Q: migrate code off GitHub (Microsoft-owned), onto a FLOSS platform?

General Discussion
1

Hi there,
Wondering about — at least just mirroring on https://Codeberg.org , to start with? Or https://framagit.org
I was a bit shocked to learn that
GitHub is:

  1. itself proprietary — not at all opensource;
  2. owned and run by M$.

For more,
see “How to Kill a Decentralized Social Network”

2

Are you asking if we have plans to migrate off GitHub at this time?
We don’t at the moment, but these are all good points – perhaps something to look into in the future.
Our pipeline, including CI testing, is currently integrated with GH, so its a bit tricky, but I agree, it would be great to migrate to a fully open source solution in the future, if we can…

1 Like
3

Thank you!

How can I help move that forward?

Is this thread the only place for such discourse
?
Or do other channels exist?

4

Right now Webrecorder uses almost exclusively closed source tools for our internal non-development related work. It’s not something I think any of us love, but it’s the kind of thing that’s difficult for us to devote time to changing at this stage. We’ve had some shortcomings with GitHub, but nothing that’s majorly impacted our work to the point where if it was an open source platform, we would change it ourselves to suit our workflows better. We also use Discord, Google, and Figma, all of which are also closed source and all of which would be disruptive to switch from.

TL;DR, the switching cost is high, but as we continue to use these tools it will just get higher which also isn’t great. Mirroring I can see, it wouldn’t impact our work at all, but is a read-only copy of our code on some other platform really that valuable?

As one final fun fact, I’ve made a point of mostly using Affinity products for non-Figma related design work while working with Webrecorder, hopefully doing my small part to reduce Adobe’s grip on the design space. Affinity’s software has its quirks and while it mostly meets our needs, most designers are pretty set on Adobe’s software for better or worse and no suitable FOSS products are available at this stage. It’s the kind of thing that I think will be interesting if we hire another designer at some point in the future… How that will go only time will tell! :upside_down_face:

If you know of any other organizations that made the switch from any of the platforms I’ve mentioned and have written about it, I’d be interested! This thread is a good place for such discussion :slight_smile: