On Tue, Jul 13, 2021 at 08:01:58AM -0400, Celejar wrote: > > Github (Gitlab, Sourceforge, etc) were and are non-free (as in - > > non-gratis) services, so it's only reasonable to stay away from them > > regardless of whom is controlling them. > > What do you mean by calling them non-gratis services? I know that some > of their services are non-gratis, but basic code hosting certainly is > gratis.
You do not pay for these services, yet they provide them to you and everyone else (with certain exclusions). Guess who is the product here? The answer is - you are the product. Payment involving money is not the only kind of payment that you can make today. > > You need to be in control of your code - *you* host it. Always was, > > always is. It's not that hard anyway. > > If you maintain a local copy of your code and just push it to Github > for serving it publicly (which is what I do, and what I assume most > developers do), you haven't lost control of your code And then you take out your Github repository in compliance with DMCA claim (bonus points for false DMCA claim). Whoops - suddenly you've lost a chunk of your userbase, possibly - some of your contributors, bug reports, CI/CD pipeline, and that's a non-exhaustive list. > - if / when the host does anything you don't like, you take the > existing code and make it available elsewhere, and stop posting future > code to the offending service. (It'll still have a copy of any > existing code, of course - but that's inevitable with FLOSS software > regardless of where you host it.) But the "code" aka git repository is not the only thing that's provided by such companies, and the temptation to use these other services (that are also provided "free" of charge) is way too great for the most. You've kept your code in the scenario above, but what good did it gave you? I don't argue that there are "safe" ways of using these services (aforementioned "code dump" is one of them). Problem is - if the risks of using these services need to be explained to the participants of debian-user - it's not possible to explain the same to the happy GitHub crowd. Reco
