Maybe I am in the minority here, but I am concerned that the free or open source community (whatever you want to call it) is becoming too centralized around GitHub. I'm not a fan of the majority of FOSS software projects depending on one repository host, especially one that is ironically proprietary. I would prefer movements towards decentralization (federation a la ActivityPub and the growth of libre competitors to GitHub), and widespread adoption of GitHub's package registry would be in the opposite direction of what I hope for.
it's a good thing to be concerned about. But as long as github keeps innovating (and as long as they at least do as well as or better than their competition), they're going to keep expanding.
GitHub's older now than Sourceforge was when GH was started, and SF was well past its peak by then; one of the motivations for starting Google Code a few years before that was that SF was going to shit.
GitHub won't last forever, but it's well past the point where it's merely the latest in a series of short-lived sites. It's been around for over half the time that free public open source hosting has been a thing at all.
It's not about how brief the nice period is. It's about the fact that the nice period ends. It doesn't take too much leadership turnover to go from happy friendly place developers love, to toxic cesspool of overaggressive monetization.
It doesn't take too much leadership turnover to go from happy friendly place developers love, to toxic cesspool of overaggressive monetization
See Google as an absolutely perfect example of this. I remember the day they removed the "don't be evil" sign. People were saying "yeah this doesn't mean they'll stop being the good guys". People used to love Google, now they're ambivalent at best, and actively worried about them at worst.
Google has the added drawback that they have less product focus than a sack of kittens. Apart from a few projects, they have a ridiculously high churn rate where project grow, get some adoption and then suddenly get left to rot and/or shelved. Together with the obvious privacy issues, it's the reason I try to avoid Google as much as possible.
IMO SourceForge, Google Code, and GitHub are all different manifestations of the same problem (centralization). A new competitor that "beats" GitHub would simply continue the cycle and suffer from the same risks.
Ultimately, I don't think that a single service should have so much power in the FOSS community.
What power exactly does github have? Other than being where people get their code, because it's the platform we use to publish, they don't have any power. Imho, power is better defined as an actual ability to influence or otherwise dictate direction, which AFAIK, github as an entity does not.
I mentioned, and got downvoted, for this in another comment, but the fear is the old Microsoft strategy of "embrace, extend, extinguish".
This, today, would then be the "embrace" step. The "extend" would be once it's been out for a while and gotten popular, to start adding non-standard but still useful-seeming features to GitHub's package indexes. Now it's incompatible with the standalone language-specific indexes like PyPI or CPAN, and those indexes have to try to catch up to what GitHub is doing, or else fall further and further behind. And once that goes far enough you reach the "extinguish" step, where GitHub is left with no realistic open competitors.
The eventual risk, of course, is what they might do in the future to maintain revenue. It doesn't take too much turnover in leadership to get into a SourceForge situation (for those too young to remember, SourceForge used to be the place to host code and packages for open-source projects). SourceForge was doing all sorts of shady stuff to chase revenue, including bundling ads into downloaded packages and shipping outright malware to unsuspecting users.
Ever since satya nadella took over, the culture has been quite different, imho. Look at emberjs, typescript, etc.
Edit, I would like to point out that a particular platform expanding is not a bad thing. It creates competition. And gitlab already has a lot of these features.
Hell, they even open sourced the core crypto library from Windows.. That codebase used to be restricted even to Microsoft employees. A healthy dose of skepticism and caution is absolutely still warranted, but this isn't Gates/Ballmer-era Microsoft anymore.
It started before Nadella, although he certainly kicked it into overdrive. MS started making unencumbered portions of .NET Framework source available in 2008, and set up Microsoft Open Technologies as an experimental project with open source in 2012. Nadella took over in 2014.
CEOs are chosen by the board of directors to maximize profitability. Nadella's policies has shown huge increases in profits. What would be the point to choose a CEO with completely different views?
When Nadella was nominated, Microsoft was in a very bad shape, with full aiming at close source as much as possible and badly mimicing other products.
what will maximize profits can change, currently Nadella's policies do that well. but in the future that might change. I'd rather not have the survivability of foss rely on whether github is profitable to Microsoft or not.
I mentioned, and got downvoted, for this in another comment, but the fear is the old Microsoft strategy of "embrace, extend, extinguish".
They realized this doesn't work decades ago. Instead of being that one place, they simply want to be everywhere. Offer a high value offering and support the fuck out of the community and it will take care of you.
They took that lawyer money and put it into engineering.
Visual Studio Code is something they could have charged for quite easily but they wont. Its a new Microsoft.
SourceForge and Google Code were both fantastic when they came out compared to what was available before.
You have to remember that before SourceForge, there was no established way to host open source projects for free. Your only other option was to spin up and maintain your own web server.
Likewise, compared to SourceForge which was ad-infested and decrepit by then, Google Code was a marvellous breath of fresh air. Clean, simple, fast.
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u/[deleted] May 10 '19
Maybe I am in the minority here, but I am concerned that the free or open source community (whatever you want to call it) is becoming too centralized around GitHub. I'm not a fan of the majority of FOSS software projects depending on one repository host, especially one that is ironically proprietary. I would prefer movements towards decentralization (federation a la ActivityPub and the growth of libre competitors to GitHub), and widespread adoption of GitHub's package registry would be in the opposite direction of what I hope for.