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GitHub Is Not Open Source, A Rant
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this post was submitted on 11 Apr 2024
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Technology
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You can use other forges, but they have the exact same issues as GitHub. You need to make an account, you need to accept terms of service and if they feel like it (or are forced by a court) they'll ban you and your repository.
git send-emailexists. So it's not like you absolutely can't contribute to projects that are hosted on GitHub.At some point in the future gitlab will get federation, but that's not a solution for now. It'll take a while.
Why does everyone shill gitlab as a github alternative. Theyre just another shitty corporate platform
You can at least self host it, though performance isn’t as good as the alternatives
I imagine because it's more popular and (arguably) more feature complete than Gitea (which I use).
Gitlab had more than a decade to implement federation and didn't give 2 shits about it until one single dude (oelmeki?) decided to start implementing it. And even now, Gitlab hasn't built a team around federation and only have that single, external contributor writing all the code, tests, etc. . The only thing they're providing is "guidance". It wouldn't surprise me if oelmeki isn't even getting paid.
Gitlab feels like just another company happy to be #2 and not willing to do anything more to be better because most other alternatives are way behind. I bet if they were #1, they'd be just as bad as any other company that's #1.
Hopefully forgejo gets complete federation first and becomes real competition for gitlab. Gitlab doesn't deserve #2.
Anti Commercial AI thingy
CC BY-NC-SA 4.0Inserted with a keystroke running this script on linux with X11
:::
Total noob here when it comes to all things git, but can't you simply host git in a privately owned server? I thought I saw that when installing some packages on my Synology NAS.
Yes, but how are you gonna accept pull requests? You need a frontend and a frontend needs an account.
Of course, all of these alternative forges (gitea, forgejo, gitlab) can be self hosted on your own private server.
Yes, but the requirement of said frontend are very small.
Not required at all actually. For example, mirror a github repo in gitea. You'll see all the commits, their messages, and who made them. Yet that gitea instance isn't accessible publicly. None of those people have an account, and none of them can login even if they could access the instance. A commit is just attached to a name, that is user configurable, and a lot less data minable than a "real" account.
Would you call that open source? A read only gitea instance?
If you want to get away from GitHub a mirror won't cut it, it has to be the main dev platform.
You missed the point of my example entirely. How can those commits exist, and those people exist in that instance if they don't have accounts? I was refuting your statement that a frontend needs an account. By mirroring an existing repo, as an example, you could verify that my claim is correct. Git as platform is already decentralized and doesn't require accounts. You could email someone your git diff's and it will function the same.
I feared as much, because the same could be said about your comment above.
I already mentioned
git send-emailin my comment. But the ux of that is terrible. So if you want good UX you're in account hell, having to create a new profile for every hosting site.You can have a nice, terms of service free but read only forge, or you have terms of service and account bullshit or you can have the dev experience of git send email. Choose one of the three and until we have federation they are all terrible in some aspect.
no, you can accept them on an open port or via CLI
Not sure what you're suggesting. Here... are you suggesting random write access to a port on a device you host? Anybody can push a branch to your selfhosted repo?
Or are you talking about self-hosted forgejo, gitlab, etc.?
Anti Commercial AI thingy
CC BY-NC-SA 4.0Inserted with a keystroke running this script on linux with X11
:::
Yes, if you want to accept pull requests from anyone, you can set up a jailed git server with public access, for example.
That's not a pull request, but a merge request. Besides the point though. What I'm getting at is: isn't that asking for trouble? Somebody could
and fill up your hard drive. Also, depending on the protocol, they could try fuzzing it. Or, pipe
/dev/urandomintoncand blast your git port.And of course, the first problem is discoverability. Who's going to find your random, unfederated, git service?
It just doesn't sound like a convincing solution, IMO.
Anti Commercial-AI license
no, it's not specific to merge requests. theres a tool called git-shell that prevents abuse
Due to a generation being taught only Microsoft GitHub’s system, many forges have seen it imperative to copy all of those patterns—including all of the bad ones. Being a clone of MS GitHub isn’t a very compelling reason to be on another platform, but so few are looking to actually fix the issues Microsoft would be too big/slow to adapt to—e.g. the entire pull request model being so slow for getting it merges.