Agreed. I also see very little value in simply cloning GitHubg, that's one of my problems with GitLab. I like it, it's open source and the perfs get better, but at the end of the day, it is a clone of GitHub. Not much innovation. I would love to say a player take some risk and try to present a new model and new way to leverage Git.
Re:Requiem for GitHub
by mwcampbell on Sunday February 07, 2016 @12:33PM
(#11053735)
How about a Git repository management application designed specifically for Sandstorm (https://sandstorm.io/)? Maybe call it Gitgrains.
What kind of innovation would you like to see? We already added protected branches, integrated CI and many other features. Our current plans are on https://about.gitlab.com/direction/
Any suggestions? Git over IPFS?
It's an interesting topic but I don't have much to offer.
IPFS seems neat as an object store. Sign your commits and throw them into IPFS and you're good? Given a persistent distributed object store, it seems less obvious how to publish projects, refs, and pull requests.
If you hear about "Rails", you want to be able to find the actual consensus Rails repository master branch in a trusted way. Some semantic data on https://rails.org/ maybe? Then the namespace for repositories is just the DNS namespace... But that's just one way of getting the data; any source you can verify should be fine. So a signed message by a trusted Rails maintainer published somewhere. I was imagining a kind of NNTP reflog with PGP signatures....
Personally I'm not interested in another clone of GitHub.com. Let's try another model entirely. Something more distributed and federated. That way lies diversity and immunity to lock-in. Let's collaborate in an open fashion using open protocols and decentralized hosting.