Content warning: this is a rant from a teenager who has strong opinions.
Okay…
However, it holds a monopoly on software.
You don’t know what a “monopoly” is.
they could just go “Boop! You’re gone!” and there’s nothing I could do about it other than move forges.
Yeah, nothing you could do about it, other than moving to one of the many other git hosts. Monopoly!
And then after listing off a whole bunch of alternative git hosts…
Centralization is not bad by itself but it’s bad when there’s no other option. There just needs to be ways to contribute to code without having to use Github.
You have plenty of ways to do that, and you know that because you just listed them. Github is not a monopoly.
Also, I don’t see the concept of open source mentioned at any point in this rant.
You don’t know what a “monopoly” is.
What the author is probably searching for is “vendor-lockin”, which is an anticompetitive practice for so long that it became the way many companies rely their business on. It favors established products over new-comers by making switching offerings difficult/expensive or even impossible, thus better products often have no chance of competing in a field, that was dominated by a single supplier for a while.
IMO there should be strict regulations and high fines associated with it, because it hinders innovation massively across all industries.
The cost of switching away from github for a project is high, but not as high as in other fields.
Imo github doesnt have that high of a vendor lock-in. Its git, you can clone and push it to another server. Sure, youll have to convert the ci’s and templates, but thats about it really.
And a good yaml is easily converted as the ideas and actions are the same, only the action names are different.
But yes, i think that is what the author was getting at.It has more than you expect, if your project is established on github and want to move away you have to deal with:
- migration of issues
- migration of pull requests
- migration of all review comments etc
- migration of the wiki
- migration of the pages
- convince all contributors to possible create a new account somewhere else
- changing of the project urls. I don’t think github offers a url rewrite service
- forks on github will not have the new destination as the fork base
- change the ci and release process
- because you cannot add url rewrite rules to your old gh project, you might need to only ‘archive’ the project there with manually written text, to point to the new destination, for people to find it
Ye, some of these i started thinking of after i made my comment, which is my bad. Its true a project that uses the full github stack is harder to move, its its still relatively easy. The only problem you’d have is redirecting traffic to a new host, but this problem exists in all platforms and not only in project management sites like github.
As for your bulletpoints, i have a few remarks. Mainly that github pages are silly and they should not be used as a website. And even if you are, there are tools out there to convert the markdown from github pages into html/css/js so moving that is easy. Same with wiki pages, they are just markdown. 90% of markdown is compatible with other sites, and the parts that arent probably have a site specific syntax that youll need to look up, nothing bad. Review comments i will disregard, as those are part of the PR process. Once a project is moved you could hide the PR tab on github or close all new ones redirecting them to the new host. All older ones can be handled and phased out. Once a pr is merged, get the commit from github and push it to the new host. Thanks git!
Random contributers have nothing to say imo. If a project’s team feels the need to move away from github a true contributer/side team member/helper will move with them, and if they dont then so be it. Once a project team feels the need to move, something bad must be going on and moving will always be the better move for their mental health than to keep working with bad stuff.
As mentioned before ci/release pipelines are all yaml. Their odeas stay the same, only action names & their patameters change. Nothing complex there to move there…So im short : only moving your traffic is a real problem, but is a problem on all websites and all communities, not just github or a project on github
As I said, it is not impossible to move away from gh compared to many other cases in other industries, just that it is more difficult than necessary because vendor-lockin is allowed.
If vendor-lockin was illegal, companies had more incentives to use established or create new standards to facilitate simpler migration between software stacks, without changing the external interface.
For instance allowing your own DNS name to be used as the repo/project basepath instead of enforcing github.com, Allowing comments, reviews, issues and pull requests via email or other federated services, instead of enforcing github accounts to do so, providing documented, stable and full-featured APIs for every component of their software, so that it is easy to migrate and pick and choose different components of their while stack from possible different vendors, …
There are so many ways that would improve the migration situation, while also providing more ways for other ideas to compete on a level playing field. If a bright engineer has an idea for improving one component from github, they should not be required to write a whole separate platform first.
