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by chriswarbo
3785 days ago
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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. |
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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/