As you can easily notice, today many open source projects are using some services, that are… sus.
For example, Github is the most popular place to store your project code and we all know, who owns it. And not to forget that sketchy AI training on every line of your code. Don’t we have alternatives? Oh, yes we have. Gitlab, Codeberg, Notabug, etc. You can even host your own Gitea or Forgejo instance if you want.
Also, Crowdin is very popular in terms of software (and docs) translation. Even Privacy Guides and The New Oil use Crowdin, even though we have FLOSS Weblate, that you can easily self-host or use public instances.
So, my question is: if you are building a FLOSS / privacy related project, why using proprietary and privacy invasive tools?
Maybe an unpopular opinion but why would you care about how privacy invasive GitHub is? Your code is open-source anyways so MSFT can steal it wherever you host it. And if they haven’t changed it you’re able to sign up with just an email and a pseudonym. It’s not a social network where you have to post private information for it to be useful you can and most people do use it pretty anonymously.
So I never understand the outrage about GitHub and MSFT. Git is distributed anyway, the only thing that can be lost are issues and pull request histories. If they fuck up, everyone can just move. Now GitHub Actions, that is a clever thing for binding users…
they can take your whole project down if they want so. or if they are forced to do so.
git is literally distributed. Its trivial to push it to a new origin if that happens
so why not do it from the beginning?
Because the downsides completely outweigh the upsides by a massive amount. Risk of GitHub removing any of my projects is practically 0, while the upsides of hosting elsewhere is also almost 0.
but does it really matter where your personal project with maybe 10 stars resides? if not why not choose something like codeberg?
Yes because every company I work at uses GitHub, I use GitHub actions at work, and the majority of programmers on the planet use GitHub. So I’d not only need to maintain another account, use a different build system, and spread my project in some other manner, but I’d be losing the majority of my contributors (my most starred project has 100 stars, second most is 50). If that’s on a platform with the _most _ contributors then I literally wouldn’t have any on a different platform. I have 40+ FOSS projects (source, not forks) and I’m not going to maintain all of those somewhere where they won’t get viewers.
@mormund It’s not about the privacy of the code, but the privacy of the users clicking on github and then reading some news. They aggregate behavioral data about you.
> the only thing that can be lost are issues and pull request histories
“Only”?? That’s a HUGE problem. That’s exactly one of the walls keeping people inside github. Git protocol could distribute that, but it doesn’t suit the commercial platform’s interests -> go to open platforms instead.
Can you name an open platform that actually does distribute PRs and issues? I know there were a few that tried but I mean one that actually succeeded and is usable by people who just want to report a bug?
Also, your issues and pull requests are much more likely to be lost in your self-hosted one project instance than on GitHub if anything happens to you.
The pull request model is broken so why care about its replication? Send patches to a mailing list, ask for Gerrit, hopefully ForgeFed can be a thing sooner than later.
Talking about PRs being broken and then bringing up email, just about the most broken technology still in wide-spread use, is sort of ironic.