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posted by janrinok on Sunday May 31 2015, @02:57AM   Printer-friendly
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.


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  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 31 2015, @04:46AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 31 2015, @04:46AM (#190314)

    What I regard as offensive is the notion that having a github account is one of the factors that goes into hiring decisions.

    GitHub is the trendy place for young posers to pad their portfolios with trendiness. They go to GitHub and fork a whole bunch of trendy projects, never contribute anything ever, and put the GitHub account on the résumé with the expectation that idiot recruiters will see a whole bunch of trendy projects and conclude that anybody who is somehow involved with so many trendy projects must be trendy enough to deserve employment.

    The average GitHub project will have a handful of contributors but hundreds and hundreds of useless résumé padding forks by totally worthless morons.

    I expect that leads recruiters to conclude that I don't really know how to program computers, despite my having learned to code in 1976,

    Nobody really cares if you know how to program. The trouble is you're not young, old man.

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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Sunday May 31 2015, @05:08AM

    That's why I don't dye my grey hair.

    That's why I don't tell anyone what my github account is, despite that I really do have one. I use it only to make actual contributions to projects that are themselves hosted on github.

    A close friend who sincerely meant well advised me to stop linking my essays on mental illness from every page on my entire website. I pointed out to her that it is more important to me that those essays be widely read, than that I ever get a job.

    Even so, it sucks to be poor.

    Wikipedia has a good article about Diogenes of Sinope. He's an important philosopher but even so his lifestyle was what most today would regard as "homeless". Diogenes used to carry a lamp with him even during the day, in hopes of finding an honest man.

    I read that just a few days ago, I'm considering doing the exact same thing.

    --
    Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 31 2015, @05:37AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 31 2015, @05:37AM (#190330)

      Diogenes told Alexander to get lost and was lucky enough to live afterwards. Archimedes told a Roman soldier to get lost and died. Socrates who was too lazy to write anything down was instead such a talkative man that the Athenians had him killed just to make him shut up. So my question to you, modern man, is how lucky do you feel?

      • (Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Sunday May 31 2015, @05:56AM

        sounded like a fun game.

        Two different people - a psychiatrist and a close friend - each pointed out to me that I was "a survivor". In fact I do have the Boy Scout Wilderness Survival Merit Badge.

        I've been tazed four times, each time by Clark County Washington Sheriff's deputies. The fourth time I yanked the wires out of the tazer.

        I'm not dead certain but attribute my tolerance for pain to my fondness for spicy food. Capsaicin is well-documented to relieve pain. In my experience it does not relieve pain but makes the pain bearable.

        --
        Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 31 2015, @06:09AM

          by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 31 2015, @06:09AM (#190339)

          I'm a pain in the ass, for sure, but I'm not a big enough pain in the ass to be murdered by anyone, not even the cops, and they love to murder people!

          Look over here, at me! I love attention!!!!!!!

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 31 2015, @11:35AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 31 2015, @11:35AM (#190380)

      Can we have a link to your mental illness articles, then?