this post was submitted on 27 Nov 2024
453 points (97.7% liked)
Technology
59986 readers
2834 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Git is a distributed version control system. There doesn't have to be a single copy of the repo on which everything depends. It's a choice, and an understandable one, to treat one copy as authoritative, but there's no reason to despair if it becomes unavailable. Any copy of it will do.
What GitHub provides that's hard to do without it is not the repository but the stuff that goes around it: issue tracking, communication tools, discoverability, etc.
So if people take the distributed nature of Git seriously and make sure they all have a local copy of the repo, we won't lose the repo itself to Nintendo's actions. But we may lose the tools that make it easy to coordinate work on the repo.
Before we had GitHub and issue trackers we had mailing lists and Usenet groups. Not as convenient, bit they allowed people to coordinate work on open source software without a central, corporately owned point of failure. Maybe we should be looking to the early days of FOSS for ideas about how to make these projects resilient against corporate persecution. Not for the exact tools but for decentralized ways of coordinating collaboration.
There are self hosted github alternatives, like Gitea for example. It takes 10 minutes to set up and it behaves like github/gitlab. So all to advantages can be kept.
Forgejo (a gitea fork) is a better choice for FOSS, can't remember why.
I use it on my personal server and it's only for myself so I think I installed Gitea because it was easier or something.
Forgejo is a drop in replacement