| This would mean a lot more if GitHub didn't own the URL, which means until the end of time references to the history of the project will be partially owned by GitHub. This was the important reason for them, and everyone, to escape SourceForge. I mean, if you are honest about it: I can copy all my primary data off Facebook. I know how to do that. You know how to do that as well. But you know what I get when I do that? A copy. I will never escape Facebook without horribly devaluing my own content. Is that the correct decision for friends-only stuff about me? Sure, as that content doesn't get publicly linked anyway. For my local political movement? Probably, because that content gets dated quickly and my consumers are effectively being advertised to. Is it the correct decision for a project I expect to be relevant in 20 years? No. I find myself reading things from old mailing lists and issue trackers constantly. Open source projects that have been able to keep a coherent history of their project around long enough that hyperlinks to their issues and posts continue to work 10 or even 20 years later is super important. GitHub is at the top of their game right now. But they honestly add way way way less value than either Sourceforge or Google Code did. Mostly they trick people into using git as if it was Subversion (git isn't really designed to ever have two people pushing to the same repository on a common basis) and then "solving" the problem they created (by providing an account manager). They don't even model git networks correctly and require the fork chain to be some silly explicit tree. Something is going to come with a good issue tracker that scales to public projects and provides valuable code analysis, and all the really large projects are going to switch. Maybe GitHub will finally decide to solve these problems (though the quick response I saw to that "open letter" yesterday makes me doubtful), but then there will be more problems. Maybe in 20 years git will feel as dumb to people as Subversion, as I remember when Subversion was insanely awesome ;P. If GitHub had a "bring your own domain" option, and preferably some kind of URL router mechanism (for someone migrating from a previous solution) it would look a lot less weird to do important things on GitHub, but otherwise, being able to make a copy of your data is a red herring... of course you can make a copy: no programmer would ever question that :/. |