On 08/28/2018 01:19 AM, Guido Arnold wrote:

What I see as the crucial part is the "social" component. I'm afraid
this somewhat derails Alessandro's intended discussion as my point
totally ignores "who" the current owner of github is. 

If you have a project and are looking for more developers to join it,
you need some kind of visibility so potential developers get aware of
you. In that sense, github serves as a social network and its current
state is close to amazon or ebay - and that is what I suspect is why
they even bothered to buy it.

Yes,  Github has become the "Facebook" or "Google" of free software code hosting - nearly everybody uses it, and many of the hugest projects have moved to it.

This is not all bad. In my own company, we used to use our own, self-hosted Git server (we still do, for some things) which we access over SSH. This means that even though our software was always Free Software, it wasn't publicly available. Over the years (since 2011, but gaining momentum since 2014) we've been moving everything to public repositories on Github, so now our code is also publicly available, which is a good thing. (Though it's not that important with regard to the question of it being Free Software or not.)

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.

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.

Now, following Microsoft's acquisition, we're considering moving to a self-hosted Gitlab server. And I hope more people will do that. I think this centralization of having one site for search, one for selling stuff, one for code, one for social interaction, etc., is the sickness of the age - and one that very much promotes the proprietary business model. So my immediate hope on hearing about Microsoft's acquisition was that this would mean Github decaying and the hosting splintering - but not in two, three or even five new pieces, but in a million little pieces. As you say, self-hosting and decentralization is the best thing we can hope for - and that is also our best hope for avoiding these giants' proprietary software and all-pervasive surveillance, to which we're becoming all too used.

Best
Carsten