Comment by JuniperMesos
17 hours ago
I can appreciate Hashimoto's genuine feelings about Github, and the world of open-source software development that it opened for him and that he spent a significant chunk of his life participating in.
On the other hand, I can't help but think that some of this heartbreak would have been avoidable, if only he possessed more of the Richard-Stallman-esque attitude that non-free software is inherently suspect and unethical. Github has always been non-free software hosted by someone else, and run according to its owners' rules and for its owners' benefit, not ultimately the end user. This was true in 2008 and it's true today.
I've also used Github for a significant chunk of my life, often because I had to for my job. But I've never developed an emotional attachment to it. Indeed, I have long been annoyed that Github is someone else's proprietary software, that does what it can to structurally lock users into their platform despite being built upon free-software git.
I've never been able to love software that requires an email-based account and accepting terms of service and that doesn't work in Iran because the company that runs it obeys US sanctions law.
So without reservation on my end, I'm glad to see that ghostty is moving off of github to something else.
> Github has always been non-free software hosted by someone else, and run according to its owners' rules and for its owners' benefit, not ultimately the end user. This was true in 2008 and it's true today.
Yup. At KDE we never seriously considered GitHub. We always built our own git infra, and eventually landed on GitLab, after banding together with Gnome and a (generous and forthcoming) GitLab to convince them to move everything we needed from the Enterprise Edition to the free software Community edition.
I think we've had exactly one multi-hour git outage in 16 years.
GitLab cloud lost some of my projects. And it was (is?) quite slow. Props to those who can keep it running self hosted.
I kept a Docker install of GitLab running for many years at my first full time employer out of university back in 2014 to 2020. It was really not too difficult. Every once a while they would release a major version that required a migration or config update, but mostly the updates were a docker compose pull and docker compose up away. At our single company scale with only some 25 developers max (don't remember exactly anymore) a self-hosted instance on a moderate VM was super stable and quite boring. And boring is often good. It might be that hosting GitLab for much bigger organizations is a different beast!
I remember that the first instance of their CI solution was a separate server/service that coordinated CI jobs on runners. That was a bit cumbersome. But then they integrated the CI coordination into the main server and you only needed to figure out the CI runner part.
Today I would likely have gone for Forgejo with runners for such a small company if I were to self-host. Less moving parts and smaller footprint.
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It can be run as a single docker container, so it's actually very easy to self host. Occasionally it'll get into a 500 conniption and needs a restart, but you can create a healthcheck for that.
It's actually much faster when self hosted, even on modest hardware. And it's not _that_ bad to manage with docker (for how much it provides).
The centrality of GitHub was part of its appeal. It’s where you went to see where nearly every (obviously not all) open source project was being developed. Based on his post, the network effect was a large part of the draw and the reason he stayed despite reliability issues. A more federated set of git UIs will never capture the same feeling.
I have had my eye on these technologies for a while. Embedding the issue tracker and such in your git repo. Every day these make more and more sense.
- https://gitsocial.org/
- https://radicle.dev/
- https://github.com/git-bug/git-bug
I made the decision to leave Github a couple months ago when I retired and started heavily working on personal projects. I like the idea of radicle and used it for a while, but it's complicated to set up and maintain if you want to run your own seed node and pin your personal projects.
What I ended up with is a version of a static forge - Charm's soft-serve to host the repos and a forked version of the pico.sh pgit static site generator. I added git-bug integration to track issues in the repo and an alternative CLI to git-bug that works better when collaborating with agents.
A static forge site is very resilient to bot traffic because it only renders a limited number of commits, instead of pathologically allowing a near infinite number of URLs for bots to crawl.
https://kilimanjaro.io if you want to see what it looks like.
I would agree with everything you say, but why not both?
We are actually facing 2 distinct problems:
- Github is a centralized, controlled git hosting, identity, collaboration platform.
- Bots are attacking any public facing interface.
So maybe the solution is:
- to keep a Radicle node private/behind fences to lower the maintenance/security burden, with eventually access to selected collaborators.
- publish the repos with a static site generator like pgit
Indeed really quick and responsive
Exactly this. Even though I don't use git-bug anymore, I'm still a sponsor. I desperately want an issue-tracker-in-.git to become a standard.
Issues and CI are the only lock-in. The latter is legitimate because you're using someone else's CPU, but every developer has the tooling to "git diff" and write comments if we could just agree on a format.
I have trouble wrapping my head around how to make it so the public can create an issue in your git repo.
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They're all just value propositions. Is it worth my time and money? There ya go that's it.
It's not unlike the emotional drama I see each time Netflix raises prices (people get really upset about that), or video game discussion (the worst). If it's not worth the the value proposition, move on ... don't hang on / waste emotional cycles on Netflix or something like that ...
Granted I'm not a robot, I get the the emotional connection too, I think back to my early days in computing and I still fondly think of the now defunct manufacturer of my first PC, later the Windows 95 start me up commercials ... it was something magical.
This is orthogonal imo. There are plenty of services that work really well that are closed source
Agreed. His suffering comes from his inabillity to see the bad in closed source software. I lost my respect for him when he sold Hashicorp.