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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] 2 points 5 months ago

I run a few reasonably popular FOSS projects, and basically the reason I use non-free infrastructure where I do is that my users prefer I use that. I love open source, and I love privacy centric services, but not everyone does, and for open source projects, having (and enabling the most) community involvement is more important than privacy centric toolsets.

In a perfect world, I could self host my own code forge and support forum, and everyone would be willing and able to use it, but we don’t live in a perfect world, and I can’t do that yet. If we keep working toward it, I believe it will happen, but it’s just not ready yet.