LWN's guide to 2024

It's a large piece of infrastructure run by a commercial organization, a huge one that could turn it off and barely notice the backlash, and one that has a historically complicated relationship to open source. It's potentially like Geocities, which Yahoo unceremoniously shut down and left a hole in the Internet that's never really been replaced.

The simple answer is that it's a single point of failure - the possibility that it might become unavailable or unusable because of some future event (Microsoft remembers the "good old days" of hating open source, some awful security blunder...) It's a good idea for the process to be robust against such possibilities.

The "Network Effect" means that any potential improved alternative has a hard time getting traction, even if it's genuinely better.

Additionally, there are those for whom GitHub is already "unavailable" because of reluctance to sign up to an account, or because the interface is unpalatable to them. Various such objections (which I neither entirely agree with, nor have zero sympathy for) are frequently discussed here, on LKML, and elsewhere.

A key thing to remember is that the *reasons* some are reluctant to use GitHub (or whatever) aren't really the important thing. They exist and present an impedance requiring some kind of response, either technical (email bridges / mirrors / federation etc.) or social ("we value using GitHub more than we value your participation")

It would be great if all the process stuff hosted on GitHub (pull requests, bug tracking, discussion etc.) could be stored in a way similar to how code is stored in git. Anywhere capable of hosting a git repository (including each developer's computer) could be a complete source for all that information with whatever interface layered on top according to the needs of whoever wants access. Something like GitLab could even be taught to provide a forge-like interface on top of it to provide what people like about forges.

I'm not sure that git is really the ideal substrate for this, but could perhaps be adapted for the purpose...