[PD-dev] Github being bought by MS

[IOhannes m zmoelnig]

On 2018-06-04 15:53, Dan Wilcox wrote:
> So MS is buying Github... good thing we still have the Sourceforge master repo. Any dev thoughts on moving forward? ie. "dump Github", "it's not a big deal", "let's find a self-host solution"...

well.

to start with, i never believed that GitHub was not "evil" per se.
from the beginning, they have been monopolizing a decentralized system
(git) for their own profit.
and since there service was outstanding (at least to many people new to
git), they did have success.
this success kindled a lot of things that were impossible beforehand,
starting from *very* easy collaboration that doesn't require technical
skills above an MA, to the integration of zillions of really useful
tools (CI, automatic code review,...)
but from a corporate POV, I don't see that much difference to Alphabet,
facebook or microsoft.

as for sourceforge: i recently had to do things over their, and it was a
plain pain in the ass.
personally, i don't want to go back there.
(and from a corporate pov, again there is not much difference).

i've been using GitLab for a while, and i'm pretty happy oftentimes.
but again, when using their hosted service, you are selling yourself to
a company, which - in the capitalistic world we live in - has only a
single primary goal: making money.
and nobody can guarantee that GitLab won't be acquired by... Oracle or
somesuch in the near future.

so the only way to guarantee independence of the big players, is by
self-hosting services.
this of course means, that we are dependent on whoever does the
self-hosting.

i've been running my own (free) instance of GitLab (for the iem) for a
few years now, and it's been fun.
recetnly i've been playing a lot with self-hosted CI with native support
for macOS and W32 builds.
however, even though we allow any user to log into our instance (e.g. to
submit bug-reports), we've decided that "external people" (neither
uni-staff nor uni-students) have some restrictions, namely they cannot
create their own repository.
mainly, because we do not have a big data-center where storage is not an
issue.
but this makes the instance a lot less attractive to casual
collaborators (and from the administrator's pov, i'm not really very
sorry about this...).

one alternative would be to switch to use OSUOSL as a provider (as
jonathan suggested 3 years ago).
since this is a university, i figure that the chances are reasonable low
that they will be acquired by a corporation anytime soon (but then, it's
in the US, and i really don't know ;-))

another one might Joe's Texas connection.


so, to conclude:
i don't think we should jump the gun, just because EvilCorp acquired GitHub.
however, we might want to look for a self-hosted solution mid-term, that
is located in an appropriate data-center.

fgmasdr
IOhannes

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