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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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All of those issues would arise if you wanted to migrate an established project to Github as well.
Well the reason for that is the vendor-lockin and centralized technology.
If your project for instance uses a similar development method as the linux kernel does, e.g. sending and reviewing patches via mailing lists and providing url to push and pull git repos from, it is quite easy to switch out the software stack underneath, because your are dealing with quasi-standart data: Mbox, SMTP, HTTP(s) and DNS. So you can move your whole community to a different software stack by just changing some DNS entries and maybe provide some url rewrite rules without disrupting the development process.
I am not saying that the mailing list development process is the right one for every project, but it demonstrates how agnostic to the software stack it could be.
If vendor-lockin is made illegal, the service providers would have more incentives to use or create standardized APIs, so that their product can be replaced by competitors. So switching to or from github/gitlab/... becomes easier.