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Cake day: July 10th, 2023

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  • As I said, it is not impossible to move away from gh compared to many other cases in other industries, just that it is more difficult than necessary because vendor-lockin is allowed.

    If vendor-lockin was illegal, companies had more incentives to use established or create new standards to facilitate simpler migration between software stacks, without changing the external interface.

    For instance allowing your own DNS name to be used as the repo/project basepath instead of enforcing github.com, Allowing comments, reviews, issues and pull requests via email or other federated services, instead of enforcing github accounts to do so, providing documented, stable and full-featured APIs for every component of their software, so that it is easy to migrate and pick and choose different components of their while stack from possible different vendors, …

    There are so many ways that would improve the migration situation, while also providing more ways for other ideas to compete on a level playing field. If a bright engineer has an idea for improving one component from github, they should not be required to write a whole separate platform first.


  • Well the reason for that is the vendor-lockin and centralized technology.

    If your project for instance uses a similar development method as the linux kernel does, e.g. sending and reviewing patches via mailing lists and providing url to push and pull git repos from, it is quite easy to switch out the software stack underneath, because your are dealing with quasi-standart data: Mbox, SMTP, HTTP(s) and DNS. So you can move your whole community to a different software stack by just changing some DNS entries and maybe provide some url rewrite rules without disrupting the development process.

    I am not saying that the mailing list development process is the right one for every project, but it demonstrates how agnostic to the software stack it could be.

    If vendor-lockin is made illegal, the service providers would have more incentives to use or create standardized APIs, so that their product can be replaced by competitors. So switching to or from github/gitlab/… becomes easier.


  • It has more than you expect, if your project is established on github and want to move away you have to deal with:

    • migration of issues
    • migration of pull requests
    • migration of all review comments etc
    • migration of the wiki
    • migration of the pages
    • convince all contributors to possible create a new account somewhere else
    • changing of the project urls. I don’t think github offers a url rewrite service
    • forks on github will not have the new destination as the fork base
    • change the ci and release process
    • because you cannot add url rewrite rules to your old gh project, you might need to only ‘archive’ the project there with manually written text, to point to the new destination, for people to find it

  • You don’t know what a “monopoly” is.

    What the author is probably searching for is “vendor-lockin”, which is an anticompetitive practice for so long that it became the way many companies rely their business on. It favors established products over new-comers by making switching offerings difficult/expensive or even impossible, thus better products often have no chance of competing in a field, that was dominated by a single supplier for a while.

    IMO there should be strict regulations and high fines associated with it, because it hinders innovation massively across all industries.

    The cost of switching away from github for a project is high, but not as high as in other fields.






  • What kind of comparison is that? sudo is setuid while Firefox and its extensions run as the user you started it as.

    Also sudo has just one very specific and limited use case, while Firefox is more of a platform for web content. I could argue that sudo itself is an ‘extension’ to a Linux system, like every application.

    You also don’t have to install all of those extension, you can choose which you trust, similar to a Linux system, you don’t have to install every application in the repository.

    If you say that the Firefox add-on repo should be more managed like a repository of a Linux distribution, where developers cannot simply upload their own software, but need to find a trusted maintainer first, I could agree to that. But that would mean more work and overhead.


  • cmhe@lemmy.worldtoSelfhosted@lemmy.worldUncommon Syncthing usecases
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    8 months ago

    I mod my games on my PC and sync it to my SteamDeck. I also sync the save files back and fourth, to continue playing on different devices. Mostly non-steam games.

    I also sync my eBook collection to my eink reader with syncthing.

    Everything is also mirrored to my always-on NAS, so syncing always works.