[jaemoe]

Yes, this is really sad to see that much people in the OSS scene using nonfree ways to communicate.

At least, IRC had open-source servers and clients but in my opinion, it's too old nowadays.

[judge2020]

OSS primarily uses a non-free way to host source code (GitHub), so it's not much different to use Discord.

[rednut]

So what if Github itself is not OSS? The technology behind is already open source and decentralized. You can switch to a Gitlab instance with just a few mouse clicks while also migrating your issues and pull requests.

[thekyle]

I don't believe issues or pull requests are part of the Git repo. If there is a way to migrate them it would involve some GitHub API which could be shut down.

[Arnavion]

The commits in pull requests are part of the git repo, in that they can be fetched from the repo's remote. The comments are not.

[samoa42]

as said; the issues are not part of the repo.

as much as many projects could use a clean slate here, i dont think the burden of migranting them manually or the act of just dumping them is realistic.

[CharlesW]

> So what if Github itself is not OSS? The technology behind is already open source…

So is much of the technology behind Discourse.[1]

[1] https://discord.com/open-source (click on "OS Libraries")

[jaemoe]

And it's sad to see.

[snazz]

There are at least a few different "OSS scenes" that have different priorities. More principled, idealistic developers fall under a different category than more pragmatic ones, so it should be no surprise that they use different tools.

[frabbit]

Using non-Free tools has been shown to be distinctly non-pragmatic under a wide variety of considerations.

A better term would be something like "Tied programmers" or "Dependent progammers". Maybe "sharecropper progammers"?

[snazz]

"Sharecropper programmers" might be an accurate way of describing developers for Apple platforms, but that's not what is happening when people use GitHub and Discord to work on open-source software. They can easily move their Git hosting and chat to another platform—they just choose to use the popular, coincidentally non-OSS, platform for its pragmatism.

A large base of existing users, easy onboarding, and good visibility makes a big difference for many OSS projects. Using a self-hosted Git hosting system and mailing list is a lot of work—and it adds a not-insignificant barrier to entry for potential contributors. What issues exist with popular, proprietary Git and chat tools that make them unsuitable for OSS development?

What are some of the considerations you're thinking of where using a popular option is not pragmatic?

[MaxBarraclough]

> nonfree ways to communicate

Does that include Hacker News?

[jaemoe]

It does, currently waiting to be either invited to lobsters or for the registrations to open again.

[ptman]

Check out federating reddit -like service lemmy.ml: https://dev.lemmy.ml/

[dmitriid]

> Yes, this is really sad to see that much people in the OSS scene using nonfree ways to communicate.

And the reasons are entirely understandable:

- you don't have to run your own infrastructure

- you don't have to run your own protections against fraudulent activity, DDOSes, bots etc.

- you don't have to worry about availability on any number of platforms, including mobile

[detaro]

free software as a hosted service is a thing.

[dmitriid]

It is a thing, is there enough of this thing? Is it free? Do these hosted services provide the infra and protection? Do these hosted services solve the issue of the dearth of clients for these services?

And if you look at hosted services like IRCCloud, it turns out they are not that different from Slack/Discord: closed source, for full range of capabilities you need to use their apps.