[Arm-netbook] Standards Organization as a Potentially Universal Free/Libre Software Developement Sustenance Model

[Tzafrir Cohen]

On Sun, Jun 11, 2017 at 04:50:50PM -0400, doark at mail.com wrote:

> I give up. Why do some people dislike github or sourceforge?
> This is at least the third mailing list in which I've seen discontent
> without a reason given.

Git is a nice distributed version control system. That is: each node
contains the whole archive including all of the history. No inherent
central node. So all you need to develop with it is some basic hosting,
right?

Now Github comes along and tells you: if you use git in our site, you
can have extra goodies. Pull requests work. But only so long as you are
a user of Github to begin with. If it's not in Github, it might as well
not exist.

So suddenly you have a single point of failure. This is not that good.
For instance, what if Github decides not to allow you to host your
project (for whatever legitimate reason)?

I believe most people who object using Github here object using those
extra services and not merely using Github as a git hosting service. But
this point is mostly moot, as why would you use Github and not use bug
pull requests, bug tracking etc.?

Are they evil? Certainly not. They provide a great service that people
like. We should also provide quality services / software or otherwise
people will keep depending on walled gardens.


Sourceforge has held a somewhat similar position in the past (at around
1999-2005 or so) when a large portion of the projects were hosted there
because it provided a very fine hosting facility (files, web, shell,
mailing list, tasks, and more) for free. It is no longer in that
position. One problem with it nowadays is that they have been shown to
used some non-optimal methods of getting ad money in the recent past.

-- 
Tzafrir Cohen         | tzafrir at jabber.org | VIM is
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