<html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html charset=windows-1252"></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;"><br><div><div>On Mar 16, 2014, at 11:40 PM, Joshua Root <<a href="mailto:jmr@macports.org">jmr@macports.org</a>> wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><blockquote type="cite">However I would also agree with what Landon said here:<br><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; float: none; display: inline !important;"><</span><a href="https://lists.macosforge.org/pipermail/macports-dev/2013-September/024252.html" style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px;">https://lists.macosforge.org/pipermail/macports-dev/2013-September/024252.html</a><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; float: none; display: inline !important;">></span><br style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px;"></blockquote></div><br><div>I’m glad I read the full thread, as otherwise I might have reiterated this point without realizing I’d already made it :-)</div><div><br></div><div>That said —</div><div><br></div><div>The better I understand git, the less I like it, but the fact is that the industry has shifted and git is the leader <i>for now</i>. I’d certainly support a move to git, especially if we had the time and server-side control necessary to disable dangerous, data-destroying features such as permanent deletion of branches+tags and forced pushes, and thus could be assured that repository history would remain correct and internally consistent until the <i>next</i> SCM emerges.</div><div><br></div><div>However, I still think it’s a backwards step to abandon self-hosted control of critical project infrastructure, and I don’t think there’s a compelling technical or administrative argument for Github that outweighs this. I’ve not seen *better* or more *correct* contributions by using Github on projects; rather, it seems to lower the bar (and even that is arguable) on the least important part of the process — submitting the patch.</div><div><br></div><div>I also have some ethical qualms about contributing to the furtherance of what amounts to Github’s social network lock-in through network effects. They’re a commercial organization, and I don’t think an open source monoculture defined and driven by GitHub's business goals and ideals of how people should manage projects is to open source's benefit.</div><div><br></div><div><div>Lastly, I question the wisdom of tying a project that has already lived for 12 years to a commercial “SaaS” offering. Recently, I had to move some small projects off of Google Code — because Google had deprecated and removed their data APIs, I had to actually use a screen scraper to (lossily) export my Google Code issues.</div><div><br></div><div>If you’d told me 8 years ago that Google would pull the data APIs and make it difficult to leave, I wouldn’t have believed it.</div></div><div><br></div><div>-landonf</div></body></html>