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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 31 2015, @06:23AM
What I regard as offensive is the notion that having a github account is one of the factors that goes into hiring decisions.
"What's my github? Oh, that's easy. Just take the "name@" of my email address and replace it with "git.". So, "git.mydomain.com"
The next inevitable question among such morons is, "Oh cool, how do you get your own domain on github?" The answer is, "Apache mod rewrite redirection magic", but the real answer is I host my own public git server on a subdomain (each project's git repo is also a submodule of the main repo), and have thus never needed github. It's fucking easy. Just:
touch git-export-daemon-ok
mv hooks/post-update.sample hooks/post-update
git update-server-info
And my bare repository is available to clone over standard HTTP, use a local repo cloned with SSH to push changes to the remote. Sure, I don't get all the bells and whistles that github has, but that's what the rest of my website is for. Really, if you're a software dev and can't manage a git repo, then you probably shouldn't be releasing software publicly.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 31 2015, @07:24AM
Really, if you're a software dev and can't manage a git repo, then you probably shouldn't be releasing software publicly.
Non sequitur. Just because someone doesn't have knowledge about something specific doesn't mean they're not very good at something else.
I agree that people should be able to do this, though.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Sunday May 31 2015, @06:53PM
the forms, sometimes recruiter solicitation emails that ask, are always quite specific that they want my github username.
they don't ask for my bitbucket, my sourceforge or what have you.
I've been hosting my own repositories since 1988 but because I choose not to use a cloud service to have someone else host my repository, I am regarded as unemployable.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 01 2015, @07:24AM
Well, you could create a GitHub account, and put a single repository there which contains a single file that lists the web addresses of all your privately hosted publicly accessible repositories. :-)
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Monday June 01 2015, @08:59PM
Filter error: Comment too short
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]