As you can easily notice, today many open source projects are using some services, that are… sus.
For example, Github is the most popular place to store your project code and we all know, who owns it. And not to forget that sketchy AI training on every line of your code. Don’t we have alternatives? Oh, yes we have. Gitlab, Codeberg, Notabug, etc. You can even host your own Gitea or Forgejo instance if you want.
Also, Crowdin is very popular in terms of software (and docs) translation. Even Privacy Guides and The New Oil use Crowdin, even though we have FLOSS Weblate, that you can easily self-host or use public instances.
So, my question is: if you are building a FLOSS / privacy related project, why using proprietary and privacy invasive tools?
A lot of people use Github because it’s easy to use and popular. Not everyone wants to self host, although it would be nice if the larger projects did. What I really hate is when open source projects use something like disord for support.
I run a fairly popular open source project called Svelte Material UI, and I can tell you why I use Discord for support. My users want me to use it. GitHub too.
People want to use what they already have, and most people, even developers, don’t care that much about privacy. I would gladly self host a support forum, but tons of people would rather use a different library than sign up for my personal support forum. And the people who really care about privacy wouldn’t trust my self hosted solution either, so there isn’t really a better option than Discord, as much as that sucks.
I can’t even use discord at all because it forces me to verify with a phone number as soon as I sign up, every single time, no matter what ISP/browser/etc. I use.
When support is hidden away in discord, web searches can’t find it. Nobody can even look through it without having an account.
I agree that it sucks. I would much rather use a more open platform. But my users don’t want that. Discord is convenient, people want convenience, and I want to give my users convenience (even if it means I have to answer the same questions once in a while).
Only convenient for those who are on discord. Everyone else is excluded.
Sure, but I’ve actually had people ask me to set up a Discord, and no one has ever asked me to set up anything else.
Unrelated question but why did you not upvote your own comment?
on lemmy.world it automatically does that for you.
I posted like I normally do from the Voyager app, and it shows me that I’ve upvoted it, so I don’t know.
weird
Edit: It most like was a federation problem on my end.
Whenever I see a project which the support relies on Discord, I ignore it, or I treat it as if it doesn’t have support at all.
I refuse to participate in a community which makes Meta looking like a privacy focused company.
I disagree with the fact because they want to self host. Codeberg exists and is pretty easy to use. Been thinking of migrating there.
I hope this changes (even if a little bit) once Forgejo (FLOSS Gitea fork) adds forge federation.
Radicle already supports this and it is in use right now.
I don’t mind if they have a support discord, as long as they have a better alternative available
Because most oss maintainers are more afraid of their work disappearing due to service shutdowns than they are being profiled by data miners.
Everyone has seen some example of a tool or resource hosted on a persons private server end up taken down because they couldn’t afford it, the isp or university stopped offering hosting or because they simply couldn’t keep doing it due to death or old age.
That’s what people who create software are afraid of. The loss of that creation, not the loss of the privacy of people who contribute to it or download it.
Network effect.
Using GitHub as an example, choosing any alternative (as a small project) will reduce the amount of contributions and will make the project less discoverable. Especially if you consider projects where the technical barrier for contribution is lower, it is much more likely for a potential contributor to have an account on a “mainstream” platform.
I used to think that this was less of an issue in more niche communities, but a recent post by an Emacs package developer (Protesilaos Stavrou, won an FSF award a few years ago) changed my mind: https://protesilaos.com/codelog/2024-04-30-re-emacs-github-freedom-microsoft/
That makes sense. But what about big ongoing projects/ Couldn’t they easily migrate to a FOSS service? I’d imagine people will look out for them specifically no matter where they’re hosted.
Big projects generally have their own websites to house their community. Example of LibreOffice comes to mind.
Codeberg is relatively new, gitlab sucks, I’ve never heard of notabug. That’s why. People want their open source projects to be found and contributed to so using what the most popular makes sense. Although i do love codeberg and I’m glad it’s being worked on so well.
