Comment by PaulRobinson

1 month ago

I agree with all of this, and as I've mentioned elsewhere in this thread, anything I release now is going to be a tar.gz/zip with a LICENSE file in it, and people can do what they want with it, but they're not getting tech support on it.

However, this is a really sad state of affairs, and I'm wondering if we can't have scale _with_ friction to counter some of these pain points?

I think srchut is one solution. Its email workflow does successfully deter less experienced/curious people, for better or worse, and it still has some project discovery bit not social signals like stars.

  • It’s not a neutral service though. The owner is very opinionated and likes to get involved in what projects are and are not allowed to be hosted there, and changes these rules on a whim.

    In my eyes, this disqualifies Sourcehut for anything serious. You could get booted off any second, if Drew decides that he does not like you.

    (I like Drew, and I like opinionated and outspoken people. But Service Providers should be neutral, and only involve themselves as far as required by law.)

    • I think Sourcehut is the more portable of Git forges. Everything is stored in standard formats, its workflow isn't anything bespoke but just a good automation for git send-email, and I believe the source code should be all published.

      In my eyes, if this ever does become a problem, migrating elsewhere wouldn't be that much trouble. When the "cryptocurrency purge" happened, maintainers were given 2 months of advance notice, which is a little short but reasonable.

      [0] https://sourcehut.org/blog/2022-10-31-tos-update-cryptocurre...

We had scale with friction before GitHub was a thing.

It wasn't perfect, but you were required to do things like subscribing to mail lists if you wanted to interact with a project.