<story><title>Python moves to GitHub</title><url>https://mail.python.org/pipermail/core-workflow/2016-January/000345.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>StevePerkins</author><text>What does &amp;quot;punished socially&amp;quot; even mean?&lt;p&gt;Unable to attract as many contributors?  The cold reality is that most open source projects aren&amp;#x27;t really TRYING to attract contributors.  Small-time hobbyists often don&amp;#x27;t want to play with others in their personal project sandboxes, and big-time projects with high profile usually put up high barriers to contribution.&lt;p&gt;Unable to attract as many end-users, or as much public mindshare?  Now this makes more sense.  Many of the high-profile moves to GitHub are really about P.R., and signaling friendless to the developer community (e.g. Microsoft&amp;#x27;s recent image re-branding efforts).  Not having a GitHub presence DOES make you less visible and more isolated from developers today.&lt;p&gt;Either way, I would argue that GitHub is really just a sort of Facebook or Twitter-like presence for software organizations.  A way to draw attention, publicity, or mindshare from the public... but often merely a hosting mirror, and not even the primary toolset through which the software is actually developed.&lt;p&gt;This being the case, who cares if GitHub is dominant?  Or SourceForge ten years ago, or whatever the next popular thing might be ten years from now?  In most cases, it&amp;#x27;s effectively about as consequential as having to shift your focus from MySpace to Facebook when the audience moves.</text></item><item><author>cm3</author><text>The problem is with people&amp;#x27;s mindset that everything has to be on github. Large projects that dare to use self-hosted more fitting infrastructure like Phabricator tend to be punished socially.</text></item><item><author>tw04</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m not sure why it&amp;#x27;s a problem though.  If they decide to go down that path, it&amp;#x27;s not that hard to move off.  They don&amp;#x27;t have the lock-in that would scare me like having terabytes of data in an oracle database.</text></item><item><author>eugenekolo2</author><text>GitHub&amp;#x27;s reign over public open source programming is a bit terrifying. But, it&amp;#x27;s been mostly benevolent so far, but I do find it troubling to trust a private company to keep dev&amp;#x27;s in mind, and not profit.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>27182818284</author><text>&amp;gt;What does &amp;quot;punished socially&amp;quot; even mean?&lt;p&gt;This is an interesting expression by the grandparent. I&amp;#x27;ve never heard this term before, but I&amp;#x27;ve definitely felt like I&amp;#x27;ve been &amp;quot;punished socially&amp;quot; in some way on the Internet by not having Facebook. The most common example are the large number of apps that I can&amp;#x27;t use because they require a Facebook account to get started. (I had an FB account in the early days when it was still edu only, but ended it a few years back)</text></comment>
<story><title>Python moves to GitHub</title><url>https://mail.python.org/pipermail/core-workflow/2016-January/000345.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>StevePerkins</author><text>What does &amp;quot;punished socially&amp;quot; even mean?&lt;p&gt;Unable to attract as many contributors?  The cold reality is that most open source projects aren&amp;#x27;t really TRYING to attract contributors.  Small-time hobbyists often don&amp;#x27;t want to play with others in their personal project sandboxes, and big-time projects with high profile usually put up high barriers to contribution.&lt;p&gt;Unable to attract as many end-users, or as much public mindshare?  Now this makes more sense.  Many of the high-profile moves to GitHub are really about P.R., and signaling friendless to the developer community (e.g. Microsoft&amp;#x27;s recent image re-branding efforts).  Not having a GitHub presence DOES make you less visible and more isolated from developers today.&lt;p&gt;Either way, I would argue that GitHub is really just a sort of Facebook or Twitter-like presence for software organizations.  A way to draw attention, publicity, or mindshare from the public... but often merely a hosting mirror, and not even the primary toolset through which the software is actually developed.&lt;p&gt;This being the case, who cares if GitHub is dominant?  Or SourceForge ten years ago, or whatever the next popular thing might be ten years from now?  In most cases, it&amp;#x27;s effectively about as consequential as having to shift your focus from MySpace to Facebook when the audience moves.</text></item><item><author>cm3</author><text>The problem is with people&amp;#x27;s mindset that everything has to be on github. Large projects that dare to use self-hosted more fitting infrastructure like Phabricator tend to be punished socially.</text></item><item><author>tw04</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m not sure why it&amp;#x27;s a problem though.  If they decide to go down that path, it&amp;#x27;s not that hard to move off.  They don&amp;#x27;t have the lock-in that would scare me like having terabytes of data in an oracle database.</text></item><item><author>eugenekolo2</author><text>GitHub&amp;#x27;s reign over public open source programming is a bit terrifying. But, it&amp;#x27;s been mostly benevolent so far, but I do find it troubling to trust a private company to keep dev&amp;#x27;s in mind, and not profit.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>cm3</author><text>Projects that use github merely as a mirror always run into the issue that of all features pull requests are the only one that you cannot disable, and they have to deal with closing pull requests, pointing to the real contribution process. So far github has always rejected the possibility to disable pull requests.&lt;p&gt;The problem with Sourceforge is that we now have a thousand unmaintained projects only available there as an archive and are risking to lose them if we&amp;#x27;re not careful. It seems easier to build a github-to-new_thing service as long as github cooperates (web api throttling).&lt;p&gt;If git is to be the dominant tool, it should support a wiki, tickets, code review and more complete distribution. Kinda like Fossil++. I hope git-appraisal or at least the idea gets more popular.</text></comment>