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Why FOSS projects are using proprietary, privacy invasive infrastructure? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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As you can easily notice, today many open source projects are using some services, that are… sus.

For example, Github is the most popular place to store your project code and we all know, who owns it. And not to forget that sketchy AI training on every line of your code. Don't we have alternatives? Oh, yes we have. Gitlab, Codeberg, Notabug, etc. You can even host your own Gitea or Forgejo instance if you want.

Also, Crowdin is very popular in terms of software (and docs) translation. Even Privacy Guides and The New Oil use Crowdin, even though we have FLOSS Weblate, that you can easily self-host or use public instances.

So, my question is: if you are building a FLOSS / privacy related project, why using proprietary and privacy invasive tools?

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[–] [email protected] 61 points 5 months ago (2 children)

There's been a general trend towards self-hosted GitLab instances in some projects:

Small projects tend to not want to spin up infrastructure, but on GitHub you know your code will still be there 10 years later after you disappear. The same cannot be said of my Cogs instance and whatever was on it.

And overall, GitHub has been pretty good to users. No ads, free, pretty speedy, and a huge community of users that already have an account where they can just PR your repo. Nobody wants to make an account on some random dude's instance just to open a PR.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 5 months ago (2 children)

GitHub (since the Microsoft acquisition) is good to users because that's their MO, it's called Embrace, Extend, Extinguish, and the whole point is to centralize users and projects and make them dependent on the Microsoft ecosystem.

Of course now there's also the whole issue of Copilot, which means any code you put on GitHub could very well show up piecemeal in someone's AI-generated code. If it wasn't for that novel avenue of monetization, you can bet your ass GitHub would have already made the free user experience a lot shittier.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 months ago

Wouldn’t code hosted anywhere on the open internet be potentially susceptible to AI scraping?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

Micosoft also owns npm, Windows, Azure, Office, Outlook, Teams, & LinkedIn—MS GitHub is not just Copilot, but Sponsors & Codespaces. The whole overarching goal is to integrate all this data & make support between these products is prioritize with little upsells inside the apps, & get you hooked on the ecosystem… neo-EEE.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago (1 children)

You can host a git repo with little effort on any Linux machine you can ssh to. You don’t need to host a git lab instance unless you want some web gui.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago

Multiform merge support, issues, wiki's, discussions. Its all of the other pieces of a software forge.