There’s been a general trend towards self-hosted GitLab instances in some projects:
Small projects tend to not want to spin up infrastructure, but on GitHub you know your code will still be there 10 years later after you disappear. The same cannot be said of my Cogs instance and whatever was on it.
And overall, GitHub has been pretty good to users. No ads, free, pretty speedy, and a huge community of users that already have an account where they can just PR your repo. Nobody wants to make an account on some random dude’s instance just to open a PR.
GitHub (since the Microsoft acquisition) is good to users because that’s their MO, it’s called Embrace, Extend, Extinguish, and the whole point is to centralize users and projects and make them dependent on the Microsoft ecosystem.
Of course now there’s also the whole issue of Copilot, which means any code you put on GitHub could very well show up piecemeal in someone’s AI-generated code. If it wasn’t for that novel avenue of monetization, you can bet your ass GitHub would have already made the free user experience a lot shittier.
Micosoft also owns npm, Windows, Azure, Office, Outlook, Teams, & LinkedIn—MS GitHub is not just Copilot, but Sponsors & Codespaces. The whole overarching goal is to integrate all this data & make support between these products is prioritize with little upsells inside the apps, & get you hooked on the ecosystem… neo-EEE.
Wouldn’t code hosted anywhere on the open internet be potentially susceptible to AI scraping?
You can host a git repo with little effort on any Linux machine you can ssh to. You don’t need to host a git lab instance unless you want some web gui.
Multiform merge support, issues, wiki’s, discussions. Its all of the other pieces of a software forge.
Maybe an unpopular opinion but why would you care about how privacy invasive GitHub is? Your code is open-source anyways so MSFT can steal it wherever you host it. And if they haven’t changed it you’re able to sign up with just an email and a pseudonym. It’s not a social network where you have to post private information for it to be useful you can and most people do use it pretty anonymously.
So I never understand the outrage about GitHub and MSFT. Git is distributed anyway, the only thing that can be lost are issues and pull request histories. If they fuck up, everyone can just move. Now GitHub Actions, that is a clever thing for binding users…
they can take your whole project down if they want so. or if they are forced to do so.
git is literally distributed. Its trivial to push it to a new origin if that happens
so why not do it from the beginning?
Because the downsides completely outweigh the upsides by a massive amount. Risk of GitHub removing any of my projects is practically 0, while the upsides of hosting elsewhere is also almost 0.
but does it really matter where your personal project with maybe 10 stars resides? if not why not choose something like codeberg?
Yes because every company I work at uses GitHub, I use GitHub actions at work, and the majority of programmers on the planet use GitHub. So I’d not only need to maintain another account, use a different build system, and spread my project in some other manner, but I’d be losing the majority of my contributors (my most starred project has 100 stars, second most is 50). If that’s on a platform with the _most _ contributors then I literally wouldn’t have any on a different platform. I have 40+ FOSS projects (source, not forks) and I’m not going to maintain all of those somewhere where they won’t get viewers.
Because most of us want projects with users, and there’s a lot more users on GitHub and Discord than Gitea and Matrix
@OsrsNeedsF2P But that’s the problem we need to fix, not the reason to give up. There will be more people on Gitea and Matrix if you try. There is also more people on Reddit and Twitter, yet here we are.
If you try. Have you ever maintained any sort of large FOSS project? Have you ever run infra for FOSS? Even if you control your own DNS, you somehow became your own Domain Name Registrar, you bought the fiber all the way to your internet backbone provider, you are still compromising somewhere. For those of us that actually maintain and run foss projects it’s a massive pain in the ass. There’s nothing to “give up”. It’s all about using your personal resources wisely. I can’t spend time trying to get gitea up and running when I can quite easily use GitHub and lose absolutely zero functionality. And it’s not like any project I put on GitHub is somehow worse off than on gitea, they’ll function exactly the same since I only use MIT licensing.
I wish I could upvote you more than once.
