cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/15691030
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?
I’d like to replace GitHub with something self hosted but I’d still like other people to be able to fork and especially do pull requests. Because everyone already has a GitHub account it’s easy for them to do that. I wish there was some small software which would be easy to install and update and it would be connected to for example ActivityPub to be able to do pull requests. I’m not so keen on making everyone who wants to create a Issue or a Pull Request to make a seperate account on my own website, nobody will do that.
Gitlab and a few others are actually working on using ActivityPub for this use case. There’s still a lot of work to do, though, so give it time.
I really hope that takes off because that would be awesome. Same with issue tracking.
Because hosting shit yourself isn’t free, and most people aren’t up for taking financial losses for their projects.
Gitlab, Codeberg, Notabug, etc.
And how do they make their money?