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Why FOSS projects are using proprietary, privacy invasive infrastructure? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 6 months ago by JustMarkov@lemmy.ml to c/foss@beehaw.org

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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/15691030

As you can easily notice, today many open source projects are using some services, that are… sus.

For example, Github is the most popular place to store your project code and we all know, who owns it. And not to forget that sketchy AI training on every line of your code. Don't we have alternatives? Oh, yes we have. Gitlab, Codeberg, Notabug, etc. You can even host your own Gitea or Forgejo instance if you want.

Also, Crowdin is very popular in terms of software (and docs) translation. Even Privacy Guides and The New Oil use Crowdin, even though we have FLOSS Weblate, that you can easily self-host or use public instances.

So, my question is: if you are building a FLOSS / privacy related project, why using proprietary and privacy invasive tools?

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[–] hunger@programming.dev 19 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (2 children)

The biggest factor to me is developer attention. I had a project on gitlab and pushed a README.md with a link to the gitlab instance into github. I got about 10 times more reactions from github, incl. PRs (where the person had grabbed the code from gitlab and did a PR on github anyway) -- even in this setup. Mirroring a project to github tilts that even further.

Not being present on github means a lot less users and contributors. As long as that stays this way there is no way around github.

I hope federated forges can move some attention away from github, making other forges more visible... but I am not too optimistic :-(

[–] ryannathans@aussie.zone 5 points 6 months ago (2 children)

Running my large project on gitlab I have no shortage of contributors, just painful sometimes to get people to register on gitlab due to account verification with credit card or phone number

[–] CalcProgrammer1@lemmy.ml 5 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

GitLab has gone downhill over the past several years to the point I cannot recommend it anymore. Requiring a credit card is a kick to the face of younger devs wanting to get their feet wet in open source. The CI minutes that free accounts and FOSS projects get is insultingly pathetic. Their open source program that you have to apply for is intentionally annoying, requiring you to manually get re-approved yearly and the benefits only work for FOSS projects under a group, not a personal account. It's tolerable if you self-host your own runners and forget their shit excuse for a managed CI exists, but I'm also running into this super annoying issue where I get signed out of Gitlab almost daily and have to re-login and enter a verification code from my email. I have my project mirrored to Codeberg and if Codeberg had better CI I'd move completely, even if it were self hosted. Gitlab has gone way downhill since I moved to them after MS bought Github.

[–] ryannathans@aussie.zone 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

As an open source project via gitlab's program we get 50000 minutes each year. That's 4000-5000 merge requests of CI time for us. How many do you need? Odd that you get signed out every day.

[–] CalcProgrammer1@lemmy.ml 2 points 6 months ago

I don't want to move my project to a group, which is the only way to use those minutes. It used to be that any public project with a FOSS license got access to the FOSS minutes but now only the ones they approve do, and as I said, there are restrictions like having to have the project under a group. At least gitlab-runner is self hostable, but it's a depressing mess compared to what it used to be.

[–] hunger@programming.dev 4 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

I never said that you can not run a project elsewhere, my point is that you will get way more interaction on github.

Try pushing your project to github and compare the interactions you get from both forges.

[–] ryannathans@aussie.zone 1 points 6 months ago

We took it from github, there's not much difference. Just had to SEO better to get the new repo above the old one

[–] fmstrat@lemmy.nowsci.com 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Forejo, where you can use your github oauth login

[–] hunger@programming.dev 1 points 6 months ago

Github login does not help much... devs are on github, not on random forgjo instances. That's where they see your project. Github is also where they put their fork of your project when they play with it. They will write comments using github markdown and won't care whether that renders correctly or not in your forge.

And it is where they will report issues and open a PR. It is annoying, but it is how it is. When you ask them to open the PR elsewhere they complain sinde they need to set up an account there and copy ssh key and similar things. You need a very dedicated contributor to go through with all that.... especially if it is just a few lines of drive-by fixes.