Direct competition against GitHub is barely worth contemplating; the practical path I see for replacing GitHub must be more indirect:
1. Some nonprofit foundation spins up a GitHub alternative focused on transparency and strong data privacy protections. This alternative has only a small fraction of GitHub's most crucial features.
2. A major FOSS project---which values the principles of the new alternative over the practical benefits of GitHub---switches away from GitHub.
3. Satellite projects reexamine their use of GitHub and slowly start switching over as well. The new hosting service incrementally adds features in response to demands from the growing userbase.
Steps 1 and especially 2 will require motivation by philosophical arguments, even if I agree that the linked article's execution wasn't perfect.
Simply, I'm highlighting what I believe to be crucial in giving the philosophical argument some teeth in purpose and next steps.
If the friction cost is low to do the right thing, then doing the right thing becomes extremely palatable
yeah these same types of purely philosophical arguments have led me to move away from services like DropBox and Google Drive at my own expense. Lost too many hours trying to find the “we do things the right way” alternative—when it comes down to it, if it works well and keeps the friction low, mf’s can have their bag
- what you opposed negatively affects your target audience in real ways that matter, for their career, livelihood, or some other means
- Show that continuing to be apart of an old model will be damaging in the long term
- Also importantly, the thing you are referring people to do needs to be seamless. For instance, they mention SourceHut, and I sure hope SourceHut has all the core features and ease of use of GitHub, because if not, you are likely already going to lose in this conversation to most
Without factoring these things, its great to point out issues, and rightfully they should, but its not going to mean much in terms of action