But your note feels like you're saying "why don't the kernel dev switch to Ruby?" Of course when I say it that way it sounds absurd, but really it's simply an equivalent.
The point is that reducing the friction required to contribute to an open source project is a great way to attract new contributors. Using more user-friendly dev tools is a great way to do that, and is therefore something existing maintainers would be wise to consider doing.
Yes. Because that's true. Either you have a good point and manage to convince people in the project, or you have to fork.
Writing irrelevant comments on some news site is not going to convince anyone to spend a combined hundreds to thousands of man-hours work (at the very least) to move kernel development to GitHub or whatever platform you like.
Also notice how you are ranting about tooling in a project you're not contributing to, while the submission here is about something entirely different -- and written by a contributor.
So you're saying we shouldn't discuss this at all? Just shut up and stop trying to convince anyone to adopt a viewpoint I believe would be beneficial to open source projects in the future?
IMO open discussions like this are a good and healthy thing for any community of developers (such as the one on Hacker News) to have. It's a great way to share ideas with each other and collectively come up with ways to improve the open source community. It's not something that should be discouraged.
So don't.
Do you have a single compelling issue why they should switch?
That said, switching to something like GitHub doesn't necessarily mean developers all _have_ to use exactly the same workflow. For example, if you're more comfortable in the command line, there are tools like [hub][1] and [git-gitlab][2] available which let you perform common tasks in GitHub/GitLab using the CLI.
I just think that long-term it's better to have a good baseline user experience that devs can then extend with their own personal tools if they choose than to have a not-so-great one that _requires_ you to extend it with your own tools before it's anywhere near as good as what a well-designed Web UI provides out-of-the-box; even if in the short-term that means breaking some dev's workflows.
Obviously that doesn't mean you shouldn't try to maintain compatibility with developer's existing workflows wherever possible though. For example, GitLab and GitHub both let you reply to issues by email, and RocketChat has an IRC plugin that lets you connect RocketChat rooms to an IRC channel.
[1]: https://github.com/github/hub
[2]: https://github.com/numa08/git-gitlab