It all really comes down to making choices that make the most use of the extremely limited resources (time, money, spoons) you have as a maintainer.
@foosel If that is the case, then how did the choice of using an open-source license even get through? It sounds like you are confusing commercial thinking (we have to get more users, we have to be where the users are, we have to support them, we have to meet the KPIs…) with the open-source. You don’t have to do any of those.
You misunderstood me. My reason isn’t “get more users”. My reason is “my day only has 24h and maintenance itself is a full time job, without adding on hosting, administration, etc for code repository or communication infrastructure”.
I have to choose my fights if I don’t want to burn out. I’ve been a full time maintainer for 10 years now, 8 of those self employed.
That being said, I do in fact self host a web forum for my project (which I can only do because I have a volunteer admin taking care of the day to day and a whole ton of mods helping with moderation), and I do have a nightly mirror of everything on the project’s GitHub org to my private NAS just in case.
@foosel But why do you feel like you “have to” do those things? Are you paid for it? Are you trying to sell the project? Are you looking for VC funding? Is someone threatening you if you stop fighting those fights? Those are all things from the commercial mindset, or things exploited by Jia Tan. Of course everybody likes when a project is maintained, good quality, free, but that should come from the cooperation and from the freedoms in the license and platform, not from your personal sacrifice
Welcome to the real world, where open source maintenance should be a lot of things but instead boils down to a whole lot of personal sacrifices by maintainers. I don’t like this either, and do what I can to improve it, but that’s a slow process. Idealism is nice, but it doesn’t help here.
And why do I do this to myself? Because I believe in open source and because I want people to have free access to good tooling. Currently I can afford to do this thanks to crowd funding of my work. I would never accept VC funding.
Kindly stop insinuating that I’m a turbo capitalist corporate drone, it’s insulting and absolutely ridiculous.
@tyler Also note how you went from “we want projects with users” to “oh it’s so hard to provide services to so many users”… at least stick to your argument. One thing is for sure - actively keeping users away from open platforms is not going to increase the users on these open platforms. Doesn’t take a genius to figure that out. Do what you want, I’m just pointing out that you seem to be working against yourself.
@tyler Also note how you went from “we want projects with users” to “oh it’s so hard to provide services to so many users”… at least stick to your argument. One thing is for sure - actively keeping users away from open platforms is not going to increase the users on these open platforms. Doesn’t take a genius to figure that out. Do what you want, I’m just pointing out that you seem to be working against yourself.
I literally didn’t make any of these arguments. You’re just setting up several strawmen to attack. And no, I’m not working against myself. Using non-OSS software has nothing to do with ‘working against’ FOSS software. I can all but guarantee you use non-OSS software every single day which was the actual point I was making and you so conveniently ignored. Whether it’s the software that runs the car you drive, or the software for the train you take to work, or the software in your cell phone, there is lots of necessary non-FOSS software out there and you’re completely ignoring that any given person’s time and energy can only be spent on so much.
@tyler So why are you doing open source anyway, if not for the philosophy? You are completely undermining that by forcing your contributors to stick to proprietary walled gardens. Last time I checked there were hosting providers for both gitea and matrix.
@tyler So why are you doing open source anyway, if not for the philosophy? You are completely undermining that by forcing your contributors to stick to proprietary walled gardens. Last time I checked there were hosting providers for both gitea and matrix.
none of my users have to use any walled gardens. My final artifacts are pushed up to the respective artifactory like npm, maven central, rubygems, pypi, etc. all of which are artifact repositories set up by non-profit foundations that anyone can use. You are talking about being open to contributors, which is an entirely separate thing from users. I’m not forcing anyone to contribute, and no one is forced to use my projects. I can pretty much guarantee I’ve contributed to more OSS in the past year than you have in a lifetime, and it’s going to continue to be that way for the foreseeable future. So you can fuck right off
@tyler Did you just break some code of conduct by telling me to F off? For what exactly? Arguing for open source software here on the open source community? Interesting…
