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Comment by forty | Hacker News Reader

Great, but why on GitHub? That doesn't seem very souverain to me

Git is distributed, the repository can be hosted concurrently at many places.

and the primary place they chose is owned by Microsoft

I would strongly assume the primary place is on some French government server somewhere and this is just the public mirror.

The project benefits from the visibilityband community of GitHub and GitHub is completely replaceable with European hosted or self-hostable options should something untoward happen.

I think you and other responders are missing the point. Yes GitHub gives visibility to the project and is easily replaceable. But putting projects on GitHub gives visibility to GitHub and reenforces the network effect and Microsoft leadership, making it harder for European alternative to emerge.

I'm sure they would use a European provider if it was only a minor inconvenience to them; but there is no EU-github nearly done and it doesn't make sense to hamstring this project waiting on it. If this project is successful it will help to justify funding more EU sovereign projects, which will likely include GitHub replacements.

But they still chose an American company, github, lol ironic

There's nothing ironic, as since the GP said there is no risk associated with GitHub. Git fundamentally prevents vendor lock-in and tampering, and the project is open, so the US have no leverage and pose no threat at all here.

You’re reasoning with a troll who doesn’t care about reason. Save your brainpower.

its not about leverage or threat, same as the office products, the french owned their docs at the end of the day, i thought it was about sovereignty and using french alternatives?

If you have the docs, but not the means to (legally) read and edit them, do you really own them?

When MS pulls services you are largely screwed.

When GitHub pulls services its a few hours downtime and a new provider.

> Yet they still participate in GitHub. Ironic! Lol.

Literally the "gotcha" fool from the Matt Bors cartoon: https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/

With that argument we are discussing this on...errr US - the organization that perhaps grew those companies.

The word is not ironic it is pragmatic.

It's the code that's hosted on GitHub, not the documents. Easier to move, easier to negotiate a move. You get visibility and easy distribution until they feel the need to bail.

Cause that's where the traction is. The beauty of git is that it's inherently distributed, github is just a clone like any other.

Not sure that it’s relevant to switch git hosts is trivial. And everyone is already there

I wait for frenchhub, in french only, no english translation, nothing. Typical french. Greetings from you EU neighbor.

A lot of the documentation in La Suite seems to be available in English.

> frenchhub

*Lieu de Rencontre Français Pour le Contrôle de Version

Underrated point: Bldg #1 needs to be sovereign hub for initiatives, for which OP is providing a first tenant…

One step at a time. This is a long-term movement.

Don't let perfect be the enemy of good.

given git is decentralized, my guess is github is just a public mirror.

GitHub is using Git which was developed by Linus Thorvald, a Finish and thus EU citizen.

That does not sound very sovereign by the US to me.

There's a huge difference between the origin of some open source software, where a service is hosted and where the company providing it is from.

You can take some open source software made in some other country and use it or fork it no strings attached to its country of origin. No leader from that country can decide to abruptly cut you off your usage of the software because they feel like it.

GitHub is literally Microsoft. US company with servers in the US. What you're talking about is the underlying technology.

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