Code hosting providers

[Chris Angelico]

On Fri, Mar 13, 2015 at 7:59 PM, Steven D'Aprano
<steve+comp.lang.python at pearwood.info> wrote:
> 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.

Not quite. It's a matter of priorities. I will make use of their
proprietary features, but they aren't important to me, and if ever I
need to move away from GitHub, I'll just shrug and abandon all of that
ancillary stuff. In the meantime, I get zero-dollar hosting of my
repos, including zip download and such (I'm not sure how many other
hosts have that, but it's a minor convenience rather than anything
crucial), and it's a convenient place to point people.

You're welcome to shun them. There is definitely benefit to
encouraging a multiplicity of hosting services. But I'm not bothered
by the GitHub non-free-ness, because I take a less philosophical and
more pragmatic view of things.

ChrisA