So fix it in 10 years. Git makes that easy.
Point me to a good alternative to github that matches all your ideals. A free alternative to github - free as in beer, unless you're willing to fund this effort yourself, of course?
We migrated one of our projects from Sourceforge to Github, and all the stallmen came out of their rock to tell us how Github is evil, how Savannah is the only true alternative, pah. "Absolute freedom of software" is nice but it's not the only requirement. Savannah has the usability of a rusty wrench and will probably shut down without warning long before Github "turns evil".
Some people are just so far detached from reality when suggesting that stuff isn't perfect. Github is pretty damn amazing. If you want to use foss alternative like Gitlab, more power to you, but that doesn't make them ideal in every situation.
Gitlab? Savannah (of the nongnu.org variety)? Bitbucket? Gitorious? A basic VPS with SSH and git?
The implicit free-as-in-speech condition is adequately fulfilled by other alternatives, like (as I mentioned) Gitlab and (IIRC) GNU Savannah (along with - again - just installing git on an SSH-able server).
The reason we went to Github rather than Sourceforge is because of the community. Nethertheless, I think it's fairly foolish to focus on the platform (in the case here of archiving) - it's just a host. Stuff goes on domain 1 instead of domain 2. In either case it's still open source, the archives are all there, git is decentralized and perfect for the job.
Is it just an archive or isn't it? If it is, what's so important about the community, then?
It's fine that you chose what you did, of course. It's just that that in your defending it, you can't seem to decide whether you want to have your cake or eat it.
If you wanted, this would have been a perfectly fine reason to give: "We went with GitHub because it's just what we use mostly, and other stuff not so much."
1. The meat of which remains: if it's just an archive and the host is only being used as dumb storage, how is the "community" aspect of it a plus?
So I'm going to repeat myself here:
- Savannah is shit. Zero UX effort. Atrocious home page, branding, atrocious everything. - Unfunded efforts are unreliable. Get a grip on reality, man. This isn't afound foss or proprietary or whatever - it's about having a business model. - If you think it's OK to recommend shit products as alternative to good products because of ideology, you are a detriment to the cause you claim to promote.
BTW, I'm the LXQt project lead and a huge proponent of free software. Some advice next time you attack someone, look them up.
Oh and here's another piece of advice: Don't attack people.
As a tangible example, imagine yourself working in a dank, contaminated 6' diameter sewer pipe with spotty pirated electricity, vs. a well-designed, large interior space with plenty of natural light and reliable utilities. Regardless of how irrelevant appearances are to you, I'd wager you'd get more work done in the second environment than in the first.
To the point of Savannah vs. SF, I'm inclined to agree. I have projects from the early 2000s still on SF and I need to move them off.
At the same time, if we're the ones generating our own bad press, we at least control the overall narrative. I guess that's a net win.
What do you think will happen, exactly, when an unfunded host can't keep running? Maybe their gnu website will receive some donation from Facebook or Google or something, but there is no incentive to keep the nongnu part running. It's just volunteer work.
That model can work (cf wikipedia), but it's extremely rare, requires a lot of effort, a lot of bootstrapping and a lot of luck. It also requires $1 to pay for more than itself, so there are extra requirements regarding efficiency of spending, and diminishing returns of donations.
Gitlab has a good model. In fact, I'd be curious to see what their CEO makes of what I'm saying here - I always find him scouring HN comments about github, git, hosting, sourceforge, all of these. This is the sort of effort you have to put into to get your product out there into the ears and minds of people.
As I said earlier, yes there is a risk Github will turn evil. If they do, there will be warning signs (there have been warning signs about SF for 5 years). If such is the case, there will be alternatives by then (ever heard "if there aren't, I'll build one and get rich"?).
If Savannah runs out of money and has to turn off the lights, how much of a warning sign will there be? A few weeks maybe? Maybe there just won't be any. And this is a very real situation, which you absolutely need to be ready to confront. Putting your fingers in your ears and calling everything "an assault" won't help.
> if we're the ones generating our own bad press, we at least control the overall narrative
It's a very bad sign that you care so much about the "overall narrative". It's reminiscent of your approach to flag criticism as assault again. You care about what people say, not why they say it.
