Seems there’s lot of mess in the company all because of Microsoft or name it greed or late stage capitalism but still something tells me GitHub is just too important to lose dominance in next few years, after that if any other company takes over it’ll probably be gitlab but it’s really hard to speculate on this kind of things, I hope Microsoft leaves GitHub alone, they probably will fix themselves, lot’s of developers depend on Github and migration is not easy thing for big repos I expect.
Github more than a code repository is a social network for coders, and it has the first mover advantage… making people move from that is dificult (facebook still being used nowadays after all), but also its not impossible.
I see no way of that happening. GitHub is a huge resource for Microsoft; in terms of market penetration, people platform, but especially now with GitHub Copilot and their push for AI. They can’t let go of GitHub.
When I first became familiar with the existence of free and open source software, GitHub did not exist yet. The most popular similar website was SourceForge. (Do many people much younger than me even know that exists?)
If things could change once, they can change again.
You think it sucks because you’re used to GitHub’s interface. I really dislike the github interface after having left it a few years ago. Gitlab’s interface is, to me, so much better and a breath of fresh air (even though it might look like the old old Github).
As for forgejo, I agree, once they get functional federation and a good CI (not a shitty Github actions clone), github and Gitlab can really fuck off. Gitlab might become a “competitor” once they have federation, but they only will do that if forgejo takes off sue to federation.
Agree- I think the gitlab interface, though they tweak it all the time, makes sense. I continually have to hunt for things on github and it’s very annoying to me.
Forgejo/Codeberg is the one that will take over in the coming decade.
This is both wishful thinking, and would reintroduce the same problem anyway (centralization) if it would happen (the codeberg part).
I don’t take seriously individuals celebrating a move to self-hosting either. While it may look cool and ideally liberating at first, infrastructure/hosting responsibility has worse bus factors and burnout than actual development (not to mention actual monetary costs). It’s safe to assume that any code self-hosted has a high chance of becoming unreachable in 1-3 years (and yes, exceptions exist).
Solutions like radicale don’t help with unpopular repos, as you would again get a (hosting) bus factor of 1 (the dev/seeder), if that.
A theoretical solution leveraging an anonymous encrypted distributed storage network for repos would help keeping code alive for a while (after the bus hits). But unpopular content will eventually fizzle out, out of the network.
Multiple congregations of Forgejo (or something similar) communities forming would be cool. But the technology that would help them form one social block with network effects doesn’t exist*. And what’s proposed here and there (like federation for issues) doesn’t cover the code itself. And even if we get far in that direction, instance drama incidents, and attempts at exerting control over “the network” will inescapably appear.
* I don’t know if tangled counts. But judging by the amount of love😑 people show the AT protocol, it may as well not exist.
tl;dr: Codeberg will not become GH-big. And if it did, it wouldn’t be a good thing. And yet there is no ideal alternative to central forges anyway, not even a theoretical one.
forgejo is working on federation. They’ve been working on it for a certain amount of time by now, but I do think we can expect some concrete version of what you describe in terms of community to materialize in the next decade as long a people want it and are motivated enough
when talking about code that is stored in a version control software that supports decentralized state (git, mercurial are the 2 I have working knowledge of) the “easy” fix for low bus factors is to just fork/mirror the software you want to see continue to exist. Source code is not that voluminous, I would be surprised if [the collective we] can’t manage to store multiple copies of the sources for software we deem useful. It’s a question of changing habits, not finding some miracle tech
Of course, habits aren’t necessarily easy to change.
Your comment contains an implicit assumption; there is always a co-occurrence between active development, and all ever grown interest in a project.
A person could grow a newfound interest in a repo after 1/3/5/10/20 years of inactivity. Most people are not glued to their chairs watching endless feeds, and bookmarking/starring (and maybe forking) all repos of interest away. The “normal” chain of events usually starts with a person growing a need for certain functionality (for research or direct use), and then checking out all tools, libraries, or resources available related to that functionality.
Relying on users to only “seed” repos they approve of is not a good strategy for high availability, for many reasons, not the least of which is the tendency of some users to develop tantrums over time, and pressing the “remove account and delete all history” button*. This is why anonymous distributed storage is unrivaled as an availability provider, at least for a period. Long term availability however still requires frequent re-grabbing or re-insertion (both have the same “refreshing” effect in these networks).
*Pushing code repos themselves to the side again, a decision will also have to be made with regards to whether the “ghost” behavior from GitHub should be replicated, or should “respecting the user wishes” to really delete EVERYTHING take precedence. Deciding this is important as it would/should be a part of the user agreement.
