Comment by acidburnNSA
8 years ago
Good point. It's not too crazy to have people behind major open-source efforts get their own VPS's and run Phabricator or Gitlab. With a universal login akin to OAuth maybe it's doable.
8 years ago
Good point. It's not too crazy to have people behind major open-source efforts get their own VPS's and run Phabricator or Gitlab. With a universal login akin to OAuth maybe it's doable.
That's insane, not only do developers and maintainers devote a huge part of their life to major open-source efforts, now they are expected to spend more time and money setting up, admining, and securing their own private servers? That's a great way to destroy Open Source projects. Very few people would be able/willing to put that much effort into it.
Not sure if this is an age-gap or participation-gap here but that's EXACTLY what we did before Github came along. My foray into open source started in '99 and it wasn't until 2010? that we had good centralized alternatives to switch to. Hell, jQuery was on a hosted version of Trac until just recently. And yes, we spent time on it. A great deal more than "very few" did the same and were involved and passionate about it.
You're absolutely right! That's exactly what open source developers used to do. In some cases, still do.
Is it perhaps possible that there are non-trivial advantages to the ecosystem that's grown up around GitHub?
I know I've written and released code that would have stayed closed-source forever if I had to manage my own listserv, wiki, and CVS around it.
Why do you think open source is so much more accessible and popular today?
Not all of us. I have been writing open source since approx. 1998, and I remember hosting my code on sourceforge, and announcing on freshmeat. There was also a few other central repositories, and some major projects having their own CVS and later Subversion repositories. Later came Google Code that I used too, circa 2004 or 2005. But I clearly remember people, myself included, looking for a code repository they could use for their source code.
Funny you say that, as 1999 was the year that SourceForge was launched.
Back in the day that was the centralised site that people used to host code, mailing-lists, issues, and etc.
Right - and before VPSs, running a server for an open-source project often meant having to have real metal in a data centre somewhere, too!
I could envision pre-configured vps images maintained in the open by volunteers to make it more practical. They could have unattended-upgrades configured for major patching and the community could help migrate between major LTS releases.
It isn't ideal but it might be doable at least for some projects. Maybe devops people want new ways to contribute to open source too!
Isn't Gitlab pretty much that already?
How is running a bit of infrastructure so lethal? Most of my libre projects aren't on Github, and running your own Git server isn't terribly difficult.
Running your own git server is far from impossible. But you have to take into account various items.
1) the cost of the server, you don't need a powerful one, a 5 or 10$ a month box is more than enough, but it constitute a barrier for some, not necessarily because they can't afford it, but because they don't think their projects is worth it.
2) You have to maintain it properly, applying security fixes, having backups and maybe some basic monitoring. It's not high and complex maintenance, but it's far from a fire and forget thing.
3) Contribution from external sources becomes harder, you generally don't have basic "fork" and PR buttons in the simpler hosting git options, and if you opt for something like gitlab or gogs, external contributors as to register in your instance.
4) Github is really convenient if you are searching for open source tools that does a specific task in a specific language. Having various self hosted git servers makes it harder to discover new tools.
I do run my own Gogs instance which mirrors my github repositories, it's not heavy maintenance, but it's not exactly nothing. And I'm pretty sure nobody, except bots, knows it exists.