Small aside: Microsoft GitHub’s proprietary Markdown fork is certainly not 90% compatible—most egregious IMO was overloading blockquote semantics with callouts which breaks semantics all over the web. Some providers & forks have had to support their fork due to the monopoly control MS GitHub asserts.
Do you mean admonitions? E.g. info, warning, etc? There’s precedent for that in commonly-used open source implementations, e.g. obsidian.md (which uses the same syntax, and started before). What semantics does it break? It’s designed to read well in plaintext and render nicely even if used in a renderer that doesn’t support admonitions, e.g.
[!NOTE] Information the user should notice even if skimming.
As opposed to other common markdownish implementations that use nonsensical plaintext which renders poorly in alternative renderers. Here’s a discussion on the topic in the CommonMark forums.
Read the Markdown spec where it says the
denotes a blockquote. There isn’t room to overload it without breaking that into something not backwards compatible (such as CommonmsMark which will follow the spec & render a blockquote—which, according to the HTML spec, must be text quoting a source). Just because some of the bigger players—namely the proprietary forks, Obsidian & MS GitHub—doesn’t mean it’s not breaking with the original spec. Go ahead & do it, but don’t lie & say it is Markdown or Markdown-compatible. Instead these entities try to push & sway everyone to adopt their syntax rather than working with say CommonMark with RFCs.CommonMark has the
:::block syntax, but folks using this are relying on stringly-typed, not-well-defined options when they do::: noteas it just becomes a CSS class where anyone could style it.As callouts are such an everpresent construct in technical writing, documentation, & so on, what you need is first-class support. Docbook as an output has first-class support, but sadly W3 shot down the last attempt at an element proposal (but can be properly by manually constructed with
role=note&aria-labelledby). reStructuredText & AsciiDoc are both lightweight markup syntaxes that support first-class callouts & other elements (definition lists, summary/details, figures, etc.) as well as having first-class metadata (like basically every other creative work format for images, audio, documents).All of this is to say what Microsoft is doing is no longer Markdown & only they hold the keys to the spec (you can complain in their forums, but you can’t submit an RFC or pull request). But also, Markdown / CommonMark are honestly ill-suited for the task of technical writing since it doesn’t support basic features for that task (embedding HTML defeats the purpose & portability)—and instead we have a lot of ad-hoc hacks & bad HTML output due to choosing the wrong tool for the job.
Ye fair, it all depends on what markup you have and what features you use. Personally i dont think my markup of priiloader has any weird stuff that is specific to github, but i will have to check to be honest. If there was any special stuff id try to steer away from github specifics as much as i can, because i believe and work in a way it should always be possible to take away any part of a project and replace it with something else. It makes projects very flexible to change
The real issue is the base Markdown spec is absolutely barren. Folks have tried to shoehorn Markdown into something general purpose so everyone & their brother needed to fork it to add some level of usability since base Markdown isn’t suitable for blogging, technical documentation, white papers, etc. which it was never designed to do
All of those issues would arise if you wanted to migrate an established project to Github as well.
Well the reason for that is the vendor-lockin and centralized technology.
If your project for instance uses a similar development method as the linux kernel does, e.g. sending and reviewing patches via mailing lists and providing url to push and pull git repos from, it is quite easy to switch out the software stack underneath, because your are dealing with quasi-standart data: Mbox, SMTP, HTTP(s) and DNS. So you can move your whole community to a different software stack by just changing some DNS entries and maybe provide some url rewrite rules without disrupting the development process.
I am not saying that the mailing list development process is the right one for every project, but it demonstrates how agnostic to the software stack it could be.
If vendor-lockin is made illegal, the service providers would have more incentives to use or create standardized APIs, so that their product can be replaced by competitors. So switching to or from github/gitlab/… becomes easier.
Gitea can migrate all issues, PRs, wiki, etc. It works very well.
