Comment by NobodyNada
5 hours ago
10 years ago, GitHub had a far better reputation and the Rust ecosystem was much smaller and less load-bearing, so "what if someone doesn't have a GitHub account" was a theoretical concern for most people. So the issue was a low-priority backlog item that everyone agreed would be nice-to-have but there weren't enough people willing to volunteer their time to it over more important and more impactful work.
Obviously, the situation has changed in recent years, so it's now considered a much higher priority by many people and some of them are actively working on it. But it's a lot of work to be done by volunteers, so it takes time.
That's the reality of open-source projects: things get done when they are important enough to motivate someone to either fund it or work on in their free time, not according to idyllic roadmaps and schedules.
The reason people were sounding the alarm 10 years ago is because if you tie yourself to a proprietary platform then you're at its mercy, even if it changes for the worse for everyone which is what we're seeing now.
With open-source projects, realistically there is no shortage of alarm sounding, and there is a shortage of alarm fixing, consequently if you really care about this being fixed you have to volunteer to go fix it.
Open source projects tend to be (and Rust certainly is) a showupocracy. Shit gets done when people that care about that shit does it. This means that important stuff that everyone agrees is important but not important enough for me to do, doesn't get done. And that some things end up being 80% solutions that scratch the itch of the person driving a project and progress stalls beyond that.
The comment you are replying to was in response to essentially the same point, albeit with fewer words and less emphasis.
From the outset, crates.io was careful to deliberately not tie itself inextricably to Github. For example, by resisting the endless deluge of people demanding that Github usernames be used as public-facing package namespaces. Github is only used as an identity provider for logging in.
Pro tip: Using "load-bearing" is heavily associated with LLM usage :)
You could say it’s the real smoking gun. With significant blast radius.
Pangram says human: https://www.pangram.com/history/208879e5-8510-479a-b96c-a20f...
This is where I would insert the Little Britain "Computer says no" meme.
It is also heavily associated with humans writing about things which bear load (in an xkcd #2347 sense) :)
Wow, have you forgotten? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
10 (edit: 8) years ago MS took over Github. The writing was on the wall then...
No need to explain OSS to me, I maintain and contribute.
crates.io was started long before the GitHub acquisition.
Yes, and your point?