Hacker News Reader

Comment by lfam | Hacker News Reader

Why would a free software project leave GitHub just to run a proprietary "stack"?

You could try one of the self-hostable free software alternatives listed here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_source_code_host...

View on HN

With self-hosting you don't get the broader community... With node, for example, most modules have source on github and it's easy to fork, fix/enhance something and submit a PR... with everyone self hosting, how many logins do you have to create.

I know, tracking, federation, etc... but it's much nicer only having a couple logins (google, fb, twitter, github) for most sites I access regularly.

SSO is a separately solvable problem, and even so, I'm not sure it's a solution that needs applying here. It's not clear why any form of sign-on is needed—SSO or not. Almost everybody in this space is already using public-key crypto for authentication.

But not for signing into the website, and adding notes for a pull request, or filing a bug/issue/feature request.

I don't even know why I bother trying to have discussions with GitHub users.

How does public key crypto let me use multiple website, similar to github's, so that I can create a PR, and update/edit notes/comments on issues? It's a demonstrably broken experience in the browser.

Having one key to rule them all, so to speak is far easier than having to sign into every project's own issue tracker. I understand the risks (ie: sourceforge), but have some level of trust in GH's founders.

self-hostable and free doesn't mean they're not proprietary.

and my comment was more about the fact that github is just git (which is completely open) with some extra features. like the other comments have said, it's not really a big risk.

I don't mean free as in price. I mean free as in freedom, and I mean proprietary as in non-free: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proprietary_software

Reply on news.ycombinator.com