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GitHub Is Not Open Source, A Rant

listed.to Github is Not Open Source | Juliette — I write

Github is Not Open Source | Juliette — I write

Github is Not Open Source | Juliette — I write
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  • Content warning: this is a rant from a teenager who has strong opinions.

    Okay...

    However, it holds a monopoly on software.

    You don't know what a "monopoly" is.

    they could just go “Boop! You’re gone!” and there’s nothing I could do about it other than move forges.

    Yeah, nothing you could do about it, other than moving to one of the many other git hosts. Monopoly!

    And then after listing off a whole bunch of alternative git hosts...

    Centralization is not bad by itself but it’s bad when there’s no other option. There just needs to be ways to contribute to code without having to use Github.

    You have plenty of ways to do that, and you know that because you just listed them. Github is not a monopoly.

    Also, I don't see the concept of open source mentioned at any point in this rant.

    • You don't know what a "monopoly" is.

      What the author is probably searching for is "vendor-lockin", which is an anticompetitive practice for so long that it became the way many companies rely their business on. It favors established products over new-comers by making switching offerings difficult/expensive or even impossible, thus better products often have no chance of competing in a field, that was dominated by a single supplier for a while.

      IMO there should be strict regulations and high fines associated with it, because it hinders innovation massively across all industries.

      The cost of switching away from github for a project is high, but not as high as in other fields.

      • Imo github doesnt have that high of a vendor lock-in. Its git, you can clone and push it to another server. Sure, youll have to convert the ci's and templates, but thats about it really.
        And a good yaml is easily converted as the ideas and actions are the same, only the action names are different.
        But yes, i think that is what the author was getting at.

        • It has more than you expect, if your project is established on github and want to move away you have to deal with:

          • migration of issues
          • migration of pull requests
          • migration of all review comments etc
          • migration of the wiki
          • migration of the pages
          • convince all contributors to possible create a new account somewhere else
          • changing of the project urls. I don't think github offers a url rewrite service
          • forks on github will not have the new destination as the fork base
          • change the ci and release process
          • because you cannot add url rewrite rules to your old gh project, you might need to only 'archive' the project there with manually written text, to point to the new destination, for people to find it

          • Ye, some of these i started thinking of after i made my comment, which is my bad. Its true a project that uses the full github stack is harder to move, its its still relatively easy. The only problem you'd have is redirecting traffic to a new host, but this problem exists in all platforms and not only in project management sites like github.
            As for your bulletpoints, i have a few remarks. Mainly that github pages are silly and they should not be used as a website. And even if you are, there are tools out there to convert the markdown from github pages into html/css/js so moving that is easy. Same with wiki pages, they are just markdown. 90% of markdown is compatible with other sites, and the parts that arent probably have a site specific syntax that youll need to look up, nothing bad. Review comments i will disregard, as those are part of the PR process. Once a project is moved you could hide the PR tab on github or close all new ones redirecting them to the new host. All older ones can be handled and phased out. Once a pr is merged, get the commit from github and push it to the new host. Thanks git!
            Random contributers have nothing to say imo. If a project's team feels the need to move away from github a true contributer/side team member/helper will move with them, and if they dont then so be it. Once a project team feels the need to move, something bad must be going on and moving will always be the better move for their mental health than to keep working with bad stuff.
            As mentioned before ci/release pipelines are all yaml. Their odeas stay the same, only action names & their patameters change. Nothing complex there to move there...

            So im short : only moving your traffic is a real problem, but is a problem on all websites and all communities, not just github or a project on github

          • All of those issues would arise if you wanted to migrate an established project to Github as well.

    • So, is google not a monopoly because there are other search engines out there? Does Apple not have a monopoly among US teenagers because there are Android phones available? Does Microsoft not have a monopoly in desktop computing because Apple and Linux exist or because phones exist?

      What is your definition of monopoly and how does Github not fit it? I'm genuinely curious.

      Anti Commercial AI thingy

      CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

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      • So, is google not a monopoly because there are other search engines out there?

        It isn't. There are other search engines. People use Google because it's the best, not because it's the only one available. If Google became a horrible search engine, people would switch no problem

        Does Apple not have a monopoly among US teenagers because there are Android phones available?

        Yes. Although Apple is preferred in this public (of which I don't know a lot about, so I won't try to guess why), Android is always an option. And a cheaper one, usually. This forces Apple to differentiate themselves by giving the best in what their users want (premium quality and status, I guess).

        Does Microsoft not have a monopoly in desktop computing because Apple and Linux exist or because phones exist?

        Same point.

        What is your definition of monopoly and how does Github not fit it?

        A monopoly is when a company is the only one in a market niche. Not the most prominent one.

        • A monopoly is when a company is the only one in a market niche. Not the most prominent one.

          What would you call the latter then?

