What can I say?! Thank you for your time writing all this stuff. I appreciate it!
You reminded me I have to go check this open source vs free source issue. Anyway, I think if GitHub it’s currently the “best” option it doesn’t mean one day there could not be a Free Software better alternative to it. Honestly that Savannah seems a bit outdated. Maybe they lack of volunteers too. And maybe that’s the reason why projects are moving to GitHub, yours included. > Il giorno 4 nov 2019, alle ore 16:33, Ivan Vučica <[email protected]> ha > scritto: > > On Mon, Nov 4, 2019 at 11:16 AM Umberto Cerrato > <[email protected]> wrote: >> >> Yeah… >> >> Just sayin’… >> >> Do you know how can GitHub achieve that? > > Yes, I indeed do. By having "501 to 1000 employees": > https://www.glassdoor.ie/Overview/Working-at-GitHub-EI_IE671945.11,17.htm > who are working on developing the product, maintaining the product, > --> selling the product <--, paying for datacenter/cloud hosting > services. > > It's not a small effort either: > https://github.blog/2017-10-12-evolution-of-our-data-centers/ > > Can you do it simpler than what I outlined, without 501 to 1000 > employees? Most certainly. > > Just spin up Gitea or Gitlab or something like that. Preferably just a > docker image, because it's easier. Maybe docker-compose so you get a > database too. Then ignore it, fix it only when someone complains, do > upgrades when you feel like without announcements, do kernel, library > and software upgrades when you feel like it (don't pay attention to > CVEs) or fully automatically (risking outages). Don't pay attention to > database credentials and accidentally leave the database open with > some default network-accessible credentials. In short, run it like > you'd run a toy project, and hope that nobody pushes in an exploit > that unobserved ends up in Debian, Fedora, FreeBSD, etc. Also, don't > do automated backups -- if you don't do backups, then nobody can ask > you to do the restore! > > Sure, you can do it, and maybe I'd do it too. But, it should be > something you consciously do when you decide to put your name next to > it :-) > >> It gives its services for free basically… > > Do they? Free service is mainly advertising for the paid tier, incl > enterprise-oriented stuff: > https://github.com/pricing > > There's more, but I'm not going to do their marketing for them. > Effectively, by being something developers get familiar with doing > FLOSS work, they get foothold and mindshare. Having a very well > designed, scalable product with good UX and APIs certainly doesn't > hurt either, but Bitbucket is close, Gitlab is close, etc. > > Oh, and at this time, GitHub also happens to be owned by a much larger > company, so that helps with that money and enterprise-sales thing, > too. > >> Anyway, honestly I like and prefer GitHub. It had success for reasons. It’s >> more user-friendly, it does work, everyone know “how to use it”. There are >> really a lot of pros to it. I think it was a good move moving gnustep to >> GitHub. I do not know you really well, I could say I’m new here, but it >> seems you are “few”. Something like a little community. And maybe this can >> change, adopting more common software tools. > > I don't think people here hate the GitHub UX (especially now we're > used to the objectively horrible Git CLI and each of us has a > workflow). > > However, GNUstep happens to be a project where each contributor > assigns copyright to Free Software Foundation, so they happen to own > the code. And, as an organization that promotes Free Software (as > opposed to Open Source; they want to make a point of the word Free > standing for freedom) -- they, for ethical reasons, discourage hosting > Free Software projects on non-free platforms which, to be fully > utilized, download non-free software on your machine. > > So, here's their evaluation on GitHub and other code hosting platforms > and why they're not great for Free Software projects: > https://www.fsf.org/news/gnu-releases-ethical-evaluations-of-code-hosting-services > > Does this mean nobody should use it? No. Does it mean I won't use it > personally? No. I think it's decent enough. I happened to avoid using > it because: > > 1. I don't like Free Software and Open Source to end up depending on > exactly one service provider (and that happened for some programming > languages; see how many Go projects can you build without importing a > Go package from github.com). > 2. I don't like the idea of a world where "if you aren't on GitHub, > you aren't doing free software/open source work", which we're > dangerously close to. > 3. I want private repositories for some things; these weren't provided > for free until Microsoft bought GitHub > 4. I have some projects that are done with Mercurial and I didn't feel > like converting. > > But that's me. I'll use it for some things. Maybe I'll migrate all my > stuff to it just yet. I don't personally feel like my freedoms are > being violated because I use GitHub, but I'm not FSF either. > >> Also, I would add that gnustep itself is quite “complicated to understand”… >> “how can I install gnustep” “what’s gnustep” “what can I do with it?” >> >> PS: >> I know it’s another proprietary service, but what about creating a Discord >> Server for it? > > Who would use it? Large part of core contributors doesn't want to use > real-time communications in general, including IRC. :-) That’s nah... how could you exchange ideas and really work together without them? And how can new members presentate themselves, talk about it, make some conv?! I talked about Discord because I saw lately it is having a great success. People (like me) like to visit the website, find the Discord join link, enter and get themselves engaged in the project by following discussions etc. Also it is a “virtual place” where to meet. “If you think it could interest you, come and join our Discord”. Also it’s not reserved to programmers/devs/contributors only. I mean, all are welcome. A novice will surely ask “what is it about” in a real-time communication but he probably wouldn’t write a mail to the mailing list asking for it. And you could possibly lose a (future) contributor. Anyway, personally I like this project. I have to figure out many other things in order to start. But I like it. -U
