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Comment by xte | Hacker News Reader

Of course, like the trend "hey if it does not work for you write down your code"...

On git only: what is another remote? A GitHub concurrent company? A personal dyndns from a single developer with a fable ADSL?

On GitHub: many use it's proprietary characteristics like PR, wikies, pages etc. That's not "portable" to any other remote if you do not count site-scraping...

No, we need to focus on distributed/decentralized solution now.

In the past at least we use tons of different hosting most of them offered by ISP that actually use hosted projects, universities that actually participate in many FOSS project so while not distributed we are decentralized on "friendly" systems. Not nearly all FOSS project is on a super-big-corp server. Without any viable alternative ready to use.

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> On git only: what is another remote?

A remote is a URL location of a repository. A local git repo can point to multiple remotes by using the git remote <opts> functionality. For instance, you can point your local repo to GitHub, GitLab, and BitBucket and choose which to push to using the command git push <branch> <remote>.

Hem, no perhaps is my poor English but you do not understand: I know what a git remote is. My point is what kind of "other remote" a typical FOSS project have these days?

In the past we have tons of hosters so we can easily spread our code in many "mirror", now there is GitHub and few others, mostly on the very same "cloud".

I mean you have no damn viable remote. Single devs can share code P2P but nothing that can work instantly out of the box.

Get a VPS and setup git?

Good. On witch cloud? Google? Amazon? Microsoft?

When I was a bit younger I read that "internet" was a fantastic decentralized infrastructure explicitly design to being fault-tolerant and unlockable as possible to survive any critical scenario... Now it seems more a deep substrate of a modern mainframe... So deep that only few subject can really access it, all others are in their own hand...

> My point is what kind of "other remote" a typical FOSS project have these days?

In the context of the original comment, think: "setup a /second/ remote" as the meaning. If the first 'remote' is github, the second remote could be gitlab, and so forth.

Ah ok, so you change Microsoft cloud for Google cloud... UAU... And what about PRs&c?

Sorry for being rude but for me is unacceptable to depend on tons of proprietary stuff from a handful of vendors. Even personal websites that use Google Fonts, some JS framework directly from the "project" CDN (too hard to keep it on your disk, up to date) etc...

We need to be interdependent or independent not dependent of few subjects that make money on us for witch us are puppets. How can we say "it's FOSS" if so? How can we have FOSS as the tip of a proprietary iceberg?

You do realize that git itself is vendor independent, right?

One can, if one chooses, setup a git repository on a spare PC in ones basement and have a "git repository" into which one or more collaborators can "git push" and "git pull" to/from.

In the context of the original post, to which you asked "what is another remote", the second (or third, or fourth) 'remote' can be "any git repository to which the individual has access".

Having a second remote does not, in an of itself, require that that second remote be one of the proprietary git hosting systems, nor require that it be one of the semi-proprietary or open source hosting systems. It could just as well be plain git running in repository serving mode on an old PC.

See the documentation for the "git http-backend" and "git daemon" commands that are built into the git distribution.

Yes, git, however host a repo for anyone it's another story. In the past most FOSS projects was mirrored by tons of different participants, mostly universities, ISPs, companies with reasonable resource and being part of the project itself they can be considered friendly.

now with GitHub&c excluding Savannah the sole friendly option is buy a domain, a VPS and host there the project...

That's the problem, not technical but "political" to a certain extent.

In the past someone try GitTorrent to solve this problem a bit (opening the door for "personal hosting at home" but it's a dead project now ad it was never completed. Mostly because newcomers think GitHub&c as a free space by nature, something guarantee to work always and been always free without any other "occult" cost.

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