So this is inspired somewhat by a question about somebody wanting to have a non-GitHub way of contributing to Lemmmy. I’ve really enojyed some other discussions on this community so felt somewhat inspired to ask this one too.

And whilst Lemmy is mirrored to a couple of alternatives (a self hosted Gitea and Codeberg) they can’t really be anything more than a mirror and a backup. If one doesn’t want to use GitHub they still can’t realistically contribute without signing up to GitHub and creating issues and PRs.

So what would it take to actually get people away from GitHub and onto alternatives (GitLab, Codeberg, sourcehut)? The situation seems to somewhat parallel the whole Reddit and Twitter thing. Both have/had a huge monopoly on users to the point where it just wasn’t really worth using anything else, at least not if you wanted to be part of a decently sized community.

Other mass migrations

Obviously the difference with Reddit and Twitter is that they both have had their version of “the Event” which cause existing projects (Mastodon, Lemmy amongst others) to suddenly explode in popularity. Has it killed off the originals? No but it has made the alternatives actually viable with enough of a community to sustain them and encourage more to join, even if slowly.

GitHub has had its fair share of controversy, most recently surrounding co-pilot and code scraping but no particular widespread outrage to cause people to leave it in droves.

GitHub is the home of open source?

I think for many GitHub has simply become synonymous with open source. The sheer number of repositories and projects hosted there means that people just use GitHub alone for all of their open source needs and don’t even look at other forges. Not to mention all the services offered - most of the alternatives can offer some of the same features but not all of them. Not only do you get space for your project code itself but you get access to their CI/CD platform, a forum through Discussions, a wiki, a project management tool, static site hosting which is an awful lot for smaller projects like GitLab and community non-profit projects like Codeberg to compete with.

There of course are some people that rely on their GitHub profile and their activity chart in order to get jobs and advance their careers - many of these people I suspect wouldn’t want to fragment their profile by having to split their activity up over multiple profiles.

So why would anyone not want to use GitHub. Quite simply it isn’t really in the spirit of open source is it? Not only is it controlled by Microsoft who haven’t historically been the friendliest towards open source but GitHub itself is closed source. You can’t host your own GitHub and get all the same features it enjoys. It does seem somewhat odd that the biggest vault of open source projects is itself proprietary and completely closed off.

What would need to happen for things to change?

So realistically what could be done about it? What would need to happen in order to entice people off of GitHub? Something arriving in the hopefully not too distant future is forge federation - projects such as Forgefriends, ForgeFed and ForgeFlux aim to try and create a federation of software forges. One of the main issues about having to create different accounts for every single platform goes away as you just stick with the instance you like best (or host your own) and yet still be able to fully interact with software hosted on other platforms. This means that you should be able to interact with a project hosted on, say, Codeberg, from your sourcehut account. You should be able to see issues, PRs etc. just as if you were on the same website.

GitHub, I strongly imagine, would have no intention of joining in order to maintain and protect their walled garden. I just don’t see a world where they would want to join in with federation.

Lastly I just want to add that I’m absolutely not judging anyone for using GitHub. The main project I’m involved with is also still on GitHub for some good reasons. Not only is it intertwined with their ecosystem but it provides services that we just need at this point. We still rely on some of GitHub’s services so we don’t spend our community donations on hosting stuff that we just don’t need to. It lightens the maintenance on us whilst we are still in a very active stage of the project with an awful lot of moving parts. And the bit I hate most, we need to be visible to the community - we aren’t big enough to go to one of the alternative platforms because what community engagement we have might well drop through the floor if people are suddenly forced to make accounts on other services just to log an issue or ask a question. I would love to move to a platform like Codeberg and any personal project I make would probably be hosted there but for a big-ish community project we just cannot justify it. So I am well aware of the attraction of GitHub and what keeps people there. What I want to know is what would be needed to actually break that inertia for projects, such as the one I mentioned, to justify a move away from GitHub - particularly people who may be far less ideological about the open source world.

tl;dr

  • GitHub offer many nice thing
  • Other places have not so many nice thing
  • How other place make people change mind up to move from place with all thing and all people to place with less many people and thing?
  • tal@kbin.social
    11·
    1 year ago

    GitHub, I strongly imagine, would have no intention of joining in order to maintain and protect their walled garden.

    Git makes it easy to export the code and its revision history.

    I don’t know about issue tracker content.

    I think that the largest amount of lock-in is from familiarity with the interface, which applies to pretty much any service or product to some degree.

    EDIT: While the code and commits may be under an open-source license, I do kind of wonder about the licenses on the other content on the website, like to the pull request material, which is legitimately important in maintaining an open-source project – it documents original rationales and such. Like, can Microsoft block access to them and sell them unless all of the original contributors agree to grant re-publication?

    goes to look

    Yeah. Looking at the text, it sounds like third parties might have rights to the code in the repository via the license, but not the issue tracker and suchlike: the only grant of rights there is to use it via GitHub.

    https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/github-terms/github-terms-of-service#d-user-generated-content

    1. License Grant to Other Users

    Any User-Generated Content you post publicly, including issues, comments, and contributions to other Users’ repositories, may be viewed by others. By setting your repositories to be viewed publicly, you agree to allow others to view and “fork” your repositories (this means that others may make their own copies of Content from your repositories in repositories they control).

    If you set your pages and repositories to be viewed publicly, you grant each User of GitHub a nonexclusive, worldwide license to use, display, and perform Your Content through the GitHub Service and to reproduce Your Content solely on GitHub as permitted through GitHub’s functionality (for example, through forking). You may grant further rights if you adopt a license. If you are uploading Content you did not create or own, you are responsible for ensuring that the Content you upload is licensed under terms that grant these permissions to other GitHub Users.

    It’s probably impossible to track down all of the original creators of comments to get approval for some off-site reproduction, too.

    • DaeraxaOP
      2·
      1 year ago

      I think that the largest amount of lock-in is from familiarity with the interface, which applies to pretty much any service or product to some degree.

      I think this is somewhat mitigated with some of the alternatives. You have the much more basic/“traditional” UIs of something like sourcehut which can be a bit of a challenge to get used to if you aren’t familiar. Then you have the “GitHub-like” UIs - GitLab, Gogs/Gitea/Forgejo/Codeberg where people feel instantly comfortable as it is almost exactly the same experience as what they are used to.