GitHub's “pull request” is proprietary lock-in

[Michael Torrie]

On 01/04/2016 03:21 AM, m wrote:
> W dniu 03.01.2016 o 05:43, Ben Finney pisze:
>> That and other vendor-locked workflow aspects of GitHub makes it a poor
>> choice for communities that want to retain the option of control over
>> their processes and data.
> 
> I'm also afraid that Github will make to git the same thing as Google
> did to Jabber/XMPP.
> 
> Decade ago, I had plenty of friends on my jabber contacts list. Next,
> Google made it's talk compatible with jabber, then my friends slowly
> migrated to gtalk, because if they used gmail anyway, then why not use
> it also for jabber?
> 
> And then Google turned off XMPP support and suddenly I lost ability to
> contact with 80% of my friends without having stupid hangouts running,
> or without falling back to email (which is not so bad BTW).

I use gtalk with Pidgin every day using XMPP.  So Google still supports
XMPP.  However what they stopped doing was allowing federated XMPP,
which pretty much breaks XMPP, at least the spirit of it.  So the only
way to chat with gtalk users is to use your gtalk account.  But you
certainly don't need hangouts.  XMPP works fine between your client and
the Google server.

I agree that Google really pulled a bad one with gtalk though.  Dropping
federated XMPP support was definitely not in keeping with their original
"do no evil" mantra.

> The same can be with Github and git. PPL will forget how to use git
> without github. When Github will make git-incompatible changes, vast
> majority will need/want to follow the changes and eg. will use Gitlabs
> propertiary binary.

Yup you are correct.  However for the foreseeable future, you can still
do a git clone from github, and you can still use your local repository
normally.  In fact I think this is really part of the github workflow.
But who knows what the future will bring.  I can sure see the wisdom of
the GPLv3 as we move into a world of software as a service, where even
Microsoft uses Linux, and charges us for it.