Those are fairly weak arguments honestly, none which have anything to do with the features on GitHub itself. In fact, this could have been written by someone who has no development or project management knowledge
Open source projects also don’t pay for GitHub.
Here’s one counterargument. One of our projects failed because we wasted so much time arguing about the hosting that we didn’t get much done. We moved between a few different services and wasted time comparing shortcomings between them.
In practice, migration from GitHub is actually super easy if you ever wanted to because they literally have an API for everything. It also is a really comprehensive service, and a lot of the open source ones are missing things
Im not a fan of Microsoft, but GitHub works really well and you can rely on it to be fully reliable (there have been few outages)
but GitHub works really well and you can rely on it to be fully reliable
So does GitLab, Codeberg, sourcehut or self-hosting your own instance of GitLab CE, Gogs, Gitea or Forgejo. Why use GitHub? Especially, when developing open source software? Why use a proprietary software forge run by a Big Tech corporation that uses your code to train some AI model?
I don’t know how GitLab would make anyone terribly unproductive. I see many FOSS projects or even entire (proprietary) software companies choosing GitLab for source code management. In fact, the company I work at (a government contractor) uses GitLab, as well as many other FOSS tools. And it’s definitely not a FOSS company, our main customers are the police and military.
You dont think they could train copilot if it’s hosted on a remote git repo?
Sure, but their first choice for a data source is GitHub. For other platforms, they would need to develop and maintain an indexer/crawler (which you can block), which costs time and thus money. Just think about it, why would you upload my code to a platform, when you know that the owner of that platform actually hates FOSS and only wants to profit from it?
Also, what have you contributed to openssl lately? Resources? Money?
What has Microsoft recently contributed to the FOSS community? I mean truly contributed. Why should a FOSS project use their proprietary products when other free (both as in price and as in freedom) alternatives exist?
Are they allowed to use vs code to develop too? Or do they need to change?
Dumb argument. The code editor/IDE is a personal choice of each developer. The software forge isn’t. I really doubt that anyone at OpenSSL is using VSCode (a bloated JavaScript mess) for C development. But if you need to use it, there’s VSCodium which is completely open source and removes the Microsoft tracking.
Also, there is always the possibility some of these smaller ones go bankrupt. GitHub is highly unlikely to
I don’t know how GitLab would make anyone terribly unproductive. I see many FOSS projects or even entire (proprietary) software companies choosing GitLab for source code management. In fact, the company I work at (a government contractor) uses GitLab, as well as many other FOSS tools. And it’s definitely not a FOSS company, our main customers are the police and military.
The switch process will be terribly unproductive. Also, even the process of discussing the change is a nightmare. Don’t forget all the backend stuff that needs to change too from all downstream. It’s not as easy as using the API and tools to copy the repo in this case… Everyone from Fedora to Zedora is affected on their side because the upstream address will change
Sure, but their first choice for a data source is GitHub. For other platforms, they would need to develop and maintain an indexer/crawler (which you can block), which costs time and thus money. Just think about it, why would you upload my code to a platform, when you know that the owner of that platform actually hates FOSS and only wants to profit from it?
Microsoft actually contributes a lot to open source… Why would they need an indexer / crawler? They already index everything using bing… Then they just need a git pull.
What has Microsoft recently contributed to the FOSS community? I mean truly contributed. Why should a FOSS project use their proprietary products when other free (both as in price and as in freedom) alternatives exist?
Because they work… Switching platforms offers no real benefits in any way, and Github is free for open source projects.
Dumb argument. The code editor/IDE is a personal choice of each developer. The software forge isn’t. I really doubt that anyone at OpenSSL is using VSCode (a bloated JavaScript mess) for C development. But if you need to use it, there’s VSCodium which is completely open source and removes the Microsoft tracking.
Yeah… Sure… Every developer I know these days except one uses VSCode. And we took him off the main team in our company because he was taking too long to do things (because we are all using copilot).
What exactly do you think Microsoft is tracking? Do you think they’re peeking on developer webcams? Nope… code.visualstudio.com/docs/getstarted/telemetry . Crash reports are normal… Its all GDPR anyway. I don’t care if Microsoft knows what language I’m developing on
People should use what they want. It’s actually bad for the community when people who contribute nothing try to project manage projects they have nothing to do with. It’s their decision… If you don’t like it, fork OpenSSL to Gitlab and do your own thing… Trust me, you’ll notice that choosing Github vs Gitlab doesn’t affect project success.
