[jdboyd]

If github opensource all of their stuff, this still wouldn't prevent issues like this for the projects that want to use a hosted service instead of hosting it themselves, and many projects don't want to host these services them selves anymore.

When I worry about dependency on GitHub, I'm thinking about not the inconvenient hours of downtime but the larger threat that they might disappear or turn evil.

What I would like to see even more than opensource github would be a standard for spreading over more services. For instance, syncing code, issues, pull requests, wiki, pages, etc between self-hosted gitlab and gitlab.com, or between gitlab.com and github.com. Further, I'd like to see it be easier to use common logins across services.

I don't think we can rely on Github giving us this, but if GitLab would add it between gitlab.com and gitlab ce, that would be a compelling reason to think of switching.

[sytse]

You propose GitLab syncing between on-premises installations and GitLab.com. Sync is pretty hard. What we currently plan to do is import/export https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/3050 We are thinking about distributed code reviews and issues https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/4084 and federated merge requests https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/4013

[XorNot]

The problem with git is that it's decentralized but has no model for automatic consistency. Which means we've basically ignored the issue in tooling.

That said we probably don't need to solve it - we just need a way to keep read remotes online that's separate from any one server. The DHT git project was a good move in the right direction.