Were is a great place to Share your finished projects?

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Wednesday 13 July 2016 15:11, Chris Angelico wrote:

> You're welcome to take a 100% philosophical stance

It's not a philosophical stance to avoid vendor lockin, nor to avoid incipient 
monopolies, nor to avoid rewarding companies that behave badly.

It's not for philosophical reasons that we should avoid tendencies to band-
wagon jumping and monopoly building. Its for REAL, PRACTICAL reasons that the 
short-term gain will invariably be overwhelmed by the long-term loss.

You just need to value more than the immediate right here, right now, and not 
discount future risks excessively.

There are people who plan and plant great gardens which they will never see 
completed, trees taking many decades to reach maturity. And there are those who 
think that doing the washing on the weekend so they'll have clothes to wear on 
Tuesday counts as "long term planning".

People over-estimate the costs of technical competition and under-estimate the 
costs of monopolies and the single-network effect. They jump on the bandwagon 
of "but everyone else is using IBM/Windows/Word/iPhones/Facebook/Github/
whatever" and then wonder why conditions slowly get worse. Its boiling frogs 
everywhere.

Even if Github was 100% open source with no proprietary extensions, and the 
*technical* cost of leaving was low, the single-network effect would still lock 
you in, which leaves you (to some degree) at the mercy of Github's management. 
Don't like the fact that they run their servers on electricity made from 
burning puppies and the tears of little children? Too bad, what are you going 
to do, move your project to some backwater VCS where nobody ever goes? You 
might as well be on AOL for all anyone will ever find your project.

It boggles my mind that even devs who are the most socially aware and are all 
for diversity and codes of conduct and building a better world have such a 
blind eye when it comes to jumping on bandwagons and blindly following trends.


Time-to-read-Connie-Willis'-"Bellwether"-again-ly y'rs,



-- 
Steve