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from the where-will-they-store-the-source-code? dept.
Chris Ball, about whom I know very little, gave a talk to the Data Terra Nemo conference on 23/24 May in Berlin. From the conference site, I gathered the following: "Data Terra Nemo is a technical conference for discussing the ideas behind systems and protocols without centralized ownership and how they impact the landscape of the Internet".
Chris gave a presentation regarding a decentralized git repository which he has dubbed 'GitTorrent'. His notes, which he describes as an 'aspirational transcript' of the talk, take the story up:
Why a decentralized GitHub?
First, the practical reasons: GitHub might become untrustworthy, get hacked — or get DDOS'd by China, as happened while I was working on this project! I know GitHub seems to be doing many things right at the moment, but there often comes a point at which companies that have raised $100M in Venture Capital funding start making decisions that their users would strongly prefer them not to.
There are philosophical reasons, too: GitHub is closed source, so we can't make it better ourselves. Mako Hill has an essay called Free Software Needs Free Tools, which describes the problems with depending on proprietary software to produce free software, and I think he's right. To look at it another way: the experience of our collaboration around open source projects is currently being defined by the unmodifiable tools that GitHub has decided that we should use.
So that's the practical and philosophical, and I guess I'll call the third reason the "ironical". It is a massive irony to move from many servers running the CVS and Subversion protocols, to a single centralized server speaking the decentralized Git protocol. Google Code announced its shutdown a few months ago, and their rationale was explicitly along the lines of "everyone's using GitHub anyway, so we don't need to exist anymore". We're quickly heading towards a single central service for all of the world's source code.
So, especially at this conference, I expect you'll agree with me that this level of centralization is unwise.
The talk continues in the first link at the start of this summary.
Original Submission
(Score: 4, Insightful) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Sunday May 31 2015, @03:17AM
"GitHub" is the trademark of a private company; it's like saying that all the folks who barbecued over the recent holiday weekend were a decentralized McDonalds.
It's a decentralized git repository, or a decentralized revision control system. Even if it's an identical clone of GitHub's UI, it's not a decentralized GitHub, it's a decentralized clone of GitHub.
Use trademarks carefully or the lawyers will eat your lunch.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 31 2015, @04:55AM
Nobody knows the difference between git and GitHub. Even the Torvalds himself who invented git is on GitHub.
https://github.com/torvalds/linux [github.com]
See? Only 9075 forks! If you fork Linux on GitHub you can pretend to be a kernel hacker too. Isn't GitHub wonderful.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Sunday May 31 2015, @05:10AM
That doesn't make sense. Git already is a decentralized revision control system.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Sunday May 31 2015, @05:19AM
but SEO, once regarded as a black art, is know quite well documented. Go look at who the top hits are for a selection of valuable queries.
Or consider why the Champs d'Elysees (sp?) was constructed in Paris.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 31 2015, @05:22AM
Git was a decentralized tool for losers until GitHub centralized it. These days you're not a real coder unless you're on GitHub, just like how you're not a real person unless you're on Facebook.
(Score: 3, Funny) by maxwell demon on Sunday May 31 2015, @05:37AM
What am I then? A corporation? :-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Sunday May 31 2015, @05:59AM
I would otherwise have no possible way to ever communicate with my close friends and family. I work very hard to convince them to email me but they don't know how to.
My cousin Chuck Crawford was the valedictorian of his high school. He has a master's degree from havard, now he teaches at a graduate school of architecture. Even so he doesn't know how to send nor receive email; oddly he can write fortran code.
I tried to look him up at his school's website. Other than the HTML homepage it was a bunch of PDFs. There was no faculty directory.
Chuck's apparently a real important guy in the architectural world but even so I can't find him online other than through facebook.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 31 2015, @06:21AM
I hate my friends and family. I don't have a Facebook account and I never check my email.
I do all my talking with people in person down at the general store like it's 1955.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 31 2015, @07:20AM
I would otherwise have no possible way to ever communicate with my close friends and family.
Well, between surrendering my privacy to a scumbag company like Facebook (and the numerous companies it hands your information over to) and not talking to close friends and family, I'd easily choose the latter.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Sunday May 31 2015, @06:48PM
when your friends and family are dead and buried, you will regret not having asked them some questions.
For me it is very, very painful that I did not ask my father just a very few questions.
One such is why I have never been so much as permitted to meet my own brother.
Dad left us in 2003.
Mom surely knows but she won't discuss Brother Chuck other than to name him in her will for the specific purpose of cutting him completely out of it.
My sister claims we don't have a Brother Chuck, she asserts that I'm referring to Cousin Chuck. But we really do have a Brother Chuck; I've seen one single photograph of him, also my aunt - my mother's twin sister - knew Brother Chuck when he was a toddler.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]