Seems there’s lot of mess in the company all because of Microsoft or name it greed or late stage capitalism but still something tells me GitHub is just too important to lose dominance in next few years, after that if any other company takes over it’ll probably be gitlab but it’s really hard to speculate on this kind of things, I hope Microsoft leaves GitHub alone, they probably will fix themselves, lot’s of developers depend on Github and migration is not easy thing for big repos I expect.
Github more than a code repository is a social network for coders, and it has the first mover advantage… making people move from that is dificult (facebook still being used nowadays after all), but also its not impossible.
I see no way of that happening. GitHub is a huge resource for Microsoft; in terms of market penetration, people platform, but especially now with GitHub Copilot and their push for AI. They can’t let go of GitHub.
When I first became familiar with the existence of free and open source software, GitHub did not exist yet. The most popular similar website was SourceForge. (Do many people much younger than me even know that exists?)
If things could change once, they can change again.
It’ll not be gitlab, gitlab is fine but the UI sucks and no improvements in sight.
Forgejo/Codeberg is the one that will take over in the coming decade.
You think it sucks because you’re used to GitHub’s interface. I really dislike the github interface after having left it a few years ago. Gitlab’s interface is, to me, so much better and a breath of fresh air (even though it might look like the old old Github).
As for forgejo, I agree, once they get functional federation and a good CI (not a shitty Github actions clone), github and Gitlab can really fuck off. Gitlab might become a “competitor” once they have federation, but they only will do that if forgejo takes off sue to federation.
Agree- I think the gitlab interface, though they tweak it all the time, makes sense. I continually have to hunt for things on github and it’s very annoying to me.
This is both wishful thinking, and would reintroduce the same problem anyway (centralization) if it would happen (the codeberg part).
I don’t take seriously individuals celebrating a move to self-hosting either. While it may look cool and ideally liberating at first, infrastructure/hosting responsibility has worse bus factors and burnout than actual development (not to mention actual monetary costs). It’s safe to assume that any code self-hosted has a high chance of becoming unreachable in 1-3 years (and yes, exceptions exist).
Solutions like radicale don’t help with unpopular repos, as you would again get a (hosting) bus factor of 1 (the dev/seeder), if that.
A theoretical solution leveraging an anonymous encrypted distributed storage network for repos would help keeping code alive for a while (after the bus hits). But unpopular content will eventually fizzle out, out of the network.
Multiple congregations of Forgejo (or something similar) communities forming would be cool. But the technology that would help them form one social block with network effects doesn’t exist*. And what’s proposed here and there (like federation for issues) doesn’t cover the code itself. And even if we get far in that direction, instance drama incidents, and attempts at exerting control over “the network” will inescapably appear.
* I don’t know if tangled counts. But judging by the amount of love 😑 people show the AT protocol, it may as well not exist.
tl;dr: Codeberg will not become GH-big. And if it did, it wouldn’t be a good thing. And yet there is no ideal alternative to central forges anyway, not even a theoretical one.
I agree with most of what you’re saying, but:
forgejo is working on federation. They’ve been working on it for a certain amount of time by now, but I do think we can expect some concrete version of what you describe in terms of community to materialize in the next decade as long a people want it and are motivated enough
when talking about code that is stored in a version control software that supports decentralized state (git, mercurial are the 2 I have working knowledge of) the “easy” fix for low bus factors is to just fork/mirror the software you want to see continue to exist. Source code is not that voluminous, I would be surprised if [the collective we] can’t manage to store multiple copies of the sources for software we deem useful. It’s a question of changing habits, not finding some miracle tech
Of course, habits aren’t necessarily easy to change.
Your comment contains an implicit assumption; there is always a co-occurrence between active development, and all ever grown interest in a project.
A person could grow a newfound interest in a repo after 1/3/5/10/20 years of inactivity. Most people are not glued to their chairs watching endless feeds, and bookmarking/starring (and maybe forking) all repos of interest away. The “normal” chain of events usually starts with a person growing a need for certain functionality (for research or direct use), and then checking out all tools, libraries, or resources available related to that functionality.
Relying on users to only “seed” repos they approve of is not a good strategy for high availability, for many reasons, not the least of which is the tendency of some users to develop tantrums over time, and pressing the “remove account and delete all history” button*. This is why anonymous distributed storage is unrivaled as an availability provider, at least for a period. Long term availability however still requires frequent re-grabbing or re-insertion (both have the same “refreshing” effect in these networks).
*Pushing code repos themselves to the side again, a decision will also have to be made with regards to whether the “ghost” behavior from GitHub should be replicated, or should “respecting the user wishes” to really delete EVERYTHING take precedence. Deciding this is important as it would/should be a part of the user agreement.
for open source it will be vodeberg. gotlab will do well with enterprises.