[chriswarbo]

I find GitHub rather ironic. Git was created in the first place to pick up the pieces after the BitKeeper debacle [1]

BitKeeper is/was a proprietary VCS platform, which enticed in developers by providing a free (gratis) version for FOSS projects. Sound familiar? When the "no reverse-engineering" terms were inevitably broken, access was revoked and many Linux kernel developers who'd come to rely on BitKeeper found themselves out of luck.

Torvalds et al wrote Git to replace the functionality of BitKeeper. Not only did this give those devs who'd come to rely on DVCS something to use (IIRC, Torvalds himself sent/received patches via email; a workflow which is well supported in Git), but it would ensure that no one entity could have too much control over Linux (and other FOSS) development.

Then GitHub came along, a proprietary VCS platform which enticed in developers by providing a free (gratis) version for FOSS projects, and quickly overtook previous alternatives like Gitorious, and became a single entity with too much control over FOSS development.

Whilst I admire GitLab's work, since Gitorious went away I'm reluctant to advocate such a single point of control/failure again. I now host my git repos on my own server[2], with a static HTML interface generated by git2html[3] (with a few tweaks [4]). Patches are welcome by email.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitKeeper [2] http://chriswarbo.net/git [3] http://hssl.cs.jhu.edu/~neal/git2html/ [4] http://chriswarbo.net/git/git2html/

[tmikaeld]

Much of Githubs success with FOSS where the API's, tools and simplicity of putting up new repos.

These days package managers such as Node's npm/bower, Sublime text packages, PHP's Composer rely on the accessibility of this central place for code access.

I'm worried that without a central place for FOSS code, the community of FOSS projects will fragment and some may become unaccessible when they are needed. Either by running out of hosting funds, getting hacked or becoming unmaintained.

Searching for FOSS projects will become more difficult and it would be harder to get any idea of how often the projects is updated or even how "popular" it is.

[chriswarbo]

These aren't new problems though; the same arguments apply if you replace "repos" with "Web sites" and "GitHub" with, say, "GeoCities" or "Tumblr".

Package managers certainly aren't tied to sites like GitHub; for example, I host my own Composer packages ( https://packagist.org/users/warbo/ ). Unfortunately each package does tend to get tied to a particular Web address, but there are sporadic efforts to overcome this (e.g. https://wiki.debian.org/DebTorrent )

If you consider GitHub to be a "central place for FOSS code", which represents the unfragmented community, and serves as the only neccesary search engine and update notification system, then I regret to inform you that you're mistaken. FOSS has been around far longer than GitHub, as has the Web. The community is incredibly fragmented, although pretty much all communicate via a combination of Websites, email, IRC and RSS feeds. GitHub has only ever been a rather recent fragment of this; although it would still be a great loss if all its projects were deleted overnight.

Like everything else on the Web, the current "solutions" are search and archiving on a massive scale. Perhaps P2P technologies like IPFS and magnet links will be (part of) a more scalable alternative going forward.

[tmikaeld]

Don't get me wrong here, I host a Gitlab server myself and pull other projects into that instead of relying on Github, I'm just saying that it IS a problem that Github is so central at the moment and it will have consequences if it goes down or start to charge for FOSS.

Of course Open Source have been around and will continue to be around, I'm talking about those FOSS projects that have only a single or a few developers with no company backing it. It takes effort and time to even share a project and if it is not easy and free - some might not consider open sourcing their projects at all.

I'm looking forward to a new P2P layer that works like the web, but is more transparent and encrypted. Perhaps using tech like WebRTC? Webtorrent that is built on it is already impressive - The only issue is that it loads the whole file in RAM for both seeders and leechers.

One especially interesting project is: https://matrix.org/blog/home/