I don’t know why you are trying to paint the picture that everything except GitHub is extremely unstable and makes everyone unproductive. It’s definitely not the case, I can tell you that from years of experience in both corporate and FOSS software development. Haven’t heard from any project that migrated from GitLab/Codeberg/sourcehut to GitHub, it’s always the other way around. I often see abandoned GitHub repos with links to new repos on Codeberg or sourcehut. Because people don’t want to use Microsofts proprietary garbage. And somehow they don’t have any issues with suddenly being unproductive after switching away from GitHub.
They already index everything using bing…
Bing is such a piece of shut (just like most other Microsoft software) that I actually forgot it existed, because no normal person on this planet uses it
Yeah… Sure… Every developer I know these days except one uses VSCode
What programming language do you use? JavaScript?
Microsoft actually contributes a lot to open source
For example? Name a full FOSS microsoft program that can be used on it’s own. Most of the things I see on github.com/microsoft are just some obscure libraries or other developer tools that no one uses. Sure, VSCode. But the build you can download from Microsoft’s website isn’t even FOSS. They don’t offer downloads for Code - OSS. The new Windows terminal? Only usable on the otherwise completely proprietary, bloated, ad-infested, data-extracting Windows operating system. Terminals aren’t used by most people either, I think I could almost call this a developer tool. The Windows Calculator? Wow, what a great contribution to the FOSS world. And meanwhile they make billions from selling proprietary software. Microsoft never truly supported the FOSS community and likely never will.
I think a lot of people here read the headine and think OpenSSL is moving everything to github and giving up everything else. It is not. They only moved the means of distributing the release tarball to github and stopped supporting the ftp and rsync. Do not confuse distribution and contribution/development.
I doubt many commenters here have used a wheelchair ramp to access a public building. Guess we should just remove all those ramps since that accessibility doesn’t affect them. The barrier to entry for setting up a wheel chair ramp is more expensive than offering at least one non-corporate code contribution method.
Maybe. Maybe if the back steps required an account with a US-based service owned by a publicly-traded megacorporation that is collecting your data as per the ToS just to enter. That’s a helluva barrier that should never be expected for free software.
Considering the absolutely devastating performance hits 3.x brings (and the apparent design failures that make it extremely difficult if not impossible to reclaim it) I wonder if openssl’s days are numbered. WolfSSL seems to be favorable to the HAProxy team. Hopefully that can get some traction.
Good that you mention WolfSSL and that HAProxy team seems to like it. Years ago some Linux distributions made the switch to LibreSSL, but unfortunately that all (?) seems to have failed.
These were great in their day, but it’s time to move on to something better and safer.
How is it “safer” when contributing to the codebase or filing and discussing issues will now require creating an account and giving up personal information to one of the most privacy-invasive tech companies in the world? 😳
Edit to clarify: The blog is strictly speaking about the means of distributing the release tarball. Distributing the release tarball has nothing to do with how contribution is accepted or how issue is handled. What they say on the blog is also very clear IMHO and for a good reason. Maintaining infrastructure takes work. Works that if you didn’t do it right can be an attack vector. Do you guys remember xz? Do you read how the vulnerabilities came to be? Maintaining a single source of truth for the release tarball can help mitigate that. If one malicious actor can control even one of the distribution channels of the release tarball we get xz 2 electric boogaloo.
Read-only github mirror with read/write on a personal forge seems like one possible approach to make it more accessible/friendly without giving up any control to MS.
Yes, what would possibly go wrong ? And OpenSSL is only a small and unimportant project and hardly anyone depends on it, right ? Right ? I can dig that they want to get rid of some of their own services but completely giving up on their own git repository ? Let’s hope they do mirror the source code on Codeberg or sourcehut.
Well, yes. But let’s say the OpenSSL developers copy new changes of source code to GitHub, and something goes wrong after the copying (Think of a malicious attacker breaking in and changes some code), then all the people copying from that one download link will be in the same boat as well.
What is your definition of harder? I think bugs/breaches are even more likely on personal forges than github. Not that one should rely on github anyways…
I was trying to say that if the OpenSSL developers upload new source code to only GitHub and something goes wrong, even for example simply a mistake or failure by GitHub, then other users wanting to download will not have to wait for the OpenSSL developers to repair that problem when OpenSSL project would for example have mirrors on Codeberg or sourcehut or their own git server, the latter which they intend to deprecate.
If they were to set up an official mirror it would be automatic, so I don’t think there’s any real way to avoid that problem with their current plan. But you’re right! Sorry for the confusion
Codeberg and SourceHut are not really randomdude.com’s insecure git forge. Both are doing development on their own services, and those services are not bad, like at all
The one I ran into 2 days ago was a user approving a pull request while I was requesting their & other maintainers review. It canceled their approval & I had to fetch them to reapprove since in that project no-green-checkmark-no-merge. It should not have erased their approval.
I bet you live in the West. My daytime, there are heaps of outages.
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