this post was submitted on 16 Apr 2024
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Are you guys fine with these new shenanigans from Github. I found a bug and wanted to check what has been the development on that, only to find out most of the discussion was hidden by github and requesting me to sign-in to view it.

It threw me straight back to when Microsoft acquired Github and the discussions around the future of opensource on a microsoft owned infrastructure, now microsoft is exploiting free work from the community to train its AI, and building walls around its product, are open source contributors fine with that ?

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[–] [email protected] 136 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

Microsoft acquired Github and the discussions around the future of opensource on a microsoft owned infrastructure

Personally I'm impressed it took them so long to start driving it to the ground

I moved to Codeberg

Codeberg is a non-profit, community-led organization that aims to help free and open source projects prosper by giving them a safe and friendly home

[–] [email protected] 18 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Personally I'm impressed it took them so long to start driving it to the ground

You mean their copyright washing of FOSS projects using copilot wasn't enough of a warning?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

No, that is actually useful. Blocking access for anonymous users is not

If anything, the boom of LLMs like copilot and chatgpt actually shows the power of open source and open access to information. Underlying algorithms would mean nothing without open source, open access to stackoverflow, forums, etc

[–] wildbus8979 108 points 7 months ago (2 children)

Federated forges can't come soon enough. Git is already federated. There is absolutely not fucking reason for this.

[–] [email protected] 40 points 7 months ago (3 children)

Git is already federated.

New to me. Do you mean decentralized instead of federated?

[–] [email protected] 33 points 7 months ago (2 children)

Distributed version control system

[–] [email protected] 34 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I would not say that distributed is federated. But i could not find a widely accepted definition of it.

For example i would call FTP also not federated🤷‍♂️

[–] [email protected] 21 points 7 months ago

Agreed. That said, with a few remotes and a cron job git could facilitate "duct tape and zip ties" federation.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Exactly. There's no way that could ever go tits up.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago

Eh, in a myopic sense yes, but folks are using Microsoft GitHub for their CI, issue tracker, forums, kanban, Wiki & so forth. By choosing their Markdown fork, you are locked into that too. Some communities like Elm, Unison, Nix use MS GitHub as your primary community identifier (Elm doesn’t even allow you to create packages on another platform). Many tools only allow MS GitHub single sign on. If you fork off of MS GitHub, in most scenarios you’ll still be required to have an MS GitHub mirror or you won’t be able to submit a pull request as most projects don’t have an alternative contribution channel.

Some of this can be migrated, some of it can’t & the whole time being entrenched in MS GitHub land projects will fear friction & loss of users/contributors if they move (& the platform they would move to likely isn’t offerering anything more than being open source).

So can you just move the code elsewhere since Git is a DVCS? Yep. But projects are more than just the source code.

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Can't wait for the day when I can collaborate with all my Forgejo homies.

[–] talentedkiwi 10 points 7 months ago

Forejo-mies?

[–] Gooey0210 40 points 7 months ago (2 children)

Don't forget you're contributing your code to Bill's AI

[–] [email protected] 24 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 15 points 7 months ago (5 children)

This is exactly why I add a non-commercial license to my comments. If courts decide that Github was in the wrong, then there's a chance commercial AI makers just scraping the web might be on the hook too.

Anti Commercial-AI license

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Everything I write on my blog is NC. Realistically, this should be built into the metadata of the comments just like language as I’ve seen some folks get harassed for trying to license their online comments when this is an acceptable thing to do & a nice act of rebellion. Honestly I wish there was more room for things like the Peer Production License & Prosperity License for code to remove the commercial exploitation, but FSF labels in “unfree” & it’s GPL-incompatible so it is treated like cancer when really it’s like Creative Commons Noncommercial but for source code as it’s still allowed to be used by individual workers, nonprofits, etc.

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[–] [email protected] 39 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (2 children)

I'm fine with it so alternatives will be used more in the future.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I'm not as optimistic. Some people will complain and move to alternative platforms. But the vast majority won't care and continue using the abusive platform, forcing the rest to use it sometimes. The best example for this is Reddit and Lemmy.

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[–] [email protected] 38 points 7 months ago (5 children)

Honestly I don't think there's a truly good git hosting website right now.

GitLab works if you wanna get away from Micro$oft but the UI is all over the place. Every other alternative either has an infinitely worse UI or charges money to use

[–] [email protected] 29 points 7 months ago (1 children)

What about codeberg? It is free and forgejo is easy to use.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 7 months ago

i <3 codeberg

[–] [email protected] 25 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I've been enjoying Codeberg a lot lately.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 7 months ago (2 children)

Yeah, Codeberg's UI is almost the same as github, its good tbh.

P.S. i came to the conclusion that codeberg/github UI is good, when i went to sourcehut. Holy crap, my mind couldnt comprehend what am i looking at. (Could be a skill issue tho)

[–] [email protected] 14 points 7 months ago

codeberg, sourcehut, git.gay, cgit...

[–] [email protected] 8 points 7 months ago (2 children)

The biggest issue with gitlab is the web editor. They swapped out a really fast and light-feeling one for this frankenstein monster that looks like whatever the hell the barbies and kens writing powershell are using. It's so slow, and so ugly.

Everything else about gitlab, so far, has been great. From v9 to here, it's been easy to use and easy to upgrade; but we can debate the capricious worsening of the sidebar for something surprisingly worse each time .

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 7 months ago

I went from a company that used github to one that uses gitlab. I thought it was going to be great and was excited for using a new thing. But it’s really clunky in comparison.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 7 months ago
[–] [email protected] 27 points 7 months ago (1 children)

No, that's why we host our own gitea.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 7 months ago (3 children)

Or Forgejo, or cgit, or Aylla, or Radicle, or SSH+HTTP server. There’s loads of options to try. And this is just the options for Git—not to mention the other DVCSs worth looking into.

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 7 months ago

Anyone want to revive the GitTorrent project?

https://github.com/cjb/GitTorrent

[–] [email protected] 17 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I hope github "enshitifies" to bankruptcy

Let's use codeberg :))

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago

and or sourcehut @ sr.ht supporting foss is always based.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 7 months ago

Anyone else remember when MS bought github and a LOT of folks were saying this is where we'd see that they have changed and won't fuck things up this time because Nadella is so much cooler than Balmer? Pepperidge Farm remembers.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I know people don't like sending patches to mailing lists and prefer the zoomer PR UI but god damn if you look only at the protocol openness perspective nothing comes close. sr.ht is great in that regard

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago

Useful write-up about how to do it: https://git-send-email.io

[–] [email protected] 9 points 7 months ago

Just another silly thing related. I tried to view the magnolia bypass paywall clean on gitlab the other day (after it had the DMCA takedown) and my gitlab account got "blocked". Maybe because I was also on my VPN? Or was it because I viewed that repo? I have no idea. Total shit.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago

Please mirror your stuff on forgejo or another open source git forge. They‘re working on federation and this might just be the best thing ever. Being able to not make an account on another one‘s forge would be awesome. I have like 6 plus accounts and its driving me nuts.

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