

I understand that this could make sense as a first step, but I guess they could profit if they would go all-in with GitHub and use the tools it offers. Phabricator (https://www.phacility.com/phabricator/) is even deprecated! And who likes to file bugs in Bugzilla?

As sad as it is, I see Firefox losing ground even on the developer side.

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Bugzilla and Phabricator don't have the most user-friendly interface, but at least they're not vendor lock-in for proprietary software making money from open source software like Github is.

Gitea, Gitlab and Sourcehut are in my opinion very decent alternatives to Github providing the same functionality (if not more) without any ethical downsides.

I can second Sourcehut. It looks clunky, but works fast, works well and is easy to interface with.

I moved completely to Sourcehut, and I'm not coming back.

The Sourcehut build system is also really good. It looks clunky and feels like it should be lacking in features, but realistically most of my build pipelines always ends up as a Makefile or a shell script anyway, so it fits my mental model pretty well.

Yeah I love Sourcehut because I don't think about it... at all.

The reliance on email though is a hill I'll die on. In the 90s when spam was less of an issue that would've been great. Now? I don't want to be forced into dealing with fucking email to manage issues. So yeah for my projects (which are quite small) I think SourceHut is a great fit. For a large project like rust or firefox? Not so much.

How is Github making money off of open source software in a way that Gitea, Gitlab, and Sourcehut don't?

Gitea, Gitlab and Sourcehut are all making money on open source. However, they themselves are open source projects and contribute to a wider ecosystem.

Github makes money without producing open source software. <rant>Well, that is if you don't count a sluggish electron-based text editor.</rant> Github is not open source, Github Pages is not open source, Github Actions is not open source. Sure, they offer free hosting for open source projects, but that kind of charity creates a hard dependency on Github for many projects, which is not healthy for the ecosystem.

What happens if Github closes? Or stops free offers for open source projects? To make an analogy from another ecosystem, if Mac Donalds started offering free meals to homeless people, that would not solve the problems of poverty and would not contribute to healthier food for the people or a more sane/ecological agriculture. That'd just be charity for their own gain.

I think you're selling GitHub's positive impact on open source really short.

It's important to see both sides to the benefits/risks analysis. Let that be a counterpoint to the people overselling the positive impact without ever mentioning the immediate or potential downsides. Nothing is ever truly binary outside of computing.

Historically, sure, GH was a great open source incubator. These days? It's an utter shitshow being used as chum for the Microsoft's AI monster.

I've whined endlessly about how buggy and generally awful the new UI is, but what really drove it home is having to use an old computer with an old browser. Absolutely nothing (not even static text) loads on Github without a modern javascript interpreter.

Github is ready to be put out to pasture.

Producing OSS is not the only way to contribute to the OSS ecosystem, github offers free services for OSS developers who otherwise would have to host them themselves, that's the reason why they got so popular and i think we can all agree on the fact that it's incredibly useful.

> Producing OSS is not the only way to contribute to the OSS ecosystem

Yes, it is. Otherwise, your contribution is not part of the OSS ecosystem.

> github offers free services for OSS developers who otherwise would have to host them themselves

Github offer free services to anyone, OSS or not.

> that's the reason why they got so popular and i think we can all agree on the fact that it's incredibly useful

I think we can all agree it's called a "loss leader". It's not useful whatsoever to those who refuse to further enrich a for-profit company producing proprietary software which considers your own assets to be their proprietary data (see also: Copilot). In fact it makes things more difficult for us because we're locked out of contributing to virtually any OSS project.

I'm not even sure the poster you're responding to is correct on a technical level.

My understanding (possibly flawed) is that github started by using the current git tooling but that they soon started running into issues because the CLI tools were never meant to scale and never as a web application.

So they wrote their own implementation of git (their own tool that understands git repositories) but did so in a way that's more compatible with the scale and the web-oriented work they do.

So it's not even clear to me how much of the actual code they have running is open source.

They make money off the code hosted on Github, which is by-and-large open source. Github makes money off of open source software whether they themselves run open source software (almost certainly yes) or not.

The question posed is how does github make money off of OSS in a way that other similar services do not. Since they all host OSS software in one form or another, that observation isn't relevant.

I feel it's a missed opportunity from Mozilla to use something open (Gitea, Gitlab, Codeberg...etc) and even appear in their sponsor lists or otherwise support their efforts with the occasional contribution.

Going GitHub is just so orthogonal to a mission of "openness".

Going "all-in" on GitHub means making yourself dependent on a Microsoft service that could change its conditions every day.

It is bad enough that Firefox depends on Google money for survival, I don't see why they should give even more of their freedom away to rely on Microsoft.

The kind of low-effort contributions that you would get from people that will only contribute because you are on Github are not the ones that you need or want anyway.

Plus if they wanted a alternative, Gitlab is so much more pleasant to work with anyway.

Firefox source being hosted by Microsoft us blowing my mind as a child of the 80s.

If someone had told my 80s/90s Libre/OSS advocate rebel mind how things would pan out, I'd laughed.

I think it's more or less similar to the cultural shift that by the 80's most hippies turned into yuppies working at big corporations and one of the nastiest materially and status obsessed people.

Even the most ardent woke/eco/[insert flavor]ists" need daddy to pay their rent, vacation and iPhone bills.

I’m a child of the era. It surprises me Microsoft embraced open source but it also doesn’t surprise me they bought the largest service for it. While git doesn’t have lock-in GitHub actions and the rest totally do.

My view about this: Don't be fooled! Microsoft embraced money, opensource is a tool and strategy in order to get more clients/money by being relevant and don't have all the costs of developing everything.

