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Can we please stop treating GitHub like it's an open platform? It's not. It's a closed, walled garden like every other one. The fact that they host a bunch of open source projects you use doesn't make them better; if anything, it makes them worse, because they've helped these projects wall off a part of their contribution infrastructure behind the lock and key of a corporate account.


If I have to sign up for a "corporate account" or I have to sign up for a random self-hosted gitlab account or I have to sign up for your bugzilla & wiki & gitwhatever.... it makes no difference. As a user, it's all the same. Actually... of all of these options, I prefer a "corporate account" (aka github) because I can participate in a nearly infinite amount of projects without having to create new accounts/logging in/etc.

No one has walled anything off in any way that is materially different than any other option in the space.

I would argue that Github has done a LOT of good in the space. Making good software, making it freely available. Keeping it reasonably open and accessible. Keeping it standards compliant where there are standards. Having API's for the rest. And in general, giving a huge amount of storage and compute away for free for open source projects.


The beauty with git is that it doesn’t need an account. It can all be done via email. Hosted repos that use that are much more open and allow you to use the tools you want to contribute.

A lot of these walled garden platforms have contributed a ton and github has made source code more easy to host, no doubt. At the same time, we need to ask them to do better and not allow them to concentrate power for when the inevitable enshittification begins.


I think it also needs to be said that GitHub has helped countless open source projects grow- Git Hosting, wiki hosting, issues, GitHub Actions, GitHub Pages, a nice API...

There are LOTS of reasons to host your open source project on GitHub


Sourceforge used to have similar reasons.


And if github truly goes to shit like source forge did people will just move to a clone.

But if you look at any source forge repo right now, I think you'll see github as a long way to fall before it gets that bad.


The tragedy here is that folks don't learn.


Learn what, exactly? Anything can go sour, including community-run open source stuff. There is never any guarantee for the future about anything.


Yet many expect that everything always stay the same, and flock like sheeps to the next one that sells themselves as otherwise.


The are more reasons to run away from GH and just set a locally managed SourceHut instance for sanity and interop.




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