GitHub's ³pull request² is proprietary lock-in

[Ben Finney]

Christian Gollwitzer <auriocus at gmx.de> writes:

> There are layers. Below your Python code there is CPython, below that
> the C compiler, the OS, and finally the hardware.

Yes. There are continual motivations to take the technology at any of
those levels and make it less free, make it more locked to single
vendors, make it more difficult to migrate our valuable data to a system
under our control.

Asserting that one level is currently less free, is in no measure an
argument to allow a different level to be moved further from the
community's control.

> At some point, nobody cares.

You clearly do care, since you are participating in this discussion and
attempting to argue that people *should not* care.

> In former times, people sent emails with patches attached. Nobody
> complains that those emails are lost to the community.

You make my point for me: Nothing about that method of transferring code
changes was actively controlled by a single vendor, nor gratuitously
centralised, nor handed to an unexaminable, unaccountable system.

> Then somebody invented VCS and all became better. Pull requests are
> nothing but elaborated emails.

Email is decentralised; it has no gratuitous barriers between diverse
implementations of the standards; it has standards that are
energetically guarded against vendor lock-in.

Anyone can take email data from the email server, migrate it to a
different implementation of the same email system, keep it running with
the same data and allow the same people to continue interacting with it
as before.

Those are traits I think a community should require of any system that
controls vital discussions like pull requests.

If GitHub pull requests could be verified to work that way, I would have
no complaint here. Until they do, it is foolish for a community to
willingly put their correspondence data into it.

-- 
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Ben Finney