Cassandra is only carbon nowMar 18

I'm a few months into my experiment with doing OSS development without any use of GitHub whatsoever, and while I had to introduce a minor exception, it's mostly been quite successful. Difficult, but successful.

Tricks I've found:
- Spend money. Maybe not a hell of a lot, but more than zero. What GitHub provides is subsidized in the interest of locking you in. Going without GH means spending some cash.
- Have friends. None of this would be possible without friends lending me infrastructure.

Show threadCassandra is only carbon nowMar 18

- Be OK with less. There's a lot of features GH provides that I really don't actually use, and so it's OK to go without them.

All in all, I think that as a community, we never should have gotten to where GitHub was an SPOF for all of OSS, but it is possible to undo that. It's harder than it should be, but it's getting easier thanks to groups like Codeberg and people like @whitequark.

Show threadVMar 18
@xgranade @whitequark Github didn't even exist prior to 2008. So, it's entirely possible to remove dependance on it.
What to go to instead... there's honestly more options now than in 2008, where it was basically just ... your own site/server, or like... sourceforge, or bitbucket... (Or savannah, if you were making something under a GPL license)
Show threadCassandra is only carbon now
@miss_rodent Yeah, the difference to my mind is how much other infrastructure has been built on top of GitHub, because they subsidized so much for so long it was really convenient to do so. The Git hosting part is by far the easiest to replace, yeah.
Mar 18 at 12:51amWeb
Show threadVMar 18
@xgranade Fair. I do kinda wish the F/OSS community would stop falling for this trap of 'corporate sponsor subsidizes to become load-bearing infrastructure, then stabs you in the back once they've created dependency'
Show threadCassandra is only carbon nowMar 18

@miss_rodent Agreed, but it's also hard to look a massive subsidy in the mouth when there's so little other funding.

Shit's hard, and there's a lot of individual devs whom I don't blame at all for becoming dependent on GH. I do blame well-funded institutions, though.

Show threadCassandra is only carbon nowMar 18

@miss_rodent The whole situation is absurd. The whole time I was in academia, it was far, far easier to send a company a proverbial check than to sponsor an OSS project for the same amount.

"Hey, I won't use OSS until it's as easy to use as $corporate_tech."
"Cool, I can do that, just as soon as you give me the same amount of money as you do $corporate_tech."
"What, no way!"

Show threadVMar 18
@xgranade Yeah, I don't blame devs so much as the companies themselves, and some of the larger F/OSS projects that do have money to spend on stuff to support the community, but... don't.
Funding is always an issue, and it's something that corporations exploit, often drowning other options in the process, while extracting obscene amounts of free labour (or entire business models) from volunteer F/OSS devs and maintainers.