Hi!
Martin Aspeli wrote:
I mean, there's no tangible cost (financial or otherwise) of using
GitHub; and git's architecture pretty much ensures that there's no
lock-in (especially if mirroring is set up).
[...]
I don't see it as supporting GitHub. I see it as using a service that is
free to us and rather good. It saves resources (e.g. the time spent
managing svn.zope.org <http://svn.zope.org>; the cost of bandwidth) that
can be better spent elsewhere (e.g. working on Zope/CMF). It helps make
it easier for others to contribute, because so many people already know
how to use GitHub.
> GitHub Inc. is too successful. It already has too much power. That's
> not good for the open source community.
Because?
GitHub is on the best way to become a monopoly in the area of social
coding platforms. Just like Facebook and Twitter already are in their
markets. And all these platforms benefit from the network effect: Each
additional user makes the monopoly more stable and powerful. As you say
above, the fact other people use them as well makes them so valuable.
Monopolies are bad. (At least if they are in private hand.) There is no
technical lock-in for the Git repositories. But there are economic
lock-in mechanisms. If you use a platform, you invest in it: You have to
wrap your head around it. Maybe you helped improving the platform by
reporting bugs, making feature requests or writing tools for it. You
spend time trying to convince other people to use that platform. All
these investments get lost if you switch to an other platform. And even
if an other platform would be technically better you wouldn't switch
because of the network effect that let's you stay where all the other
people are. So GitHub Inc. has to make really bad decisions before
people have an incentive to go somewhere else.
What's the worst that could happen? GitHub goes belly-up and we starting
using a different remote in our repos? GitHub tries to violate the
license terms of our software somehow (that seems very unlikely)?
Companies like GitHub Inc. want to maximize their profit. As soon as
they are big enough, they become arrogant. One day they will start
making money by placing ads everywhere.
If I did get the discussion correctly, people didn't lobby for moving to
GitHub just to use it as a cheap hosting service. They did it because of
the proprietary features GitHub is building around the repositories. I
don't want to give the responsibility for the way I collaborate with
other contributers into the hands of a company.
Cheers,
Yuppie
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