Guess it works for codeforge then because it runs on a fork of gitea
Sure, I’ve done that. The problem is, it doesn’t “migrate” the audience. The chances that people will contribute on your individual Gitea repositories versus Github is much much lower. Just clarifying to highlight it’s not just a technical problem.
You gotta consider the inverse as well. There are a lot of folks that would more happily create an account with a free software service but will only reluctantly use MS GitHub. It’s the same community-dividing tactic as putting all other communications on Discord/Slack which cut off a part of the community that wants to live the ethos by using free software/services to create free software/services.
Sure except the install base isn’t, sadly, comparable precisely because Microsoft has been using such tactics since its inception. That’s why they’ve had problems with the justice for decades now.
Ye, i went to this post diagonally and it felt like a rant without any merit. Dont get me wrong, i dont fully like github either but this was just a waste of time to read…
Thing about sharing the internet with newly minted teenagers is that they haven’t been around these streets nearly as long as us. They apparently dont know the history of the net as well as the timeline of the most popular sites.
Maybe schools need to start teaching internet history class or something. If only schools in the USA weren’t terrible when it comes to anything tech.
This isn’t even a problem with historical awareness, OP knows that Github isn’t a monopoly. They listed off a bunch of alternatives in their rant. I’m really not sure what they were even complaining about.
So, is google not a monopoly because there are other search engines out there? Does Apple not have a monopoly among US teenagers because there are Android phones available? Does Microsoft not have a monopoly in desktop computing because Apple and Linux exist or because phones exist?
What is your definition of monopoly and how does Github not fit it? I’m genuinely curious.
Anti Commercial AI thingy
Inserted with a keystroke running this script on linux with X11
#!/usr/bin/env nix-shell #!nix-shell -i bash --packages xautomation xclip sleep 0.2 (echo '::: spoiler Anti Commercial AI thingy [CC BY-NC-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/) Inserted with a keystroke running this script on linux with X11 ```bash' cat "$0" echo '``` :::') | xclip -selection clipboard xte "keydown Control_L" "key V" "keyup Control_L"So, is google not a monopoly because there are other search engines out there?
It isn’t. There are other search engines. People use Google because it’s the best, not because it’s the only one available. If Google became a horrible search engine, people would switch no problem
Does Apple not have a monopoly among US teenagers because there are Android phones available?
Yes. Although Apple is preferred in this public (of which I don’t know a lot about, so I won’t try to guess why), Android is always an option. And a cheaper one, usually. This forces Apple to differentiate themselves by giving the best in what their users want (premium quality and status, I guess).
Does Microsoft not have a monopoly in desktop computing because Apple and Linux exist or because phones exist?
Same point.
What is your definition of monopoly and how does Github not fit it?
A monopoly is when a company is the only one in a market niche. Not the most prominent one.
A monopoly is when a company is the only one in a market niche. Not the most prominent one.
What would you call the latter then?
Anti Commercial AI thingy
Inserted with a keystroke running this script on linux with X11
#!/usr/bin/env nix-shell #!nix-shell -i bash --packages xautomation xclip sleep 0.2 (echo '::: spoiler Anti Commercial AI thingy [CC BY-NC-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/) Inserted with a keystroke running this script on linux with X11 ```bash' cat "$0" echo '``` :::') | xclip -selection clipboard xte "keydown Control_L" "key V" "keyup Control_L"I don’t think there’s a precise name for that, since it can be a lot of complex things. A monopoly is a very defined thing, that was my point.
A company can be prominent because it is just better at giving what the consumers want. That’s the case of Google (as a search engine). I use Duck Duck Go, but very often I have to fallback to Google because DDG’s results are just not quite right.
It can be prominent because what it does is very expensive and so only a few can even try it. That’s again the case with Google. Creating a good search engine is hard, and Google just got more money to throw at it. That’s also the case of Apple. What they are selling (premium products with very high quality and stability) is inherently expensive, and such they don’t face a lot of competition (Sansung I guess). Many big corp will lobby the government to artificially make the market more expensive so they can rule out small fish (don’t quote me on that, I’ll not elaborate further).
