On Mon, Jul 4, 2022 at 4:23 PM Juan Nunez-Iglesias <j...@fastmail.com> wrote:

> Thanks Matthew!
>
> I will say one thing, I agree that there are major costs, but the longer I
> work in this space the more I appreciate the benefits there might be to
> *not* being on GitHub. I recently (finally) read Nadia Eghbal's Working in
> Public, where she points out that *adding* friction to the process of users
> commandeering maintainers' attention might be a good thing — commons tend
> to be depleted when there is no cost to exploiting them, and open source
> communities are an attention commons where maintainers' attention is
> constantly being used unsustainably.
>
> That's been bouncing around in my head for a few months. This post just
> adds fuel to that idea.
>

This is a great point, and it came to mind for me as well. The amount of
noise on a repo as popular as numpy can be overwhelming at times.

There's no easy solution though, because we'd want to add some friction to
the low-value pings/issues/PRs, but without adding significantly more
friction for the valuable ones. And that includes maintainers of one
project contributing to other projects. Imagine if every other project is
on a different hosting site, and you'd have to create and maintain
credentials separately for each project in order to file a bug or open a
PR. Note that GitLab doesn't even let you have full-featured code search if
you don't log in - that'd be pretty bad.


>
> Juan.
>
> On Mon, 4 Jul 2022, at 11:46 PM, Matthew Brett wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > I just came across this:
> >
> > https://sfconservancy.org/GiveUpGitHub/


I agree with Chuck's assessment. I would go a step further: the only valid
argument is the second one (ethics/ICE) - that is important and perhaps
worth discussing here, or in a future developers meeting. The rest is quite
ignorant stuff that you typically hear from GPL zealots. Who cares that the
GitHub UI is not open source? I don't, I just want it to work well. GitHub
is a business, and in the end they need to make money somewhere. The model
of providing free services to open source projects and making you pay if
you want private repos with all the bells and whistles is perfectly valid
and fine with me.

We're getting a lot of value out of GitHub, from issue tracker and code
hosting to large amounts of free and well-designed CI services. And if
you've ever interacted with GitHub staff, you have probably found that they
truly care about open source and want to address pain points maintainers
are experiencing.

> It might be nice if we could back up the issues and PRs so history
wouldn't be lost if we did need to move at some point, but that would be a
good idea on any site.

This would be great. It's not hard to do as a one-off, but doing it on an
ongoing basis and keeping all of the history is pretty tricky. Having an
easy way to have a full mirror on another hosting site would be super
useful.

Ralf
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