[UpstandingUser]

> as a community we seem to have decided that once a company has hosted some content that they should be required to host it forever at their own expense.

We need something like public (book) libraries for code. Or a Library of Congress. FOSS has become critical infrastructure and we need to act like it. Done well, this could also help foster people learning to code. Sure there will be some political issues with it around funding and what code we should or shouldn't host, but the benefits would outweigh the drawbacks I think. I've seen tax money go to worse things, at least.

[rapnie]

We might just start having a more open landscape where code can roam freely to wherever you want to host it. In other words more than just two full-service providers to choose from who lock you in by network effects and FOMO, made worse because the entire software development tools vendor ecosystem is based on them too.

When it comes to open source and free software projects both of these platforms are not your friends. The "free" services are just an enabler for their revenue models, part of the business plan. Especially Microsoft is well-known for their long game and EEE strategies. If it is up to them we'll move to GOSS, Github Open Source Software, that is so dependent on nice GH services that it can never move away.

I have my hopes in more open technologies, be they low-level like DVCS, or taking care of social aspects of software development, like ActivityPub. On this last bit cool developments are taking place. Extensions to ActivityPub that will allow code forge features to federate with any vendor that supports them. We'll get decentralized software development if that is done well.

Some FOSS projects and communities are taking first strides here. A report of their activities is in this blog post of the Forgefriends project:

https://forgefriends.org/blog/2022/06/30/2022-06-state-forge...

[progval]

Software Heritage does this. We archive as much publicly available code as we can, and make it available at https://archive.softwareheritage.org/

Notably, it includes Gitlab.com and discontinued forges like Google Code and Bitbucket's mercurial repositories.

[nonethewiser]

> FOSS has become critical infrastructure and we need to act like it.

Some FOSS has become critical infrastructure. But how much of that has been inactive for a year on gitlab free tier?

I dont see how this threatens critical open source projects.