A company can also turn itself into a conglomerate, merging, buying and assimilating other companies. That’s the case with AbInbev here in Brazil. They assimilated most of the beer companies. It is very hard (in my opinion impossible) for this to turn into a monopoly, because there will be other big fish trying to play the same game (Petrópolis and Heineken in this case, for example), and there will always be those companies that will not accept being bought, hoping they will be the next big fish.
I’m not making any judgement of value here, I hate big corporations, but I think we should put blame where blame is due, and not attack straw men and use water down terms, because that’s pretty weak.
I don’t think there’s a precise name for that, since it can be a lot of complex things.
Do you understand now why people call it a monopoly? Why the US Department of Justice alleges Apple to be a monopoly?
There are indeed 5 characteristics for a monopoly and only one need fit the target to be called a monopoly, of which your criteria is only one:
- Profit maximizer: monopolists will choose the price or output to maximise profits at where MC=MR.This output will be somewhere over the price range, where demand is price elastic. If the total revenue is higher than total costs, the monopolists will make abnormal profits.
- Price maker: Decides the price of the good or product to be sold, but does so by determining the quantity in order to demand the price desired by the firm.
- High barriers to entry: Other sellers are unable to enter the market of the monopoly.
- Single seller: In a monopoly, there is one seller of the good, who produces all the output.[6] Therefore, the whole market is being served by a single company, and for practical purposes, the company is the same as the industry.
- Price discrimination: A monopolist can change the price or quantity of the product. They sell higher quantities at a lower price in a very elastic market, and sell lower quantities at a higher price in a less elastic market.
Had you provided another term, I would have agreed with you that the author doesn’t know what a monopoly is, but it seems like the inverse is true.
I don’t like to argue semantics on the internet so I won’t answer further than this
US Department of Justice alleges Apple to be a monopoly
With all due respect, I really don’t care what the US government calls a monopoly. It doesn’t make it a monopoly just because some county government said so.
Single seller: In a monopoly, there is one seller of the good, who produces all the output.[6] Therefore, the whole market is being served by a single company, and for practical purposes, the company is the same as the industry.
That’s the most important thing. We agree on that one. A monopoly is the singular provider of a good in the market. Github is not the only provider of git hosting (think Gitlab and Bitbucket). Apple is not the singular provider of smartphones (Sansung, Motorola, Xiaomi, etc), nor it’s the singular provider of laptops (Lenovo, Samsung, Alienware, Framework). All of the other points are things that monopolies do, but alone doesn’t make a monopoly.
This difference is important, because creating a true monopoly is impossibly hard. So hard in fact, that they are usually caused by interference of the government (like Petrobrás here), not the other way around.
Duopoly?
Wouldn’t it be when there are only 2 companies selling a product by @[email protected]’s logic? Windows for example has 71% desktop marketshare worldwide, but Apple, Linux, BSD, Redox, TempleOS, and others as “competitors”. Or ~90% of all sunglasses are made by one company in Italy, but there are hundreds of copycats from China and other countries with knockoffs.
What’s that called? I’m still curious about @[email protected]’s answer.
You don’t know what a “monopoly” is.
Do you though? A clarification that most people miss : “In economics, a monopoly is a single seller. In law, a monopoly is a business entity that has significant market power, that is, the power to charge overly high prices, which is associated with a decrease in social surplus.” (from Wikipedia) So are you 100% sure that the author was talking from an economical rather than legal viewpoint?
So sure, in theoretical economics GitHub is not a monopoly, rather it’s part of an oligopoly. Yet, in law, it is in practice a monopoly. GitHub is so big that it does shape the market of collaborating on (open-source) software, even though alternatives do exist.
Not like you can just visit some other selfhosted community on lemmy or reddit and see how others started hosting a local git appliance for their scripts and what not.
