Open source continues to struggle because above all else it has persisted in the idea of corporate dependence.
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RE: https://social.jvns.ca/@b0rk/116487769966981099
Open source continues to struggle because above all else it has persisted in the idea of corporate dependence. We moved to Sourceforge and it was a mess. We moved to Github which gave us even less individual control and it also became a mess. In between was also Launchpad but tbh that never really took off bc of bzr.
The alternative isn’t self-hosting though. Large projects provide code hosting for anything vaguely relevant. Umbrella hosting and cooperating on these services makes things more sustainable and makes anything less likely to disappear.
Over a decade ago I used to lend my time to various places to assist with hosting or just initial set up, and then everything started disappearing, wikis got swallowed by fandom and ign, every major project moved to github, and everyone else pretended you need a k8s cluster to run anything. We could just bring that back. We even learned a lot of important lessons from the likes of Freenode about how to avoid hostile takeovers.
Not to be unkind, but GitHub dying as the home of open source is a good thing for foss. We grew too complacent and dependant. Yeah it costs money and time to run our own spaces. Better than giving up.
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Not to be unkind, but GitHub dying as the home of open source is a good thing for foss. We grew too complacent and dependant. Yeah it costs money and time to run our own spaces. Better than giving up.
@maxine por que no los dos? a lot of people *are* going to give up as a result
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Not to be unkind, but GitHub dying as the home of open source is a good thing for foss. We grew too complacent and dependant. Yeah it costs money and time to run our own spaces. Better than giving up.
@maxine I'm largely happy with the FOSS diaspora
Multi platform CI/CD kinda sucks to build though
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@maxine por que no los dos? a lot of people *are* going to give up as a result
@glyph I view the first move to Sourceforge and subsequent move to Github as giving up, especially after Microsoft acqui, ICE contracts, etc.
For all the justified hate Canonical got, even Launchpad would have been a better home than an entirely proprietary platform. But then it seems we’re now replaying these mistakes with how many projects are willing not just to succumb to LLMs but specifically tie themselves to the goodwill of Anthropic and the like. Building foss on corporate ground was always silly.
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@maxine I'm largely happy with the FOSS diaspora
Multi platform CI/CD kinda sucks to build though
@astraluma god yeah, but i don’t think free ci would have lasted if they hadn’t eclipsed those costs with llms anyway
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@astraluma god yeah, but i don’t think free ci would have lasted if they hadn’t eclipsed those costs with llms anyway
@maxine Linux CI is largely ok, if you have even amateur levels of Linux admin experience. I've got a cheap-ass box in the basement doing stuff.
It's doing Linux, Windows, and Mac, that's annoying, especially since Mac is expensive and doesn't have containers.
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@maxine Linux CI is largely ok, if you have even amateur levels of Linux admin experience. I've got a cheap-ass box in the basement doing stuff.
It's doing Linux, Windows, and Mac, that's annoying, especially since Mac is expensive and doesn't have containers.
@astraluma i think the gap between free and managed and paid and requiring work, even if the cost is 3usd/mth and some minimal maintenance is shockingly insurmountable for a lot of people
But yeah, I am personally “exempt”. For Linux+Mac CI I literally do have my own infra, and would struggle to believe anyone who wanted to learn couldn’t operate the same, if they have the resources.
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Not to be unkind, but GitHub dying as the home of open source is a good thing for foss. We grew too complacent and dependant. Yeah it costs money and time to run our own spaces. Better than giving up.
@maxine i'd love to see federated protocols for software forges. being able to fork, open issues and send PRs without having to register an account on every instance would really open up the possibilities of a more distributed hosting ecosystem. i think forgejo was working on it but i don't know what the status of it is...
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@maxine i'd love to see federated protocols for software forges. being able to fork, open issues and send PRs without having to register an account on every instance would really open up the possibilities of a more distributed hosting ecosystem. i think forgejo was working on it but i don't know what the status of it is...
@drikanis afaik forgejo is still working on it, but tbh I think the problem is mimicking the github model so much. There’s nothing wrong with instead of a “fork” from which you make a PR, you submit a patch and it shows up the exact same way, minus the forked repo part. This would be a great way to lower the resource cost and barrier to submission, and minimise federation needs to identity (which we already had with openid, once upon a time)
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@maxine i'd love to see federated protocols for software forges. being able to fork, open issues and send PRs without having to register an account on every instance would really open up the possibilities of a more distributed hosting ecosystem. i think forgejo was working on it but i don't know what the status of it is...
@drikanis @maxine There is of course https://radicle.dev/ but it comes with its own caveats I guess
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RE: https://social.jvns.ca/@b0rk/116487769966981099
Open source continues to struggle because above all else it has persisted in the idea of corporate dependence. We moved to Sourceforge and it was a mess. We moved to Github which gave us even less individual control and it also became a mess. In between was also Launchpad but tbh that never really took off bc of bzr.
The alternative isn’t self-hosting though. Large projects provide code hosting for anything vaguely relevant. Umbrella hosting and cooperating on these services makes things more sustainable and makes anything less likely to disappear.
Over a decade ago I used to lend my time to various places to assist with hosting or just initial set up, and then everything started disappearing, wikis got swallowed by fandom and ign, every major project moved to github, and everyone else pretended you need a k8s cluster to run anything. We could just bring that back. We even learned a lot of important lessons from the likes of Freenode about how to avoid hostile takeovers.
@maxine Huge wishlist item I want to see: hosting where your issues, PRs, log, etc. appear on the web under a domain you own (so you actually have freedom to move without catastrophic linkrot).
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@maxine i'd love to see federated protocols for software forges. being able to fork, open issues and send PRs without having to register an account on every instance would really open up the possibilities of a more distributed hosting ecosystem. i think forgejo was working on it but i don't know what the status of it is...
@drikanis @maxine TBH I think ForgeFed's "federate all the forge functionality" is a bit of a distraction
90% of what people want is "I don't want to have to sign up over and over again for everyone's different one-off sites" and you can get that with OAuth plus dynamic client registration
the problem is right now Forgejo requires admins to individually add each other OAuth site by hand one-by-one when Forgejo should just ask the user for their server and do the registration for them (I've implemented this twice in different languages and it's under 200 lines)
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