Re: Savannah bug tracker disabled?

[Ivan Vučica]

On Mon, Nov 4, 2019 at 11:16 AM Umberto Cerrato
<umbertocerrato@outlook.it> wrote:
>
> Yeah…
>
> Just sayin’…
>
> Do you know how can GitHub achieve that?

Yes, I indeed do. By having "501 to 1000 employees":
  https://www.glassdoor.ie/Overview/Working-at-GitHub-EI_IE671945.11,17.htm
who are working on developing the product, maintaining the product,
--> selling the product <--, paying for datacenter/cloud hosting
services.

It's not a small effort either:
  https://github.blog/2017-10-12-evolution-of-our-data-centers/

Can you do it simpler than what I outlined, without 501 to 1000
employees? Most certainly.

Just spin up Gitea or Gitlab or something like that. Preferably just a
docker image, because it's easier. Maybe docker-compose so you get a
database too. Then ignore it, fix it only when someone complains, do
upgrades when you feel like without announcements, do kernel, library
and software upgrades when you feel like it (don't pay attention to
CVEs) or fully automatically (risking outages). Don't pay attention to
database credentials and accidentally leave the database open with
some default network-accessible credentials. In short, run it like
you'd run a toy project, and hope that nobody pushes in an exploit
that unobserved ends up in Debian, Fedora, FreeBSD, etc. Also, don't
do automated backups -- if you don't do backups, then nobody can ask
you to do the restore!

Sure, you can do it, and maybe I'd do it too. But, it should be
something you consciously do when you decide to put your name next to
it :-)

> It gives its services for free basically…

Do they? Free service is mainly advertising for the paid tier, incl
enterprise-oriented stuff:
  https://github.com/pricing

There's more, but I'm not going to do their marketing for them.
Effectively, by being something developers get familiar with doing
FLOSS work, they get foothold and mindshare. Having a very well
designed, scalable product with good UX and APIs certainly doesn't
hurt either, but Bitbucket is close, Gitlab is close, etc.

Oh, and at this time, GitHub also happens to be owned by a much larger
company, so that helps with that money and enterprise-sales thing,
too.

> Anyway, honestly I like and prefer GitHub. It had success for reasons. It’s 
> more user-friendly, it does work, everyone know “how to use it”. There are 
> really a lot of pros to it. I think it was a good move moving gnustep to 
> GitHub. I do not know you really well, I could say I’m new here, but it seems 
> you are “few”. Something like a little community. And maybe this can change, 
> adopting more common software tools.

I don't think people here hate the GitHub UX (especially now we're
used to the objectively horrible Git CLI and each of us has a
workflow).

However, GNUstep happens to be a project where each contributor
assigns copyright to Free Software Foundation, so they happen to own
the code. And, as an organization that promotes Free Software (as
opposed to Open Source; they want to make a point of the word Free
standing for freedom) -- they, for ethical reasons, discourage hosting
Free Software projects on non-free platforms which, to be fully
utilized, download non-free software on your machine.

So, here's their evaluation on GitHub and other code hosting platforms
and why they're not great for Free Software projects:
https://www.fsf.org/news/gnu-releases-ethical-evaluations-of-code-hosting-services

Does this mean nobody should use it? No. Does it mean I won't use it
personally? No. I think it's decent enough. I happened to avoid using
it because:

1. I don't like Free Software and Open Source to end up depending on
exactly one service provider (and that happened for some programming
languages; see how many Go projects can you build without importing a
Go package from github.com).
2. I don't like the idea of a world where "if you aren't on GitHub,
you aren't doing free software/open source work", which we're
dangerously close to.
3. I want private repositories for some things; these weren't provided
for free until Microsoft bought GitHub
4. I have some projects that are done with Mercurial and I didn't feel
like converting.

But that's me. I'll use it for some things. Maybe I'll migrate all my
stuff to it just yet. I don't personally feel like my freedoms are
being violated because I use GitHub, but I'm not FSF either.

> Also, I would add that gnustep itself is quite “complicated to understand”… 
> “how can I install gnustep” “what’s gnustep” “what can I do with it?”
>
> PS:
> I know it’s another proprietary service, but what about creating a Discord 
> Server for it?

Who would use it? Large part of core contributors doesn't want to use
real-time communications in general, including IRC. :-)