It works both ways. If you're too lazy to learn a service I chose to host my code, you don't deserve my code.
(Sorry to put it harshly, but it's felt like we're all getting a bit spoiled. Especially compared to the old days.)
For better or worse, you are the product if you use a centralized, free service. And the only thing keeping those dominant players dominant is the blind loyalty we seem to give freely.
It's all about that convenience! I get that. But morals have their place, and in the coming months the world will show whether they care at all about centralization.
It's probably important to stay nervous about centralization. If we let our guards down, we could find ourselves on the short end of an upsetting stick. History has shown time and again that when companies have no incentive to compete, they tend not to try. The reason Facebook can be so free with your data is that there is no way to compete with them. With github, at least there's a way.
Honestly, the biggest thing holding back Github competitors is that they won't just make their service look identical to Github. Gitlab looks strange every time I run across a repo. Instead everyone wants to be different, and usually it's not better.
I use (for example) 50 libraries, and want to submit bug reports and pull requests to all of them over the course of 5 years...
and your attitude is "well.. if you don't make 50 accounts you don't deserve it!". Really? And also that's why we have package repositories... npm, nuget, PECL, composer, should i also register on 500 websites just so i can build a website or two?
Also, github is free for open-source projects, but it's paid for teams and enterprises. it's a win-win situation where they do social good and get paid for private service.
Alternatives & competition is good, but too much competition is not that great either in this case.
This is what I like about collaborating on code that still uses mailing lists to collaborate. I already have an account that I can use for every mailing list in existence -- my email account.
Maybe, but maybe I disagree with how they treat their female employees, or maybe I don't like that they financially support some political thing or whatever.
Capitalism doesn't work without real competition. I shouldn't be obliged to do business with this one particular company if I want to develop Free Software. My point isn't that GitHub is evil; it's that each person should be free to decide that individually.
Correct, capitalism isn't inherently evil, competitions is healthy. That's why we have github, bitbucket, sourceforge,gitlab,gitea,phabricator, and probably few more projects like this. however imagine if we had thousands and the open source community was give or take evenly distributed between them. that would simply be nightmare. discoverability will be pretty low, contributions will be even lower and the community wouldn't be thriving as it is now. path of least resistance and all that..
First you spoke of 50, then 500 (web sites), now thousands (yet you only managed to name 6).. this is starting to resemble reductio ad absurdum.
You haven't really made a convincing argument for why we might have excessive variety, such as an unusually low barrier to entry compared with other open source tools.
Moreover, I'm pretty sure your arguments could also be used in favor of federation, rather than centralization.
Why would discoverability be low? Search engines exist.
Why would contributions be low? Presumably we'd have a common way to contribute from your own federated instance.
There are thousands of websites (maybe even more!) and it's possible to discover them and comment/upload/whatever. Would it be better if they all moved to Medium, Wordpress.com and Facebook?
> It works both ways. If you're too lazy to learn a service I chose to host my code, you don't deserve my code.
I have infinite work that needs to be done, and a finite amount of time. I have found in my experience that only looking at github works for maximizing my productivity; I can get almost everything there, and the returns for learning another system does not make up for the time it takes. This isn't about laziness, it is about choosing to put effort where I get the most value for it.
> For better or worse, you are the product if you use a centralized, free service
I pay for github (7 bucks a month for a personal account, and my company pays $100k+ for github enterprise).
I think the thing we should be nervous about is not centralization, but vendor lock-in. As long as we can switch, we are ok. Making sure we use abstractions in our interaction with github API helps with this.
However, as long as they keep providing the best service, I will keep using them.
I would not say that GH offers the best service. There are lots of features that they are lacking compared to BitBucket and GitLab. I think it is about the interface and that we are just too used to it and lazy to retrain around brains... again
> It works both ways. If you're too lazy to learn a service I chose to host my code, you don't deserve my code.
Not really, you just get less people using, contributing, and testing your project - software should try and stay in the known, not scattered around sourceforge, google code ... etc
> It works both ways. If you're too lazy to learn a service I chose to host my code, you don't deserve my code.
Linus is that you?
[1] in case you don’t get the reference.
But in all seriousness this is a terrible attitude to have. One of the things I enjoy about being a developer is the community and collaboration and this type of thinking is the antithesis of that.
I’d much rather have centralised tools and a distributed/diverse development community than decentralised tools and isolationist community.
(Sorry to put it harshly, but it's felt like we're all getting a bit spoiled. Especially compared to the old days.)
For better or worse, you are the product if you use a centralized, free service. And the only thing keeping those dominant players dominant is the blind loyalty we seem to give freely.
It's all about that convenience! I get that. But morals have their place, and in the coming months the world will show whether they care at all about centralization.
It's probably important to stay nervous about centralization. If we let our guards down, we could find ourselves on the short end of an upsetting stick. History has shown time and again that when companies have no incentive to compete, they tend not to try. The reason Facebook can be so free with your data is that there is no way to compete with them. With github, at least there's a way.
Honestly, the biggest thing holding back Github competitors is that they won't just make their service look identical to Github. Gitlab looks strange every time I run across a repo. Instead everyone wants to be different, and usually it's not better.