          Anti Commercial AI thingy

          CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

          Inserted with a keystroke running this script on linux with X11

          #!/usr/bin/env nix-shell
#!nix-shell -i bash --packages xautomation xclip

sleep 0.2
(echo '::: spoiler Anti Commercial AI thingy
[CC BY-NC-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/)

Inserted with a keystroke running this script on linux with X11
```bash'
cat "$0"
echo '```
:::') | xclip -selection clipboard
xte "keydown Control_L" "key V" "keyup Control_L"

          • I don't think there's a precise name for that, since it can be a lot of complex things. A monopoly is a very defined thing, that was my point.

            A company can be prominent because it is just better at giving what the consumers want. That's the case of Google (as a search engine). I use Duck Duck Go, but very often I have to fallback to Google because DDG's results are just not quite right.

            It can be prominent because what it does is very expensive and so only a few can even try it. That's again the case with Google. Creating a good search engine is hard, and Google just got more money to throw at it. That's also the case of Apple. What they are selling (premium products with very high quality and stability) is inherently expensive, and such they don't face a lot of competition (Sansung I guess). Many big corp will lobby the government to artificially make the market more expensive so they can rule out small fish (don't quote me on that, I'll not elaborate further).

            A company can also turn itself into a conglomerate, merging, buying and assimilating other companies. That's the case with AbInbev here in Brazil. They assimilated most of the beer companies. It is very hard (in my opinion impossible) for this to turn into a monopoly, because there will be other big fish trying to play the same game (Petrópolis and Heineken in this case, for example), and there will always be those companies that will not accept being bought, hoping they will be the next big fish.

            I'm not making any judgement of value here, I hate big corporations, but I think we should put blame where blame is due, and not attack straw men and use water down terms, because that's pretty weak.

            • I don’t think there’s a precise name for that, since it can be a lot of complex things.

              Do you understand now why people call it a monopoly? Why the US Department of Justice alleges Apple to be a monopoly?

              There are indeed 5 characteristics for a monopoly and only one need fit the target to be called a monopoly, of which your criteria is only one:

              • Profit maximizer: monopolists will choose the price or output to maximise profits at where MC=MR.This output will be somewhere over the price range, where demand is price elastic. If the total revenue is higher than total costs, the monopolists will make abnormal profits.
              • Price maker: Decides the price of the good or product to be sold, but does so by determining the quantity in order to demand the price desired by the firm.
              • High barriers to entry: Other sellers are unable to enter the market of the monopoly.
              • Single seller: In a monopoly, there is one seller of the good, who produces all the output.[6] Therefore, the whole market is being served by a single company, and for practical purposes, the company is the same as the industry.
              • Price discrimination: A monopolist can change the price or quantity of the product. They sell higher quantities at a lower price in a very elastic market, and sell lower quantities at a higher price in a less elastic market.

              Had you provided another term, I would have agreed with you that the author doesn't know what a monopoly is, but it seems like the inverse is true.

              • I don't like to argue semantics on the internet so I won't answer further than this

                US Department of Justice alleges Apple to be a monopoly

                With all due respect, I really don't care what the US government calls a monopoly. It doesn't make it a monopoly just because some county government said so.

                Single seller: In a monopoly, there is one seller of the good, who produces all the output.[6] Therefore, the whole market is being served by a single company, and for practical purposes, the company is the same as the industry.

                That's the most important thing. We agree on that one. A monopoly is the singular provider of a good in the market. Github is not the only provider of git hosting (think Gitlab and Bitbucket). Apple is not the singular provider of smartphones (Sansung, Motorola, Xiaomi, etc), nor it's the singular provider of laptops (Lenovo, Samsung, Alienware, Framework). All of the other points are things that monopolies do, but alone doesn't make a monopoly.

                This difference is important, because creating a true monopoly is impossibly hard. So hard in fact, that they are usually caused by interference of the government (like Petrobrás here), not the other way around.

          • Duopoly?

    • Ye, i went to this post diagonally and it felt like a rant without any merit. Dont get me wrong, i dont fully like github either but this was just a waste of time to read...

    • You don’t know what a “monopoly” is.

      Do you though? A clarification that most people miss : "In economics, a monopoly is a single seller. In law, a monopoly is a business entity that has significant market power, that is, the power to charge overly high prices, which is associated with a decrease in social surplus." (from Wikipedia) So are you 100% sure that the author was talking from an economical rather than legal viewpoint?

      So sure, in theoretical economics GitHub is not a monopoly, rather it's part of an oligopoly. Yet, in law, it is in practice a monopoly. GitHub is so big that it does shape the market of collaborating on (open-source) software, even though alternatives do exist.

    • Not like you can just visit some other selfhosted community on lemmy or reddit and see how others started hosting a local git appliance for their scripts and what not.

    • Well, if you want to contribute to a project to github then you are pretty fucked if the gate keepers won't let you

      • You're not "pretty fucked". Just use one of the many other git hosts out there. OP himself lists some of them in his rant.

        • You didn't seem to read what I said. I can't force other projects that I don't own off github.

          • Actually, you can do exactly that. Fork them.

            You can't force the people who are using Github to follow you, of course. But that's every individual's choice.

        • How do you contribute to project on Github from a different git host?

          • Oh, that's what you meant. How do you contribute to a project on any git host if that git host won't let you? In what way is GitHub any different from that?

            • Its different in that other platforms aren't run by evil corporations that could decide to deplatform a user.

              • You think Microsoft is the only "evil corporation" among these? That's very naive. Any hosting service will deplatform users when they can see a profit to be made from doing so.

    • Cut them some slack. They're at an age where they're trying to assert their independence and their brain is still developing. They've got time to mature and find more worthy fights over which to spill words. Or maybe they'll remain smooth-brained. But either way, right now they're not at their best.

82 comments