Re: Savannah bug tracker disabled?

[Umberto Cerrato]

What can I say?!
Thank you for your time writing all this stuff. I appreciate it!

You reminded me I have to go check this open source vs free source issue.

Anyway, I think if GitHub it’s currently the “best” option it doesn’t mean one 
day there could not be a Free Software better alternative to it. Honestly that 
Savannah seems a bit outdated. Maybe they lack of volunteers too. And maybe 
that’s the reason why projects are moving to GitHub, yours included.

> Il giorno 4 nov 2019, alle ore 16:33, Ivan Vučica <ivan@vucica.net> ha 
> scritto:
> 
> 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. :-)

That’s nah... how could you exchange ideas and really work together without 
them? And how can new members presentate themselves, talk about it, make some 
conv?!

I talked about Discord because I saw lately it is having a great success. 
People (like me) like to visit the website, find the Discord join link, enter 
and get themselves engaged in the project by following discussions etc.

Also it is a “virtual place” where to meet. “If you think it could interest 
you, come and join our Discord”.

Also it’s not reserved to programmers/devs/contributors only. I mean, all are 
welcome. A novice will surely ask “what is it about” in a real-time 
communication but he probably wouldn’t write a mail to the mailing list asking 
for it.
And you could possibly lose a (future) contributor.

Anyway, personally I like this project. I have to figure out many other things 
in order to start. But I like it.

-U