The bottom line here is that until the “revolution” occurs and it’s worldwide…there’s going to be a chain of for-profits in your solution. Instead of taking the rather naive/classic/everything is black or white communist view of all entities are either abusers or the abused…take a more pragmatic view. In all relationships there’s going to be points of disagreement and you maintain relations with those which you have some common ground agreement and no major disagreements. Fighting against for-profits which are harmful to humanity is something I applaud, but they are frankly in the minority.
You paying is having to take care of all of this yourself. Your users paying is lower bandwidth and perhaps flaky service. And you’re both paying by having less exposure to potential users/contributors.
Again. Yeah that sucks, but its much less opportunity cost than doing it yourself. In your place I’d gamble on GitHub being reasonable for at least the next three years…and at whatever point (assuming it occurs) that GitHub gives you reason to move, there might be some easy solution that’s politically acceptable for you that had been developed in the meantime.
I think the best solution may be one of the following:
Write your own repository hosting service, to ensure nothing will ever change.
Or for backing up code, print each page to paper.
Every company may change, so either choose the one that provides the best features and appeals to you the most, or write your own custom repository hosting service with the features you wish, to ensure you, as a user have control over the direction of the development for the tool.
Just because one paying customer doesn’t want a company to change, doesn’t mean they will listen to 1 out of their entire user base. And the other users may like the direction its heading, or not really care as long as there product is still great.
What I didn’t say before, because it had been said, but I’m 100% of the opinion that GitHub is the right answer at the moment for an open-source project, and that’s as much about the community linking as code-management feature set. I wouldn’t host an open-source project of mine anywhere else at the moment.
Only if you want either the ability for free private repos or to self-host would I actually recommend GitLab. I think the UI feature set is just as good - it’s more about where other projects are.
BUT, the key thing in any of this in moving from Subversion to Git is to make the most of it being a distributed version control system. Who says you need a canonical upstream? JOGL does that right? Run off a domain you control and link through to the services you wish to use when you’re happy to use them.
Off-topic :
Quite! The problem with “revolution” is that it never begins with an “r” Not to mention none of my hard-left leaning acquaintances has ever actually managed to live in line with their own viewpoint. Julien and I have political views that are very different and yet quite similar - I’m quite a believer in free markets - one day I may live to actually see one!
Our hackspace used to meet in an activist space that had two posters next to each other, one promoting anarchy, the second wanting to save the National Health Service - ah, the irony. ;D
It’s not a problem of being on an “old” platform. You completely miss the point. At first, ublock (a competitor of adblock and adblock plus) blocks Sourceforge which means that lots of people can’t access my website without modifying the filter. Moreover, I strongly disagree with Sourceforge modifying the bundles to put any badware into it. I already had one very bad experience of badware under Windows 7 caused by a webmaster using my game to propagate badwares, it was difficult (even for me) to remove his craps and this isn’t the kind of experience that I want to provide.
I already had a pragmatic view. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have used Sourceforge without complaining since 2006. I don’t see why it would be “bad” to reduce the number of “for-profits” in my solution.
I already had a low exposure to potential contributors anyway and I had only a very few users this year and last year except when I started providing some self-contained native application bundles.
Self-hosting is viable to me. I can use my current Internet connection, the VPN would cost about 8 € a month and the Internet brick would cost about 80 €. I could go to an Install Party in Paris to be almost 100% to have a working solution in a few hours. This solution seems to be more and more attractive for me as time goes by.
I don’t worry about the exposure as my current blog has received more than 300 000 visits and my previous blog received almost 900 000
Github is indeed a viable fallback solution, Gitlab too.
I don’t need a company to get a working Git repository. I don’t need a company to have a working server except for the hardware. I suggested a deal to Sourceforge, I haven’t had any reply yet, I’m preparing my migration. What’s wrong with doing things by myself when it is viable? Gitolite isn’t maintained by a company as far as I know. There are more and more things not provided only by companies.
nsigma, I’m already preparing the migration to Git. You wrote that none of your hard-left leaning acquaintances has ever actually managed to live in line with their own viewpoint but it’s a perspective, a set of objectives, the path is important and I get closer to my viewpoint everyday
I guess the bottom-line question to ask yourself: Is drawing your line-in-the-sand today and little closer to your target worth the fact your making yourself an IT department…or can you spend your time better in some other way?
renting a root server would become the next issue of dealing with money-greedy-companies but that is usually a much more stable and durable environment.
I think that there are some risks and that the migration to a self-hosted solution would take some time but don’t you overreact by comparing self-hosting to making myself an IT department? Spending one or two months in migrating is acceptable to me, especially if I don’t have to migrate every three years. I think that doing so wouldn’t be a waste of time except if I totally fail, it would be helpful to show some people that we can regain control on computer science.
Moreover, there were more and more problems on Sourceforge, a lot of HTTP 500 errors (internal server error) when trying to commit, numerous failures when trying to upload the bundles onto the storage space, …
I have X computers in my house. I’m the IT department. Luckily nobody outside of my house depends on any of them.
That’s my whole point (one to two months is hopefully a grossly overestimated time investment)…is whatever the initial time investment + ongoing time investment worthwhile? Moving to GitHub should take less than a couple of hours.
That time could be spent “regaining control” in a wider sense. Contribute to HURD as an example. You can find something to advance your political/social views more than walking the self-hosting route.
+1 And once you’re using Git, moving between services or setting up multiple upstreams should be quicker too.
Jumping on with a related question, though. One thing I find frustrating on GitHub is the inability to report issues without having an account. That’s one thing I think you can allow on Sourceforge. Any thoughts on alternatives there?
Unrelated: the thing I find most confusing about GitHub is Git. Has anyone yet found a UI for Eclipse that makes Git comprehensible for an idiot (ie. me)?
Somebody once said, git is only confusing to people that got screwed up by svn
I would suggest to use the commandline client at first, to get the terminology before trying to use a UI. Can’t comment on eclipse, but support is great in Intellij Idea
Interestingly looks like Idea uses the CLI client under the hood, whereas Eclipse and NetBeans both use JGit? The UI in Eclipse and NetBeans looks quite similar - easy enough to work with when you get a handle on the terminology. Not that you have to manage your source control through the IDE. +1 to @cylab on trying with the CLI client first.
Roquen, I’ll have to migrate my blog too anyway, this early migration of my repository and of my website will reduce the time spent on the migration of the blog as I won’t start from scratch for the latter. Yes, I find urgent to show to my relatives that we can share tons of things online without Facebook and co. and without showing everything to everybody.
At least give it a try and if you don’t want to use Github try another service after you’ve auto-imported and verified things on Github. It could possibly work with a little less stress than dealing with the CLI (though get used to that too eventually).
Not to mention none of my hard-left leaning acquaintances has ever actually managed to live in line with their own viewpoint. Julien and I have political views that are very different and yet quite similar - I’m quite a believer in free markets - one day I may live to actually see one!