Well, if you want to contribute to a project to github then you are pretty fucked if the gate keepers won’t let you
You’re not “pretty fucked”. Just use one of the many other git hosts out there. OP himself lists some of them in his rant.
You didn’t seem to read what I said. I can’t force other projects that I don’t own off github.
Actually, you can do exactly that. Fork them.
You can’t force the people who are using Github to follow you, of course. But that’s every individual’s choice.
How do you contribute to project on Github from a different git host?
Oh, that’s what you meant. How do you contribute to a project on any git host if that git host won’t let you? In what way is GitHub any different from that?
Its different in that other platforms aren’t run by evil corporations that could decide to deplatform a user.
You think Microsoft is the only “evil corporation” among these? That’s very naive. Any hosting service will deplatform users when they can see a profit to be made from doing so.
My point is don’t go with a corporation. Use open source software. Use codeberg.
Cut them some slack. They’re at an age where they’re trying to assert their independence and their brain is still developing. They’ve got time to mature and find more worthy fights over which to spill words. Or maybe they’ll remain smooth-brained. But either way, right now they’re not at their best.
deleted by creator
I kinda hope they change the software to also be called codeberg. Its sich a good name and forgejo is so difficult to say and have people know how to spell it
IDK. I think that just causes more confusion. Like with “Use gitlab”, do I mean the application or gitlab.com?
“Forge-yo” difficult to say?
Because it doesn’t sound like “forge” in English. People hear it and don’t know how it’s spelled (thanks Esperanto).
deleted by creator
Did you just discover this? It’s a Microsoft site after all.
It is indeed surprising how a Microsoft-owned site has become the default home for open-source projects. Have people thought this through?
They bought it after it was already the default.
To be fair, it only became Microsoft-owned after it had already become that home.
GitHub isn’t.
The code on it is.
You could use gitlab, or something else.
The fact that GitHub is owned by Microsoft alone makes it not open-source.
Microsoft has developed many open-source projects. The view of Microsoft as some kind of anti-open-source crusader is 20 years out of date.
I will now attempt to invalidate your opinion by parroting the words “Embrace, Extend, Extinguish”.
:^)So has Google, they’ve done the Chromium browser, but everyone on Lemmy sees that so called “open-source project” with suspicion.
There’s quite a series of leaps of logic here.
Because Google (not Microsoft) released a project under the BSD license (an open source license) but “everyone on Lemmy” doesn’t think it’s open source, therefore a hosting site owned by Microsoft (not Google) is not “open source.”
I’m not even sure what is meant by GitHub being “open source.” It’s a hosting provider, not an actual piece of software. The site itself doesn’t have a source license. The individual repositories can have licenses, which can be whatever the user who created the repository sets it to be - including open source licenses. Do you mean GitHub Desktop? Microsoft released that under the MIT license. And you don’t need GitHub Desktop to use GitHub anyway.
GitHub is a git hosting provider, but it also has its own service software for all the peripherals - organizations, issues, pull requests, all the user account management stuff, etc. AFAIK those parts are mostly/all proprietary.
So we’ve moved from “GitHub is not open source” to “GitHub has some support software for peripheral features that is not open-source?” I’m definitely failing to see the rant-worthiness of it at this point. It’s certainly not monopolistic, platforms like GitLab and Bitbucket also provide these features. And I’d bet that some of them have their own proprietary software to support these things too.
“We” haven’t moved anywhere, I just chimed in for the first time with my interpretation of what the other person was talking about. Jeez.
“We” as in the conversation as a whole. You joined an ongoing thread.
Insanely useful info. Thanks.
The fact GitHub is not open source on their servers is not really a problem for me, there are many open source platforms to host code. And for centralized platform I won’t be able to change anything myself anyway.
My rant would be about having to run their proprietary code on my machine to use GitHub.What proprietary code do you have to run to use GitHub???
Turn off executing JavaScript code in your browser and you’ll see.
You are not required to visit the website to use GitHub.
