Software Freedom Conservancy: Give up GitHub

5 views
Skip to first unread message

William Lindley

unread,
Jul 12, 2022, 9:04:06 AM7/12/22
to KYOSS general discussion list
Any thoughts on this?
\\/


— ⋄ —

Those who forget history often inadvertently repeat it. Some of us recall that twenty-one years ago, the most popular code hosting site, a fully Free and Open Source (FOSS) site called SourceForge, proprietarized all their code — never to make it FOSS again. Major FOSS projects slowly left SourceForge since it was now, itself, a proprietary system, and antithetical to FOSS. FOSS communities learned that it was a mistake to allow a for-profit, proprietary software company to become the dominant FOSS collaborative development site. SourceForge slowly collapsed after the DotCom crash… We now must learn the SourceForge lesson again with Microsoft's GitHub.

GitHub has, in the last ten years, risen to dominate FOSS development. They did this by building a user interface and adding social interaction features to the existing Git technology. (For its part, Git was designed specifically to make software development distributed without a centralized site.)

…There are so many good reasons to give up on GitHub, and we list the major ones on our Give Up On GitHub site. We were already considering this action ourselves for some time, but last week's event showed that this action is overdue…

Jeff Squyres

unread,
Jul 12, 2022, 6:00:28 PM7/12/22
to KYOSS Discuss List
It is certainly a very interesting topic -- there are definitely points on both sides of this issue.  There's quite a bit of inflammatory rhetoric in the cited article, but it's not wrong, either.  That being said, I can see points on the Microsoft/Github side, too.  And then there's a developer side (which isn't really discussed in that article).  For example, some developers may value the quality of the Github ecosystem of tools, and have no problem with Microsoft/Github using their code as an ML training set.  Shrug.

This would be a great discussion for the meeting tomorrow (sadly, I am unable to be there).



--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "KYOSS general discussion list" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to kyoss-discus...@kyoss.dev.


-- 
{+} Jeff Squyres

bent...@gmail.com

unread,
Jul 12, 2022, 7:07:38 PM7/12/22
to kyoss-...@kyoss.dev
Hey guys,

My birthday is Saturday and my week is hella packed due to that so I won’t be able to make the meeting tomorrow sorry 

Sent from my iPhone

On Jul 12, 2022, at 6:00 PM, Jeff Squyres <je...@squyres.com> wrote:

It is certainly a very interesting topic -- there are definitely points on both sides of this issue.  There's quite a bit of inflammatory rhetoric in the cited article, but it's not wrong, either.  That being said, I can see points on the Microsoft/Github side, too.  And then there's a developer side (which isn't really discussed in that article).  For example, some developers may value the quality of the Github ecosystem of tools, and have no problem with Microsoft/Github using their code as an ML training set.  Shrug.

jdstelli

unread,
Jul 12, 2022, 7:23:08 PM7/12/22
to kyoss-...@kyoss.dev
That's ok! Enjoy your birthday. I'll update the presentations.
Reply all
Reply to author
Forward
0 new messages