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- Hacker News
- If your a small company developing something closed source is there any reason to use GitHub over just setting up a git infrastructure on your private server?by t1234s
- Brand loyalty.by inigyou
- This is what I do. If however I wanted to do some open source I would definitely copy releases to GitHub as wellby FpUser
- Only reason that I see is that is free to use, why other alternatives are either paid or you needs to be hosted (and thus you need to pay the cost of a server and the work to maintain it).by alerighi
- Convenience.by hungryhobbit
- GitSocial? https://github.com/gitsocial-org/gitsocialby anankaie
- How’s about radicle.dev ? Apparently like GitHub, but decentralized like Git.by ckcheng
- It's mentioned in the article.
I tried it, years apart. It's forever experimental, and requires hosting for forever online repo anyway.
Forgejo is also mentioned, to me it's a valid alternative, without the community aspect.
by hirako2000 - There is a view where developers think of a forge as a place where they host their code.
Than there is another view where the forge is where you go to get code others have written, and this is where GitHub shines. Because of the collective audit.
by merelydev - Didn’t we have these also without GitHub? If you wanted to share code, you could that even without GitHub.by ruszki
- My projects are gone from microsoft github.com. Not because I decided to move away, but mostly because github.com is now blocking noscript/basic HTML browsers for most of its basic functions, then it was actually them who did boot me away.
Small Tech Discrimination.
by sylware - > Bitbucket is the obvious existing counterexample: a conventional commercial forge that has never developed into a shared open-source community comparable to GitHub
Agreed. All my customers are on Bitbucket. All the libraries used by their projects (Ruby, Python, JS) are on GitHub.
by pmontra - I've worked in a couple of companies who used bitbucket, and I've been glad when each of them migrated elsewhere.
Bitbucket managed to be slow, annoying, and suffer more outages than github ever did. (Though perhaps that has changed, we're all aware that github has been struggling "recently".)
by stevekemp - In the early days of github, it offered private repositories only for paid users. Bitbucket allowed private repositories for free.by ValdikSS
- 99% of commits on a project come from 1% of contributors, so the main issue w/ migrating to an alternative isn't the networking effect of github, rather that you can't carry over github specific stuff (prs/issues)
i personally like how radicle.xyz managed that, where they manage issues/prs/user identities as git objects, so your entire project is self contained as git repository
by taminka - As for issue tracking, there are also other git-native alternatives out there. Epiq is entirely git-backed, vendor agnostic and persists state as a versioned log in your repo.
Im its creator, for full disclosure.
by jolaflow - I agree and I will go further: radicle has the only competent federation model. They are the only designers who understood from the beginning that issues and PRs belong to the repo, not to a bunch of random servers hosting every issue opened by a different user.
It also allows for arbitrary levels of redundancy without passively saturating the network with ActivityPub traffic that no one looks at.
There needs to be some kind of shared infrastructure to make it easier for new contributors.
by jeremyjh - The only reason I keep my projects on it is the Windows and macOS runners.by mococa
- Yeah I think people vastly underestimate the value of free CI runners - especially free Windows/Mac runners. Big projects with dozens of members can afford the effort to set up their own runners but small one-man projects aren't going to bother and they represent the vast majority of Github.
Microsoft spends around $100m/year on free CI runners. Github is going to have to get a lot worse before most people give that up.
Also the post correctly mentions the importance of stacked PRs and how it's crazy that it has taken Github this long to get them. But it fails to mention that it's taking its competitors even longer. Gitlab doesn't have them. Forgejo has no plans. The only other forges I know that support them are Phabricator/Phorge (I think anyway; it's been a while), and Tangled, which tbh looks like it has blown its weirdness budget way too much to be a viable Github competitor.
by IshKebab - They’re free, too. If your project is public, you can spin up dozens (hundreds?) of jobs (10 or so of which will run in parallel) on every push and Microsoft casually pays for it. I’d love to move off GH but I would have to significantly reduce my CI usage (before you ask - already more optimized than anything you usually see) or pay quite a lot for my hobby projects.
- Not saying it doesn't come with downsides and the hassle of maintenance, but at home I have a Linux server (running a Windows VM) + Mac Mini + Forgejo + Forgejo workers on each one of them. With NixOS it was relatively painless to get setup correctly, everything in a reproducible manner, and now I can have a ~10 line YAML file that adds cross-platform builds+signing+publishing when needed, and performance is much better than the free/cheap CI workers you get from Microsoft and others.
- GitHub is really two separate products: a code forge for teams and a social coding platform to collaborate on open source.
When I use the social platform, it is mostly as a read-only website. I am occasionally commenting, opening issues, PRs etc. The slowness and annoyances do not matter that much.
But I live in the team tool, where the annoyances and paper cuts are painful. Besides poor craftsmanship, there is often tension between the simpler design for social which sacrifices usability for pro use cases.
The social platform, which has huge network effects and is really hard to replace, is basically a loss leader for marketing the team product. I wonder if it would be viable for another company to create a team tool that stands on its own by outclassing Github like Linear outclasses Jira? That should be easier to replace. And Microsoft could keep running the social platform for the time being, where the adoption of alternatives is much slower and requires a much longer time frame.
by kloud - I hadn't ever used the email-based pull request until I started using Sourcehut, but ever since I did I've honestly grown to prefer it. People shouldn't require an account at a for-profit company to make contributions to FOSS.
Sourcehut is pretty niche but I like it a lot, and I don't really mind paying for things relative to the value they provide me.
by tombert - I really like sourcehut but I do find it frustrating that it does not offer LFS. I know I could point at another providers’ LFS, but then I may as well use their entire git offering tooby dwroberts
- Running a git forge is easy, I find the social coding/network effect the stickiest part of GitHub. I want my code to be discoverable, and I want to discover others' code.
I wanted to leave GitHub but I'm still stuck there. What it would take for me to finally leave is some kind of federation of the social features, so I can port my stars over, see what others are working on, etc.
by cedws - How much do you actually use social features of GitHub besides bug reporting?
Your stars list is browser bookmarks. You can see what others are doing even if you don't have accounts on their sites.
by inigyou - At some point the whole internet switched over from a project-centric to a platform-centric mental model for most people.
It used to be "I want to talk to these people. Oh, they're on IRC" and then it was "I'm on IRC. who can I talk to here?" and while that might not be so bad for IRC, it's catastrophic when it's proprietary platforms with lock-in.
by inigyou - Forgejo is actively developing ActivityPub-based federation support as a set of experimental features (https://forgejo.org/2023-01-10-answering-forgejo-federation-...), including federated starring: https://codeberg.org/forgejo/forgejo/pulls/1680by lispwitch
- I’m in something of the same boat, although I don’t particularly care about my own stars and what not, for me it’s just a rather effective place to find open source projects to use/contribute towards (along with hosting for my own projects).
I have found running GitHub mirrors for my own projects hosted on a private Forgejo instance works well enough, but the fracturing of GitHub will inevitably cause more difficulty in discovering others’ work. I suppose that opens opportunities up for either federation, or at least aggregation (Sourceforge has been doing that already, although I find its interface a little clunky).
by nativeit - In the end GitHub will be a dating siteby t1234s