If you are complaining because all you know how to use is the website and GitHub desktop, then that’s a you problem and you need to get good. There is a git man page and it is excellent. I suggest you study up.
I know the Git part of the GitHub pretty well, trust me. But you still need to create an account and API keys somehow.
However, GitHub is not as bad as some services, I use it anyway. Just wanted to laugh at the fact half of open source in on that platform.
So it isn’t necessary to have keys and an account on your preferred git server? What kind of insecure dumpster fire server are you committing code to???
Don’t know where this idea come from. You need to run GitHub’s proprietary app in order to create an account and do nessesary things. Meanwhile services like Codeberg have both server and client side open source and there are hosts like SourceHut that does not require running any additional code at all.
What proprietary app do you need to run… The website? Are you seriously arguing that making an account on the website is equivalent to having to run an app on your machine?
You’re weird.
God, what a bullshit, bad faith argument. I’m sure you feel like you have the high ground, but seriously, you sound like an idiot.
-
You can use other forges, but they have the exact same issues as GitHub. You need to make an account, you need to accept terms of service and if they feel like it (or are forced by a court) they’ll ban you and your repository.
-
git send-emailexists. So it’s not like you absolutely can’t contribute to projects that are hosted on GitHub.
At some point in the future gitlab will get federation, but that’s not a solution for now. It’ll take a while.
Why does everyone shill gitlab as a github alternative. Theyre just another shitty corporate platform
You can at least self host it, though performance isn’t as good as the alternatives
I imagine because it’s more popular and (arguably) more feature complete than Gitea (which I use).
At some point in the future gitlab will get federation, but that’s not a solution for now. It’ll take a while.
Gitlab had more than a decade to implement federation and didn’t give 2 shits about it until one single dude (oelmeki?) decided to start implementing it. And even now, Gitlab hasn’t built a team around federation and only have that single, external contributor writing all the code, tests, etc. . The only thing they’re providing is “guidance”. It wouldn’t surprise me if oelmeki isn’t even getting paid.
Gitlab feels like just another company happy to be #2 and not willing to do anything more to be better because most other alternatives are way behind. I bet if they were #1, they’d be just as bad as any other company that’s #1.
Hopefully forgejo gets complete federation first and becomes real competition for gitlab. Gitlab doesn’t deserve #2.
Anti Commercial AI thingy
Inserted with a keystroke running this script on linux with X11
#!/usr/bin/env nix-shell #!nix-shell -i bash --packages xautomation xclip sleep 0.2 (echo '::: spoiler Anti Commercial AI thingy [CC BY-NC-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/) Inserted with a keystroke running this script on linux with X11 ```bash' cat "$0" echo '``` :::') | xclip -selection clipboard xte "keydown Control_L" "key V" "keyup Control_L"Total noob here when it comes to all things git, but can’t you simply host git in a privately owned server? I thought I saw that when installing some packages on my Synology NAS.
Yes, but how are you gonna accept pull requests? You need a frontend and a frontend needs an account.
Of course, all of these alternative forges (gitea, forgejo, gitlab) can be self hosted on your own private server.
no, you can accept them on an open port or via CLI
Not sure what you’re suggesting. Here… are you suggesting random write access to a port on a device you host? Anybody can push a branch to your selfhosted repo?
Or are you talking about self-hosted forgejo, gitlab, etc.?
Anti Commercial AI thingy
Inserted with a keystroke running this script on linux with X11
#!/usr/bin/env nix-shell #!nix-shell -i bash --packages xautomation xclip sleep 0.2 (echo '::: spoiler Anti Commercial AI thingy [CC BY-NC-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/) Inserted with a keystroke running this script on linux with X11 ```bash' cat "$0" echo '``` :::') | xclip -selection clipboard xte "keydown Control_L" "key V" "keyup Control_L"Yes, if you want to accept pull requests from anyone, you can set up a jailed git server with public access, for example.
