Mastodawn

Cassandra is only carbon now Mar 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.

ms_nonbinary_flag

Cassandra is only carbon now

- 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.

Cassandra is only carbon now Mar 18

Like, I'm not going to lie to you and say it won't take time and some frustration to ditch GitHub. But it's definitely possible with some time and money!

@xgranade granted, I only abuse GitHub to leech their resources.

Compromise_bi_flag

@xgranade I feel like those two statements are true for defenestrating any "free" ("...as in 'you're the product'") service on the Internet.

technomancy Mar 18

@xgranade one thing that's really common with switching to open alternatives in general (not just github) is when people take what they're used to and demand that the replacement work the same way

it just ends up frustrating and unnecessarily limiting; you can treat this as an opportunity to re-evaluate your assumptions and maybe realize that there's a simpler way to do things that the old system was obscuring from you

0xC0DEC0DE07EA Mar 18

@technomancy @xgranade GitHub Actions are awful, if for whatever reason that’s your sole reference for what CI is, you’re going to do yourself a favor by moving away from GitHub.

Stefano Canepa aka sc Mar 18

@c0dec0dec0de @technomancy @xgranade the only reason most of the people uses GitHub Actions is money.

@c0dec0dec0de @xgranade GH actions is definitely the biggest thing stopping me from moving off. what do you use to replace it?

@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)

Cassandra is only carbon now Mar 18

@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.

@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'

Cassandra is only carbon now Mar 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.

Cassandra is only carbon now Mar 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!"

@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.

@xgranade @whitequark So many Previouslies https://jwz.org/b/yks-

LOL Github

Github is now a subsidiary of the MICROS~1 Spicy Autocomplete division, so I guess it's time to re-up my "LOL Github" I-told-you-so post from 2018, since in those intervening 7 years you have all learned nothing. Anyway, good luck with that! I hope your migrations go really well.

✧✦Catherine✦✧Mar 18

@jwz @xgranade I actually think the previous 7 years of subsidy was a net positive. it saved me a lot of effort at a time when disability and a lack of stable housing meant I can't run my own CI, and the "network effects" probably helped me attract a few contributors. I knew I'd have to migrate eventually, and several years of advance notice was plenty enough to plan this out

@xgranade @whitequark those who do not remember sourceforge are doomed to repeat it

✧✦Catherine✦✧Mar 18

@phooky @xgranade (i remember sourceforge and i chose to accept the risks of using github, for the period in which i thought it would be usable. also i think SF is like, okay now?)

@whitequark @xgranade I think so, but we did go through a period where it very much was not. I wouldn't treat it as a pierce of reliable infrastructure. But hey, I still have old projects there after over a quarter century so maybe it's fine?
https://sourceforge.net/projects/blitzer/

Blitzer

Download Blitzer for free. Blitzer is a simple tool for driving the SX-Blitz microcontroller programmer from Parallax. There is now a version for PalmOS devices.

SourceForge

@whitequark @xgranade haha it's still in CVS, jumpin f