I'm not paid by an anti-FOSS group or just felt like shitting on the work of random people. There's a reason behind everything I wrote here and above; it's backed by experience. And you'll be hard pressed to find people disagreeing that Savannah is pretty terrible... you can't just go around "controlling the narrative" like you own the media. You have to fix the problem at the root.
Do you mean git?
Even with all this development, I doubt we will be able to have everything on Github locally on our computers. I imagine the typical Github project to be tiny -- probably tens of megabytes at the most so I'd say we can have all the projects that we care about available locally. One can only care about so much.
At least with a commercial entity there is a bit more "trust" involved that they won't disappear out of the blue one day. And if the time comes that Github starts to collapse, the process can be repeated.
Just because something isn't permanent doesn't mean it's pointless.
Archive.org ?
And weird that nobody suggested the Bitcoin block chain. I don't think binaries are a good fit but source code doesn't require a lot of space. With the current and future block size it will take sometime to make it happen.
I said: With the current and future block size it will take sometime to make it happen.
My company uses GitHub Enterprise. Unless we have some sort of deal/discount above the built-in, we're paying over $30,000/year for it and we run it on our own servers. I'm guessing a lot of other companies do as well. Developers are quite used to using both git and GitHub and $30,000 is nothing if you have a hundred developers costing you $150k a piece (not just salary, but computers, benefits, desks/office space, payroll taxes, etc).
SorceForge counted on their open-source stance limiting who would use their service and, by extension, limiting the resources they would need to serve those people. GitHub works the opposite way. They want everyone to think of GitHub as "the place I put stuff". Have a code snippet? Stick it on GitHub! Want a basic wiki for something vaguely code related? Create a GitHub repo just for the wiki! Collaborating with friends on a class project? GitHub! And then, years later, GitHub feels like second-nature to you and you love it when employers are using it paying GitHub tens of thousands a year for it.
I'm not accusing GitHub of doing something nefarious to lock people into GitHub. Just noting that GitHub feels very familiar and that makes GitHub a very reasonable choice for companies who pay them money. Without that familiarity, the value of GitHub isn't the same. If you're a company spending millions per year, $30k is a drop in the bucket for software your developers are already familiar with and software that works well, is well supported, and can handle your problem.
Yes, GitLab exists and has both open-source and enterprise versions, but I'm not sure that a business feels that differently about $5,000/year for a 100 person team and $25,000. I'm glad GitLab exists, I'm glad Bitbucket exists. They'll make sure that GitHub has to continue being great and they'll provide services to people that want something a bit different. But GitHub's business model seems pretty sound. The more people use GitHub for free, the more likely high-rollers are to pay for GitHub.
I mean, the GitHub subscription per developer costs less than the additional money my company pays for Apple gear for developers. By targeting open source with a premium, free, non-ad driven product, GitHub opened the door to lucrative business sales. They seem like a sustainable business and it even seems like the free, open-source repositories are part of that business plan.
I'm not saying that Apple gear is so overpriced or that it isn't a better platform to develop on, but we don't need retina displays to do our work. And many people argue that you don't want to force devs to work on a platform they're less productive on. The same applies to GitHub. If your devs are more productive or, heck, even happier or more comfortable using it, $250/year isn't something a company is going to blink at if it's paying $150k+ per dev - just as the company won't mind paying an extra $100, $500, or $1,000 in equipment for that dev.
(During the past week I paid for the first month of private github hosting on my personal CC for the company I work for. Will get it re-imbursed and transition it to some company CC when I get the time.)
Also, SVN is a lot more annoying to copy, especially if you want the whole history. Not that it isn't doable, but it's pretty slow and obnoxious. With Git, every clone includes everything by default.
If that happens, the projects can be re-hosted somewhere else. For the time being Github is the best option.
Sometimes the hypothetical situations free software people bring up hurt their cause more than they help.
In 10 years time, Github may be the tired old service that gets acquired by a hedge fund that decides to monetize their repos. Such things are part of the corporate lifecycle.