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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 (1 children)

Network effect.

Using GitHub as an example, choosing any alternative (as a small project) will reduce the amount of contributions and will make the project less discoverable. Especially if you consider projects where the technical barrier for contribution is lower, it is much more likely for a potential contributor to have an account on a "mainstream" platform.

I used to think that this was less of an issue in more niche communities, but a recent post by an Emacs package developer (Protesilaos Stavrou, won an FSF award a few years ago) changed my mind: https://protesilaos.com/codelog/2024-04-30-re-emacs-github-freedom-microsoft/

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (2 children)

That makes sense. But what about big ongoing projects/ Couldn't they easily migrate to a FOSS service? I'd imagine people will look out for them specifically no matter where they're hosted.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 months ago

Big projects generally have their own websites to house their community. Example of LibreOffice comes to mind.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago

They often host on multiple platforms.