Code hosting providers

[Steven D'Aprano]

Chris Angelico wrote:

> It's worth noting, by the way, that sometimes it's worth using a
> non-federated service. I host most of my projects on GitHub, because
> the git repo is the part that's most important to me. I don't heavily
> use the bug tracker attached to any of those projects, nor the
> gh-pages branch, etc, etc.


That is the complete opposite of making sense.

If you had said, "Sometimes it's worth using a non-federated service, and
risking vendor lock-in, because the extra features they provide are just
that good" then I'd accept that. That makes sense. I don't like it, but
that's the business model of proprietary services: provide more features,
and use that to lock people in.

But saying "I host my projects on GitHub because I DON'T use any of the
features which differentiate GitHub from its federated competitors" makes
no sense to me. You are actively helping to support a software monoculture,
and you're not even getting any short-term benefit from it! That's the
worst of all possible worlds -- selling out the future, for no gain today.

Personally, I won't use Github if I can possibly ignore it. I have ethical
issues with their corporate culture, and I dislike anything which smacks of
a monoculture. The more Github gets treated as synonymous with revision
control, the more I will push back, until I cannot push back any more.


-- 
Steven