Rebecca Giblin on chokepoint capitalism [LWN.net]

Rebecca Giblin on chokepoint capitalism

Posted Mar 31, 2023 8:34 UTC (Fri) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523)
In reply to: Rebecca Giblin on chokepoint capitalism by archaic
Parent article: Rebecca Giblin on chokepoint capitalism

This is extremely relevant to 'Open Source'.
GIt was designed as a distributed system where everybody could publish with just a website.
Github redefined GIT as a client server system when they own all the servers.
Even when one keeps a server, the pressure from the community to host the project on github is enormous.
The e14n of github has already started with compulsory participation to Copilot.
In some way we are back to 1989 when Microsoft controlled all usable software by controlling the OS.

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Rebecca Giblin on chokepoint capitalism

Posted Apr 3, 2023 9:53 UTC (Mon) by kleptog (subscriber, #1183) [Link] (6 responses)

>GIt was designed as a distributed system where everybody could publish with just a website.

>Github redefined GIT as a client server system when they own all the servers.

Git never changed, it's still a distributed system. The problem is that it's not enough to develop an actual product. Git has no features to track reviews, for example. You may need to designate a branch as "authoritative" and then apply permission to control that, Git doesn't provide any help in that area. That's by design, it describes itself as a "stupid content tracker". And it does that very very well.

Hence sites like Github which round out Git's features to something that's actually usable to build an actual product. That the Linux kernel is developed by having all the developers subscribing to various mailing lists might work for them but most people would describe that as ridiculously impractical.

I agree there is pressure, many sites that develop elsewhere maintain a Github mirror for visibility, which due to Git's nature is trivial to arrange. Despite what people say, there are many competitors and self-hosting still happens. I don't like the Gitlab workflow either, I'm more a Gerrit fan myself, but to each their own.

As for the "compulsory participation to Copilot", ISTM they're simply exercising Software Freedom 1: The freedom to study how a program works [using the source code]. You may be thinking "that's not what I meant", but that's a different issue.

Rebecca Giblin on chokepoint capitalism

Posted Apr 3, 2023 11:43 UTC (Mon) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

> As for the "compulsory participation to Copilot", ISTM they're simply exercising Software Freedom 1: The freedom to study how a program works [using the source code]. You may be thinking "that's not what I meant", but that's a different issue.

Hmmm...

What they are doing, what they think they are doing, what other people think they are doing, and what other people do, are four different realities. I would be completely unsurprised if other people come up with more.

What they ARE doing is provided half-baked dodgy teaching materials, encouraging licence violations, etc etc.

They may say that's not their intention, and I believe them, but - as with the FSF's four freedoms! - actions have consequences, and quite often what happens is not what the originators intended to happen (or maybe it is ...)

Cheers,
Wol

Rebecca Giblin on chokepoint capitalism

Posted Apr 3, 2023 16:30 UTC (Mon) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link] (2 responses)

There are some pretty good self-hosting alternatives to GitHub. E.g., Gogs - or its fork - is very easy to get installed and working.

Rebecca Giblin on chokepoint capitalism

Posted Apr 3, 2023 16:34 UTC (Mon) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link] (1 responses)

I'd love to see some kind of distributed bug reporting/handling in git though. And, ideally, integrated with code review. I don't know how useable any of the solutions in this space are.

Rebecca Giblin on chokepoint capitalism

Posted Apr 11, 2023 5:01 UTC (Tue) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link]

Forgejo is supposedly building distributed collaborative features for git, but they've barely made any progress in a year beyond adding an empty skeleton metadata API (and unfortunately it's going to use ActivityPub, so the result is all but guaranteed to be a big ball of mud).

The closest existing thing to what you're asking for may be Fossil, which is lacking the somewhat critical feature here of "being git". And its code review support is a bit nonexistent, since it was built in service of a project that infamously doesn't take any outside contributions. Could serve as a source of inspiration for anyone looking to build something new though.

Rebecca Giblin on chokepoint capitalism

Posted Apr 5, 2023 12:27 UTC (Wed) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523) [Link]

> As for the "compulsory participation to Copilot", ISTM they're simply exercising Software Freedom 1: The freedom to study how a program works [using the source code].

Precisely, they updated the TOS to give them rights, instead on relying on the license.

Rebecca Giblin on chokepoint capitalism

Posted Apr 6, 2023 8:09 UTC (Thu) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link]

ISTM they're simply exercising Software Freedom 1: The freedom to study how a program works [using the source code].

Copilot doesn't study how a program works. It studies what bits of syntax appear next to one another and how frequently.