That’s not a pull request, but a merge request. Besides the point though. What I’m getting at is: isn’t that asking for trouble? Somebody could
while true ; do head /dev/urandom -c 100MB > file.txt git add file.txt git commit -m "new commit" git push doneand fill up your hard drive. Also, depending on the protocol, they could try fuzzing it. Or, pipe
/dev/urandomintoncand blast your git port.And of course, the first problem is discoverability. Who’s going to find your random, unfederated, git service?
It just doesn’t sound like a convincing solution, IMO.
no, it’s not specific to merge requests. theres a tool called git-shell that prevents abuse
You need a frontend
Yes, but the requirement of said frontend are very small.
and a frontend needs an account.
Not required at all actually. For example, mirror a github repo in gitea. You’ll see all the commits, their messages, and who made them. Yet that gitea instance isn’t accessible publicly. None of those people have an account, and none of them can login even if they could access the instance. A commit is just attached to a name, that is user configurable, and a lot less data minable than a “real” account.
Would you call that open source? A read only gitea instance?
If you want to get away from GitHub a mirror won’t cut it, it has to be the main dev platform.
You missed the point of my example entirely. How can those commits exist, and those people exist in that instance if they don’t have accounts? I was refuting your statement that a frontend needs an account. By mirroring an existing repo, as an example, you could verify that my claim is correct. Git as platform is already decentralized and doesn’t require accounts. You could email someone your git diff’s and it will function the same.
I feared as much, because the same could be said about your comment above.
I already mentioned
git send-emailin my comment. But the ux of that is terrible. So if you want good UX you’re in account hell, having to create a new profile for every hosting site.You can have a nice, terms of service free but read only forge, or you have terms of service and account bullshit or you can have the dev experience of git send email. Choose one of the three and until we have federation they are all terrible in some aspect.
Due to a generation being taught only Microsoft GitHub’s system, many forges have seen it imperative to copy all of those patterns—including all of the bad ones. Being a clone of MS GitHub isn’t a very compelling reason to be on another platform, but so few are looking to actually fix the issues Microsoft would be too big/slow to adapt to—e.g. the entire pull request model being so slow for getting it merges.
-
It’ll follow the enshitification path of every other big-tech site, give it time.
If you can’t wait, https://gitea.com/
Gitea is also privately owned. forgejo is the community owned fork of Gitea
Forgejo is foss fork. Gitea, while being free and open source as well for the time being, is run by a for-profit corporation now.
deleted by creator
Codeberg / Forgejo has a migration tool that you could use
Gitea supports migrating from a variety of sources, but I’m not sure about a bot that does everything in one click or so. You could probably make a simple script for that, though.
If I am not mistaken, there’s already an import tool. Or was it Codeberg?
Gitlab does have it. @[email protected] you can provide a personal access token to Gitlab and it’ll import your repos with all the issues and pull requests intact.
Anti Commercial AI thingy
Inserted with a keystroke running this script on linux with X11
#!/usr/bin/env nix-shell #!nix-shell -i bash --packages xautomation xclip sleep 0.2 (echo '::: spoiler Anti Commercial AI thingy [CC BY-NC-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/) Inserted with a keystroke running this script on linux with X11 ```bash' cat "$0" echo '``` :::') | xclip -selection clipboard xte "keydown Control_L" "key V" "keyup Control_L"
I’ve migrated all my repos (not much, around 50 repos or so) to GitLab this January, GitLab has a built-in tool for that, it was as easy as a single click once I authenticated GitHub to allow that.
Gitlab has a hard limit of 10gb
Gitlab.com has an even lower limit of 1GB, I think. But you can self-host it, that limit can be arbitrarily set.
Anti Commercial AI thingy
Inserted with a keystroke running this script on linux with X11
#!/usr/bin/env nix-shell #!nix-shell -i bash --packages xautomation xclip sleep 0.2 (echo '::: spoiler Anti Commercial AI thingy [CC BY-NC-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/) Inserted with a keystroke running this script on linux with X11 ```bash' cat "$0" echo '``` :::') | xclip -selection clipboard xte "keydown Control_L" "key V" "keyup Control_L"I got the message last month. I belive tho total limit for an account is 10gb
This is the coolest one I know of Self hosted, open source, good simple project management
So tired of seeing these posts.
