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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) (8 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 (5 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

[–] 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

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