I’d like to give you a heads-up about some changes we’re making at OpenSSL. We’re simplifying how
you can get our software, and that means we’re …
We’re no longer using our old ftp, rsync, and git links for distributing OpenSSL. These were great in their day, but it’s time to move on to something better and safer. ftp://ftp.openssl.org and rsync://rsync.openssl.org are not available anymore. As of June 1, 2024, we’re also going to shut down https://ftp.openssl.org and git://git.openssl.org/openssl.git mirrors.
GitHub is becoming the main distributor of the OpenSSL releases.
Yes, what would possibly go wrong ? And OpenSSL is only a small and unimportant project and hardly anyone depends on it, right ? Right ? I can dig that they want to get rid of some of their own services but completely giving up on their own git repository ? Let's hope they do mirror the source code on Codeberg or sourcehut.
Read-only github mirror with read/write on a personal forge seems like one possible approach to make it more accessible/friendly without giving up any control to MS.
These were great in their day, but it’s time to move on to something better and safer.
How is it "safer" when contributing to the codebase or filing and discussing issues will now require creating an account and giving up personal information to one of the most privacy-invasive tech companies in the world? 😳
Edit to clarify: The blog is strictly speaking about the means of distributing the release tarball. Distributing the release tarball has nothing to do with how contribution is accepted or how issue is handled. What they say on the blog is also very clear IMHO and for a good reason. Maintaining infrastructure takes work. Works that if you didn't do it right can be an attack vector. Do you guys remember xz? Do you read how the vulnerabilities came to be? Maintaining a single source of truth for the release tarball can help mitigate that. If one malicious actor can control even one of the distribution channels of the release tarball we get xz 2 electric boogaloo.
I think a lot of people here read the headine and think OpenSSL is moving everything to github and giving up everything else. It is not. They only moved the means of distributing the release tarball to github and stopped supporting the ftp and rsync. Do not confuse distribution and contribution/development.
Those are fairly weak arguments honestly, none which have anything to do with the features on GitHub itself. In fact, this could have been written by someone who has no development or project management knowledge
Open source projects also don't pay for GitHub.
Here's one counterargument. One of our projects failed because we wasted so much time arguing about the hosting that we didn't get much done. We moved between a few different services and wasted time comparing shortcomings between them.
In practice, migration from GitHub is actually super easy if you ever wanted to because they literally have an API for everything. It also is a really comprehensive service, and a lot of the open source ones are missing things
Im not a fan of Microsoft, but GitHub works really well and you can rely on it to be fully reliable (there have been few outages)
but GitHub works really well and you can rely on it to be fully reliable
So does GitLab, Codeberg, sourcehut or self-hosting your own instance of GitLab CE, Gogs, Gitea or Forgejo. Why use GitHub? Especially, when developing open source software? Why use a proprietary software forge run by a Big Tech corporation that uses your code to train some AI model?
Considering the absolutely devastating performance hits 3.x brings (and the apparent design failures that make it extremely difficult if not impossible to reclaim it) I wonder if openssl's days are numbered. WolfSSL seems to be favorable to the HAProxy team. Hopefully that can get some traction.
Good that you mention WolfSSL and that HAProxy team seems to like it. Years ago some Linux distributions made the switch to LibreSSL, but unfortunately that all (?) seems to have failed.
I doubt many commenters here have used a wheelchair ramp to access a public building. Guess we should just remove all those ramps since that accessibility doesn’t affect them. The barrier to entry for setting up a wheel chair ramp is more expensive than offering at least one non-corporate code contribution method.