Nobody worth listening to is complaining about creating an account on GitHub. Ubuntu brainstorm was a huge success and you had to create an account for that too
It literally takes 30s.
And github has a hugely comprehensive API that allows developers to easily move if that want to.
If Microsoft Open sourced the backend, the reality is, nobody would look at the code, and everyone would still use GitHub because it’s reliable. Vs code is open source, and I’m willing to bet community contributions are limited
And open sourcing the backend just means Oracle will take the code, and set up their own server for marginally cheaper and make GitHub worse… That’s what they did with red hat
What kind of shill is this, advocating for NOT open-sourcing the code?
There is a massive GitHub API which you probably already aren’t using. And now you want them to release the source code which you also won’t look at?
If they open source the code, what contributions would you make? How many contributions have you made to the Lemmy code? How many with vs code?
How would it benefit open source projects given that GitHub hosting is free for open source? How would it benefit GitHub?
Would you host your own GitHub repo when you can host it for free (which it will be for open source) on GitHub or other services anyway
Some projects don’t really benefit from open source.
If it’s a big thing, host your own using an open source project. Compete against GitHub.
But calling me a shill isn’t really an effective argument. I have contributed to a few open source projects in the past and released some of my own.
I don’t feel like forcing companies to open source their projects is the way. Open source needs to win on it’s own merits. And plenty of open source projects have (the Linux kernel as an example).
Have you contributed anything to githubs competitors? That might be a place to start. Because at the moment, there aren’t any issues with GitHub that open sourcing would address. Microsoft don’t need the additional resources
So many ignorant assumptions (first and main one being that I and others aren’t interested, and actively using and contributing to FLOSS forges) it’s not even worth arguing. Blocked.
There’s a reason GitHub is the largest service lol
You need to sell services based on their advantages rather than the politics. The reality is, github allows projects to be very easily migrated to other services anyway.
Using something because it’s open source isn’t helpful at all if it doesn’t work with your workflow easily
Productivity is more important to the success of open source than anything else.
I know this, because a project of mine died because we wasted too much time on infrastructure
Developers don’t need access to the GitHub source to do their job, and there is no advantage to anyone.
In fact, if they distribute the code, it simply reduces the incentive for Microsoft to improve it, and the only ones who will step are, are shit companies like Oracle
Time isn’t the only thing you give up when creating accounts—there is the terms of service, data collection, and supporting a proprietary held by a US megocorporation service by participating on it which is not helping the change many would like to see. This also fails to mention that as a US service they must comply with US sanctions so a section of users couldn’t create accounts if they wanted.
OP, if you want an arguably easier escape from MS GitHub, have you considered not using Git? The unfortunate current truth is these two are married to the point that a lot of new (& even experienced) folks think MS GitHub is Git & even if you start a project elsewhere, somebody will fork it onto the platform the the SEO bots will put their fork at the top of the ranks. You might be better off choosing a different DVCS all together as the interoperability will be much more difficult. That said, it wouldn’t just be to escape Microsoft, but also since there are a lot of interesting, less explored ideas in the space (like how learning functional or object-oriented code for the first time will broaden your perspective for tools & ideas you already know). Personally, I find the Patch Theory-based VCSs pretty compelling so it could be worth it to dig into Pijul or Darcs.
Gitlab or Gitea should integrate with Arweave and Fediverse. Fork if needed.
Develop a decentralized Github alternative.
Microsoft owns Github. It’s iron how popular Github is for open source.
Limitless Peace
Forgejo (Gitea fork) is working on federation, using the ForgeFed protocol: https://codeberg.org/forgejo/forgejo/issues/59
That’s awesome. Thanks
