Hi all, sorry for being late in the discussion but I still want to comment on one point:
On Tue, 28 Aug 2018 15:11:06 +0200 Carsten Agger wrote: > > I'd say, though, that my experience is that the "social media" aspect > of Github is not as important as e.g. on YouTube or eBay. People find > your software if they hear of it somewhere, in distro repositories, > through clients, co-workers, mailing lists, forums, etc., and it's > not so important where it's hosted. PyPI and CPAN (for Python and > Perl) are more important, I think, but also not really social media. Couldn't we argue the same way if we would discuss "traditional homepage vs Facebook page"? Sure, with every search engine you can find a homepage (almost) as fast as a Facebook page. Keeping aside that Facebook often makes it easier to find a specific person because you can search specific properties like name, city,... But if Facebook becomes the de-facto standard for people personal home, than many people will only search at Facebook, if they don't find you, you don't exists for them. Facebook reached this state for a large number of internet users already. All this is more or less true for code hosting with Github these days as well. > A thing that /is/ nice, though, and that makes it very irritating > that Github isn't free software, is the pull request and code review > functionality. After using it, it's hard to go back to inspecting > diffs in terminal windows. I think the "value added" functionality is what many "old school hackers" underestimate. Sure you can have a plain and stupid VCS, a separate bug tracker, a separate project management tool, a separate wiki,... In this case it might be easy to move to another VCS if you have to, ignoring that you will break all the links from the bug tracker, etc for a moment. And sure, people can send their patches just per email. But I think that's no longer the workflow and integration which will invite many new contributors to join your project. I read a blog post from a Gnome Developer recently where he wrote how amazing it is that they get so much new contributors since they moved from their ageing git repository and bugzilla to Gitlab. Another part of the social lock-in effect is that if you host your own project on Github, the chance is high that the 3rd-party libs you are using is also on Github. This way you can easily collaborate, mention the developer of a 3rd-party lib in your bug tracker if you need some feedback, send back a pull request, etc. I read regularly from projects who decide against moving away from Github, exactly for all this reasons. Cheers, Björn -- Björn Schießle Coordinator Germany Free Software Foundation Europe (https://fsfe.org) www: https://www.schiessle.org gnupg/pgp key: 0x0x2378A753E2BF04F6 fingerprint: 244F CEB0 CB09 9524 B21F B896 2378 A753 E2BF 04F6
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