Azure accounts for something like 35-40% of all their revenue, and those pesky tenants insisted on installing Linux and running things on their other than Exchange or Microsoft Dynamics.

With Microsoft there's always a catch. ( they're are not alone of course ).

Yeah, people think Microsoft somehow saw the light and completely changed. They didn’t. Microsoft will follow market trends to make money on those. That’s what GitHub and Linux on Azure are. The market’s there, let’s go there.

They also try to influence the market. To build lock-in. They’ve never stopped doing that.

well, if we want to get philosophical, that's kinda the point of free market. Not saying that it always works out well of course, but in this case it did so i don't see anything to criticize to Microsoft per se

GitHub has much better usability than gitlab and you also reach more developers with it. And if you ever don’t like what MS does with it you can just move the repo somewhere else. Zero lock in.

Phabricator is so much nicer to use for code review than Github. The ticket system is also much more powerful. I understand why people can dislike Bugzilla, it is not really meant for modern workflows and looks a bit dated. But Phrabricator is a modern tool which is easy to use, yet so many seem to abandon it for objectively inferior and dated tools. It is a mystery to me.

It phabricator still alive? Or rather, phorge? I somewhat stopped paying attention, so I wonder if the fork is alive and well.

Still alive.

I don't know about Phorge, but Phabricator is no longer maintained: https://admin.phacility.com/phame/post/view/11/phacility_is_...

I don't remember Bugzilla ever being particularly usable. In fact it's always stuck out as one of the things I detest about contributing to FreeBSD.

I hated Phabricator for all the years I had to use it. The expected workflow was completely impossible to understand to me. And the name of the tools completely opaque ("Herald"? "Maniphest"? "Phriction"??)

We ended up switching to Gitlab because Github-style code reviews are just so much easier to deal with. They hit the spot between "good enough" and "easy to use". Phabricator's bloat made it unbearable

Totally agree on the "cute" naming (and the cute strings too, turning them off on new installations is probably what most people do). If you can look past that, it is a well integrated and modern tool. Or was.

Don't understand moving to Gitlab because of the bloat though. There are lots of lighter weight tools, but Gitlab is the whole kitchen sink and then some. The integrated-ness is part of the package with these tools.

> Don't understand moving to Gitlab because of the bloat though

You're totally right: it was years ago, and Gitlab used to not be as bloated at the time. I guess today we'd migrate to Gitea instead.

> And who likes to file bugs in Bugzilla?

Not only has it been years since I last have heard of bugzilla, I also really resented it! Moving to a modern infrastructure really improves accessibility for developers. For example, GHC (Haskell Compiler) moved to gitlab a few years ago and while previously it was really hard for me to understand the development process nowdays I can follow pull requests and tickets of features I am interested in without any problem. Previously the system was really complicated and, if I remember correctly, Phabricator, mailing list etc. based. Off putting as a newcomer.

Agreed. Bugzilla just needs to go away. There are so many, far superior issue trackers. Plus Mozilla could allocate resources to Firefox and Thunderbird.

Bugzilla is fine. It looks OK. You can subscribe to individual tickets. It doesn’t support emoji reactions or Markdown but it does the job just fine. One thing it does better than GH issues is ticket dependencies even with tree/graph visualization. GH just has no blockers/blocked issues in any form or shape. New ticket form has a few more fields than the default GH issue form but it’s much better than it used to be back in the days and comparable to custom form on GH. You also can log it with your GH account so not much of a barrier there, too. Seriously, try Mozilla’s bugzilla now and see for yourself. It’s probably not as bad as you remember it.

Also consider that Mozilla’s bugzilla contains quarter of a century worth of tickets. There’s no way it can be moved to GitHub (or wherever) without loss of data.

IIRC, Python managed to move to github issues.

Kinda... they completely lost any kind of user-lookup or CCs or versions or any other data... but yeah sure they moved comments I guess that's everything ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

FYI, Bugzilla supports markdown just fine :)

And AFAIU, GitHub doesn't have a way to limit the visibility of individual tickets, so even Mozilla teams that use GitHub's issue tracker still use Bugzilla for their security bugs.

What you're saying is that a complex tool requires learning to understand it. Of course it does. Does that make the less complex tool better? No, in fact usually it only makes it better for the occasional user - at the expense of the all-day-every-day user.

Most of the organizations still on Phabricator all seems to be switching to Phorge (https://phorge.it/).

I understand why Mozilla can't/won't go that route, but seeing organizations attempt to duct-tape solution together with Bugzilla, Phabricator, Jenkins and whatnot makes you appreciate what Atlassian has done with Jira, Bamboo and Bitbucket (even if Bamboo and Bitbucket aren't exactly industry leading). I suppose that Phabricator was intended to be a Jira/Bitbucket/Gerrit alternative of sorts, but just failed to get the required traction to survive.

It's not just open source projects, way to many companies are attempting to knit something together and they end up with this unholy mess of systems that sort of communicate, but not really. The saving grace is actually Git, because everything works with Git.

Bugzilla was built for mozilla. They have a quarter century of tickets in there. It's not going anywhere soon.

Phorge has seized the torch, and it looks promising as a Phab successor.

You can go all-in on git and not with github.

Well, yes. Despite both having the three letters "git" in the name, Github works against the features of Git and there's a huge impedance mismatch.

Git was suposed to be a decentralized, peer-to-peer way of managing software using standard open-source tools, and Github is the exact opposite.

It's like they don't know that they can have a clone on Github and still continue using Mercurial.

On the other hand, they're moving from open source tool to a closed ecosystem and depends on microsoft. Very sad.

As you say it is a first step - let's wait and see

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