• 0 Posts
  • 23 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 10th, 2023

help-circle


  • At least its plugins, which are what needs to be regularly updated as platforms change, are open source. I imagine someone will clean-room reverse-engineer the core app and make an open source one that uses the plugins.

    Reverse-Engineering and reimplementing something is a lot of work, especially if it is a moving target that is still actively developed. I don’t expect anyone to do it.

    Also, Louis Rossmann said they only reserve the right to go after forks to prevent a situation like all the shady ad-ridden NewPipe ones flooding Google Play Store.

    That is some kind of hand wavy reasoning that might come from someone that could be sponsored by them. Louis should do better than taking any company by their word and promises. And spreading FUD about NewPipe (and by extension all of Open Source software) is also a straw man argument. An untrustworthy software repository is not a argument against the open source software application, but against the software repository and their maintainers.

    If you are concerned with that, you should stop using Google Play store.













  • I only play single player games, but couldn’t care less about achievements. It is all about exploration, story, game mechanics and modding for me.

    People treat achievements as if they are a status symbol. I mean sure, if you don’t know what else to do in a game, they can give you some goal, but IMO the game itself should encourage you to reach the goal, not some external badge. The experience doing the task should be the reward in of itself.


  • As I said, it is not impossible to move away from gh compared to many other cases in other industries, just that it is more difficult than necessary because vendor-lockin is allowed.

    If vendor-lockin was illegal, companies had more incentives to use established or create new standards to facilitate simpler migration between software stacks, without changing the external interface.

    For instance allowing your own DNS name to be used as the repo/project basepath instead of enforcing github.com, Allowing comments, reviews, issues and pull requests via email or other federated services, instead of enforcing github accounts to do so, providing documented, stable and full-featured APIs for every component of their software, so that it is easy to migrate and pick and choose different components of their while stack from possible different vendors, …

    There are so many ways that would improve the migration situation, while also providing more ways for other ideas to compete on a level playing field. If a bright engineer has an idea for improving one component from github, they should not be required to write a whole separate platform first.


  • Well the reason for that is the vendor-lockin and centralized technology.

    If your project for instance uses a similar development method as the linux kernel does, e.g. sending and reviewing patches via mailing lists and providing url to push and pull git repos from, it is quite easy to switch out the software stack underneath, because your are dealing with quasi-standart data: Mbox, SMTP, HTTP(s) and DNS. So you can move your whole community to a different software stack by just changing some DNS entries and maybe provide some url rewrite rules without disrupting the development process.

    I am not saying that the mailing list development process is the right one for every project, but it demonstrates how agnostic to the software stack it could be.

    If vendor-lockin is made illegal, the service providers would have more incentives to use or create standardized APIs, so that their product can be replaced by competitors. So switching to or from github/gitlab/… becomes easier.


  • It has more than you expect, if your project is established on github and want to move away you have to deal with:

    • migration of issues
    • migration of pull requests
    • migration of all review comments etc
    • migration of the wiki
    • migration of the pages
    • convince all contributors to possible create a new account somewhere else
    • changing of the project urls. I don’t think github offers a url rewrite service
    • forks on github will not have the new destination as the fork base
    • change the ci and release process
    • because you cannot add url rewrite rules to your old gh project, you might need to only ‘archive’ the project there with manually written text, to point to the new destination, for people to find it

  • You don’t know what a “monopoly” is.

    What the author is probably searching for is “vendor-lockin”, which is an anticompetitive practice for so long that it became the way many companies rely their business on. It favors established products over new-comers by making switching offerings difficult/expensive or even impossible, thus better products often have no chance of competing in a field, that was dominated by a single supplier for a while.

    IMO there should be strict regulations and high fines associated with it, because it hinders innovation massively across all industries.

    The cost of switching away from github for a project is high, but not as high as in other fields.