I don’t agree with the whole list, but the CLA requirement and corpo projects pinky-promising they’d never do a bad thing and then going to do a bad thing as soon as their investors demand returns is certainly a major risk and harm. I’ve started self-hosting everything for my personal use, and if it’s not AGPL, then I assume at some point I’m going to get fucked and shouldn’t rely on it.
Also, the endless stupidity around everyone using Discord as their primary means of communication, discussion, issue reporting and whatnot. Politely, fuck Discord, and fuck anyone who thinks Discord is the right way to make anything accessible to the public.
There’s lots of other alternatives, including ye olde IRC and forums and even simple mailing lists - and no, I don’t mean ‘sign up for our newsletter!’ nonsense, but an actual real mailing list. And, if you want something a little more modern, there’s always Matrix which is probably feature-complete enough to compete with whatever you’d want to use Discord for anyways.
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Agreed, and in addition, I hate the web interface dependency for github and gitlab, and how many system resources they use (can’t even load gitlab on my pinephone without it crashing due to running out of memory!). At least gitlab can hypothetically have a minimal open source client. I’d much rather just communicate with developers through mailing lists. If hosting is hard, there are providers for lists.
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I think there’s nuance to this. Of course there are asshats like MongoDB that pull the rug and enshittify; but on the other hand licenses are a tool, not an ideology. If fucking over corporations involve a more restrictive non-commercial license that isn’t open source, that’s a good thing in my eyes. It depends on the software being written and how it’s being used.
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Fuck Discord, all my homies hate Discord; use IRC/XMPP/SMTP instead.
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I’m not gatekeeping anything, I only care if your patches for my ports are good.
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FSF feels like a cult, they care more about the purity of foss than its practical effects on the world; and their specific implementation of foss (copyleft). This goes back to licensing and how there’s more nuance in licensing than if it’s open source or not.
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Before Github, there was no collection of open source repositories that are easily searchable, making it easy to find and promote open source software. I am not aware of any alternative that ever did or does a better job at making open source contributions that easy. Even when I try to use codeberg as an alternative, my Github repos will always get more contributions. No idea how we could even begin to change that.
