Hacker News Reader

Comment by nimbius | Hacker News Reader

>I don't think Github is an evil organization.

its...getting there. There are good arguments to suggest new Microsoft is the same as old Microsoft and this might be one of them. Github frantically clawing for control of developers, while blindly enforcing things like ITAR are a classic Microsoft case of directionless middle management vying for government rent-seeking and free market capital at the same time.

Either MS fixes this quick, or FLOSS projects will rightly start hosting things elsewhere. free software is free as in speech, and in most cases this crap is interpreted as outright censorship.

View on HN

>> FLOSS projects will rightly start hosting things elsewhere

They should be doing that anyway, and it should be happening RIGHT NOW, not because of this single dev account suspension but because centralization of control is the antithesis of FOSS, the fact that the community is centralized around github is a clear and present danger to said community.

and no the solution it not for everyone to just move to gitlab, I can see that coming as well, replacing github with hosted gitlab would simply replicate the problem

We as a community need to the distributed, not centralized

> replacing github with hosted gitlab would simply replicate the problem

How so? A hosted gitlab instance makes you immune from the administrative whims of any particular corporation.

It's possible that gitlab the company stops maintaining the free editions but that's not very much different from other pieces of software going unmaintained.

All the older project hosting software suites like sourceforge/gforge/savannah are still available.

Git itself is very easy to use in a distribute manner, but I guess some form of distributed issue tracker is missing?

I meant using GitLab's Hosted solution, their Cloud SaaS

Not Self Hosting a GitLab environment yourself.

GitLab.com, not Self-Managed

How will they pay for it

Opensource on the whole doesn't pay unless it's sponsored by a company.

Git repo hosting really doesn't cost much unless it's super popular and needs a lot of bandwidth (at which point you can probably get some hosting company to sponsor).

At minimum, a Raspberry Pi and an internet connection will do. If you want something a bit more reliable, you can get a virtual server for $5/month and host many repos on it.

Here is a decentralized and distributed backend for git called Mango. Basically takes advantage of Ethereum and P2P content addressable networks. https://github.com/axic/mango

[Edit]: Here is another using the BitTorrent protocol - https://github.com/cjb/GitTorrent

Github "Frantically clawing for control of developers", "vying for government rent-seeking and free market capital"?

...We must be experiencing very different versions of reality. Usually I sort-of get where people are coming from, even when I disagree. Here, I couldn't even name anything Github is doing that would support these statements. What power do they have, except being a useful product?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com