[bachmeier]

> they've managed to work their way into almost being beyond reproach

Yep. It's annoying as hell when I tell someone I use Bitbucket and they try to get me to change to Github. And I'm not talking about for FOSS repos, they want me to convert my free Bitbucket repos to paid Github repos, because Github.

> A (by all indications), very profitable product that wants to make money off you. That is its goal and purpose in life, and OSS furthers it.

I'd go a little further than that. Their strategy, while good for some FOSS projects, is a common marketing tool. I can use Wunderlist, Evernote, and Dropbox for free in a limited capacity as well. The thing about those strategies is that they last as long as it's in the interest of the company to provide them.

[toomuchtodo]

> I'd go a little further than that. Their strategy, while good for some FOSS projects, is a common marketing tool. I can use Wunderlist, Evernote, and Dropbox for free in a limited capacity as well. The thing about those strategies is that they last as long as it's in the interest of the company to provide them.

It seems to me like the solution to that is for the git protocol to extend to encompass the Github tools FOSS projects have come to rely on, so Github can never hold open source projects hostage (not that they would, but as the saying goes, "Trust but verify")

Git + IPFS [1] + GPG = distributed Github. The hard part is someone building the tooling.

[1] https://ipfs.io/

[xorblurb]

Also remember about Sourceforge. I guess some people could have been in the mood to write gratitude letters to them at some point in the past.

(Does not mean that GitHub is "bad" or be useful for some free software projects right now, just that from where I am I don't think there should be a special reason to thank such a company in the name of "Open Source" -- at least also thank Linus Torvalds to begin with!...)

[nodefork]

There is PR to thank Linus Torvalds. I hope they merge it https://github.com/thank-you-github/thank-you-github/pull/19...