On Wednesday 13 July 2016 15:11, Chris Angelico wrote: > You're welcome to take a 100% philosophical stance
It's not a philosophical stance to avoid vendor lockin, nor to avoid incipient monopolies, nor to avoid rewarding companies that behave badly. It's not for philosophical reasons that we should avoid tendencies to band- wagon jumping and monopoly building. Its for REAL, PRACTICAL reasons that the short-term gain will invariably be overwhelmed by the long-term loss. You just need to value more than the immediate right here, right now, and not discount future risks excessively. There are people who plan and plant great gardens which they will never see completed, trees taking many decades to reach maturity. And there are those who think that doing the washing on the weekend so they'll have clothes to wear on Tuesday counts as "long term planning". People over-estimate the costs of technical competition and under-estimate the costs of monopolies and the single-network effect. They jump on the bandwagon of "but everyone else is using IBM/Windows/Word/iPhones/Facebook/Github/ whatever" and then wonder why conditions slowly get worse. Its boiling frogs everywhere. Even if Github was 100% open source with no proprietary extensions, and the *technical* cost of leaving was low, the single-network effect would still lock you in, which leaves you (to some degree) at the mercy of Github's management. Don't like the fact that they run their servers on electricity made from burning puppies and the tears of little children? Too bad, what are you going to do, move your project to some backwater VCS where nobody ever goes? You might as well be on AOL for all anyone will ever find your project. It boggles my mind that even devs who are the most socially aware and are all for diversity and codes of conduct and building a better world have such a blind eye when it comes to jumping on bandwagons and blindly following trends. Time-to-read-Connie-Willis'-"Bellwether"-again-ly y'rs, -- Steve -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
