> Bitbucket is the obvious existing counterexample: a conventional commercial forge that has never developed into a shared open-source community comparable to GitHub
Agreed. All my customers are on Bitbucket. All the libraries used by their projects (Ruby, Python, JS) are on GitHub.
Github is not something that should be replaced. Rather, a different kind of model needs to exist. Before Git, there were things like Subversion, for instance. All of that slowed way down after Git showed up to the party because people liked the fact Git was "easier to use" and eventually networking effects. When Microsoft purchased Git, the death knell had all ready sounded, but nobody was listening.
Git is not, in any way, easy to use. SVN was the major predecessor to Git and its simple linear history model was much easier to understand and use for most people. However, Git is more powerful.
Please by all means, sketch out a version control design that's better than both Subversion and Git.
Running a git forge is easy, I find the social coding/network effect the stickiest part of GitHub. I want my code to be discoverable, and I want to discover others' code.
I wanted to leave GitHub but I'm still stuck there. What it would take for me to finally leave is some kind of federation of the social features, so I can port my stars over, see what others are working on, etc.
At some point the whole internet switched over from a project-centric to a platform-centric mental model for most people.
It used to be "I want to talk to these people. Oh, they're on IRC" and then it was "I'm on IRC. who can I talk to here?" and while that might not be so bad for IRC, it's catastrophic when it's proprietary platforms with lock-in.
Cool story bro. I don't think that describes anyone in the market for an open source software produce to use. Instead, what it means is that before opening an issue or submitting a patch to a project, if I must create a new account on an alternate forge there is a good chance I simply won't. I'll still use the software, I just won't make casual contributions to upstream. If I get invested in it and can see myself making a series of contributions then sure I'll click through and register and put up with all the things I may have to learn (at least Forgejo is a pixel-perfect clone of Github and I don't have to learn anything).
The main issue though, is that I won't star a repo on an alternate forge. That is the main reason many projects will only consider Github - if they have no revenue they must have traction, and GitHub stars are a good substitute for meaningful measures of that.
If your a small company developing something closed source is there any reason to use GitHub over just setting up a git infrastructure on your private server?
>GitLab is capable, but it feels incredibly corporate, even more so than GitHub.3 Nor have I found it as good as GitHub at helping people stumble across projects and developers.
So it's not enough for an alternative to do everything you want ... it ALSO has to look "not incredibly corporate", and it has to bring millions of users to your project. Otherwise it's not viable.
I think people trying to move off GitHub are being over righteous.
There are far worse companies than GitHub. People acting like this company is the Nazi regime are being ridiculous. GitHub (like most of tech) is rather progressive, and trivial differences in perspective should not be taken so seriously.
Of course, you can choose whichever service you'd like, for whatever reason you'd like, but acting like allies that agree with you on almost everything are enemies is no way to make progress. This is something that should not be high on the list of priorities.
I hadn't ever used the email-based pull request until I started using Sourcehut, but ever since I did I've honestly grown to prefer it. People shouldn't require an account at a for-profit company to make contributions to FOSS.
Sourcehut is pretty niche but I like it a lot, and I don't really mind paying for things relative to the value they provide me.
My projects are gone from microsoft github.com. Not because I decided to move away, but mostly because github.com is now blocking noscript/basic HTML browsers for most of its basic functions, then it was actually them who did boot me away.
99% of commits on a project come from 1% of contributors, so the main issue w/ migrating to an alternative isn't the networking effect of github, rather that you can't carry over github specific stuff (prs/issues)
i personally like how radicle.xyz managed that, where they manage issues/prs/user identities as git objects, so your entire project is self contained as git repository
Before we can talk about a replacement we need to know what is being replaced. If your criteria is a carbon copy of GitHub then of course only GitHub suffices. You have to be more specific about your needs before you can find something else.
As a maintainer of an open source project I largely care about CI, discoverability on the web, and the sign up burden being small so that issues continue to be reported. I think Radicle and Tangled are probably the future in that way. Tangled needs to support private repositories and Radicle needs a real CI solution. We're not far off from either.
There is a view where developers think of a forge as a place where they host their code.
Than there is another view where the forge is where you go to get code others have written, and this is where GitHub shines. Because of the collective audit.
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 54.1 ms ] threadAgreed. All my customers are on Bitbucket. All the libraries used by their projects (Ruby, Python, JS) are on GitHub.
Please by all means, sketch out a version control design that's better than both Subversion and Git.
I wanted to leave GitHub but I'm still stuck there. What it would take for me to finally leave is some kind of federation of the social features, so I can port my stars over, see what others are working on, etc.
It used to be "I want to talk to these people. Oh, they're on IRC" and then it was "I'm on IRC. who can I talk to here?" and while that might not be so bad for IRC, it's catastrophic when it's proprietary platforms with lock-in.
The main issue though, is that I won't star a repo on an alternate forge. That is the main reason many projects will only consider Github - if they have no revenue they must have traction, and GitHub stars are a good substitute for meaningful measures of that.
>GitLab is capable, but it feels incredibly corporate, even more so than GitHub.3 Nor have I found it as good as GitHub at helping people stumble across projects and developers.
So it's not enough for an alternative to do everything you want ... it ALSO has to look "not incredibly corporate", and it has to bring millions of users to your project. Otherwise it's not viable.
There are far worse companies than GitHub. People acting like this company is the Nazi regime are being ridiculous. GitHub (like most of tech) is rather progressive, and trivial differences in perspective should not be taken so seriously.
Of course, you can choose whichever service you'd like, for whatever reason you'd like, but acting like allies that agree with you on almost everything are enemies is no way to make progress. This is something that should not be high on the list of priorities.
Sourcehut is pretty niche but I like it a lot, and I don't really mind paying for things relative to the value they provide me.
Small Tech Discrimination.
i personally like how radicle.xyz managed that, where they manage issues/prs/user identities as git objects, so your entire project is self contained as git repository
Not a drop-in replacement for GitHub admittedly. Requires a bit more skills from the contributors. Which might be a fine gate, actually.
The time to self-host over GitHub is now since they do not even have a CEO of GitHub anymore to help.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22868406
Than there is another view where the forge is where you go to get code others have written, and this is where GitHub shines. Because of the collective audit.