Everything you point to as ‘pros’ for Microsoft GitHub could be applied to GitLab, SourceHut, Codeberg, GNU Savannah, Notabug, Radicle, darcs hub, Smedeeree, Pijul Nest as far as hosting infrastructure where you don’t have to–and with the exception of GitLab being open core & a publicly-traded company, they are open source & not ran by corporations (some as for-profits, but indie, others, as foundations, others as community run). You’re conflating my (and many of our) distaste of capitalism/corporatism by rejecting Microsoft as if it means anti-access or anti-open source/anti-ethical source. Microsoft is 100% an enemy playing the long-con by vacuuming up all these developer adjacent services as megacorporations try to do (see their expanding portfolio of: WSL, Azure, GitHub, Codespaces, Sponsors, Copilot, VS Code, npm, Teams). I also believe it’s only a matter of time til they pull the plug on their APIs like Twitter & Reddit as the board of shareholders demand preventing migration (just like the “Search” is disabled).
There is also no shame in self-hosting these things & you can start hosting most DVCS with SSH + an HTTP server in front of the code even if it doesn’t have some web GUI to browse files so it doesn’t have to be that complicated. NixOS modules or similar can get you a cgit, GitLab Community, SourceHut, etc. all running without too much effort (services.cgit.enable = true), or forming a local collective & sharing resources is cool too & doesn’t need to be each project self-hosting. You can still have ‘barriers’ like authentication if you need that require agreeing to your community’s terms of service instead of Microsoft’s ToS–which is the system used by KDE, GNOME, & many other big FOSS self-hosted GitLab forges.
I’m also not against rejecting some of the tenets of “open source”–with OSI as its definitional gatekeeper–in favor of the copyfarleft, copy fair, Commons Clause, etc. that require corporations contribute code or finances as I don’t think it’s a difficult argument to say our current systems extract values from the Commons more than adding putting folks in positions of not getting to work on their valuable library that everyone relies on, but doesn’t want to help finance its maintenance (see Babel)… in which case, rejecting the corporations in favor of the Commons could be a greater goal than “open source is actually about”.
Everything you point to as ‘pros’ for Microsoft GitHub could be applied to GitLab, SourceHut, Codeberg, GNU Savannah, Notabug, Radicle, darcs hub, Smedeeree, Pijul Nest as far as hosting infrastructure where you don’t have to–and with the exception of GitLab being open core & a publicly-traded company, they are open source & not ran by corporations (some as for-profits, but indie, others, as foundations, others as community run). You’re conflating my (and many of our) distaste of capitalism/corporatism by rejecting Microsoft as if it means anti-access or anti-open source/anti-ethical source. Microsoft is 100% an enemy playing the long-con by vacuuming up all these developer adjacent services as megacorporations try to do (see their expanding portfolio of: WSL, Azure, GitHub, Codespaces, Sponsors, Copilot, VS Code, npm, Teams). I also believe it’s only a matter of time til they pull the plug on their APIs like Twitter & Reddit as the board of shareholders demand preventing migration (just like the “Search” is disabled).
There is also no shame in self-hosting these things & you can start hosting most DVCS with SSH + an HTTP server in front of the code even if it doesn’t have some web GUI to browse files so it doesn’t have to be that complicated. NixOS modules or similar can get you a cgit, GitLab Community, SourceHut, etc. all running without too much effort (
services.cgit.enable = true), or forming a local collective & sharing resources is cool too & doesn’t need to be each project self-hosting. You can still have ‘barriers’ like authentication if you need that require agreeing to your community’s terms of service instead of Microsoft’s ToS–which is the system used by KDE, GNOME, & many other big FOSS self-hosted GitLab forges.I’m also not against rejecting some of the tenets of “open source”–with OSI as its definitional gatekeeper–in favor of the copyfarleft, copy fair, Commons Clause, etc. that require corporations contribute code or finances as I don’t think it’s a difficult argument to say our current systems extract values from the Commons more than adding putting folks in positions of not getting to work on their valuable library that everyone relies on, but doesn’t want to help finance its maintenance (see Babel)… in which case, rejecting the corporations in favor of the Commons could be a greater goal than “open source is actually about”.