GitHub Is Not Open Source, A Rant
GitHub Is Not Open Source, A Rant
Github is Not Open Source | Juliette — I write
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.
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...
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"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.
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.
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.
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.
Did you just discover this? It's a Microsoft site after all.
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.
GitHub isn’t.
The code on it is.
You could use gitlab, or something else.
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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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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.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
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.
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
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
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.