[kde-community] Official KDE mirror on github

[Valentin Rusu]

* Jos van den Oever <jos at vandenoever.info> [2015-08-18 09:20:27 +0200]:

> On Monday 17 August 2015 22:53:13 Valentin Rusu wrote:
> > * Jos van den Oever <jos at vandenoever.info> [2015-08-17 09:51:02 +0200]:
> > > On Monday 17 August 2015 09:43:04 Boudewijn Rempt wrote:
> > > > People even get pissed that we're not on github, github is, after all
> > > > the,
> > > > Official Git Place. They don't trust a git repo that's not on github...
> > > 
> > > In real life, I very often have to correct people who conflate git and
> > > github. Github was very successful in hijacking git. That's a big
> > > achievement, but having one big player is not healthy for the ecosystem
> > > and its inhabitants.
> > > 
> > > The network effect is the big enabler here. GitHub, just like Facebook,
> > > Windows, and more recently WhatsApp, grew because people felt they could
> > > not avoid it. (I left out political examples ;-)
> > 
> > Just my 2cents. Github is not in the same game as Windows from a
> > political standpoint. Like the other apps/systems you mentioned, Github
> > shares the simplicity, the ease of use. It's very easy to have a Github
> > account, then simply fork that repo if something bothers you. You fix it
> > for you, then eventually make the pull request. No fancy workflows or
> > overengineered processes here. That's key to public adoption. That's the
> > opposite of politics ;-)
> 
> The nice features you describe are true of Git. Git is a free software 
> distributed system and GitHub makes this feature available as a closed hosted 
> service.
> 
> Windows and GitHub are both closed products that cannot be changed by the 
> user. The user can choose to use GitHub or not use GitHub. When many people 
> use GitHub, the network effect is strong and many more people will feel forced 
> to use GitHub. If KDE uses GitHub instead of its own infrastructure, KDE 
> forces people into an unfree system. Windows and Facebook are the same 
> problem: because so many people use it, others feel forced to join these bad 
> systems. GitHub might be pretty nice now, but there is no way to be sure it 
> will stay like this.

I agree with this.

> 
> The proposal by Martin is to only mirror KDE code on GitHub. That is not 
> nearly as harmful. 

Just for the record. I'm not for KDE sources move to Github. I didn't
even thought about that ;-)

However, it may be intelligent of our part to put the facility of push
requests at our service.

> Anyone can put KDE code on GitHub legally. So it's better 
> that KDE does it themselves, but we should be clear that the code is only a 
> mirror. Each respository should have a text at the top of README.md that 
> explains how people can join KDE [1]. It's a bit like throwing leaflets about 
> the good life into hostile territory. ;-)

Good idea. As a matter of fact, such a README should be mandatory, as
users must know where the original location is.


-- 
Valentin Rusu
IRC: valir