[PD-dev] Github being bought by MS

Christof Ressi christof.ressi at gmx.at
Mon Jun 4 17:27:48 CEST 2018


Actually, Sourceforge has been pretty evil in the past (like injecting installers with adware) and the new owners are still trying to recover from it. I guess Microsoft will be very careful not to mess up things with GitHub :-)

> Gesendet: Montag, 04. Juni 2018 um 10:35 Uhr
> Von: "IOhannes m zmoelnig" <zmoelnig at iem.at>
> An: pd-dev at lists.iem.at
> Betreff: Re: [PD-dev] Github being bought by MS
>
> 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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