[markphip]

Something this misses is that the mentality of OSS was just different before GitHub.

The thought from the original growth of OSS was that it would be more about the community than the code. So OSS would be a series of communities that would each have their own "identity" for their community. There were big OSS foundations like Apache and Eclipse. Sun had several like java.net, OpenOffice.org and netbeans.org. Gnome had their own place etc.

Like Sun, other enterprises like HP, Oracle and IBM were setting up their own communities for their projects and to collaborate with partners.

And then as the post touches on there were sites like SourceForge, Tigris.org, Google Code and Microsoft had something too (CodePlex?). These sites were places projects might spin up if they did not belong at one of the other foundations and wanted a place to host their code for free. Of these SourceForge was often used for distribution of binaries due to its vast mirror network and often that was all that was hosted there and the project was elsewhere.

Anyway, until GitHub sprang up and started to consolidate all the OSS in one place, I do not think anyone else was even really trying to do this. Obviously the rise of git played a big role in this. This change fueled the growth of OSS but it did kind of come at the cost of losing out on some of the community aspects that existed before in the mailing lists and forums of these other places. Now collaboration all happens in PR's and Issue and is often just between a small handful of people.

[pimlottc]

I think this is a good point, and also part of the larger trend of Internet activity moving to centralized providers. Users are now habituated to look for an existing platform to host their content, whether that's video (YouTube/Tiktok), blog posts (Medium/Substack), hot takes (X/Threads) or code (Github). It doesn't even occur to most people that there's another way to do it. They see these companies as just part of the public infrastructure of the Internet.

[vineyardmike]

Because it’s so damn easy. I started contributing to OSS and creating repos on GitHub when I was 16. I was not able (or interested in) managing my own git server; I didn’t have any connections to Apache.org. Sure I could’ve emailed diffs to some mailing list, as I know many people have done for years, but GH is a vastly better experience.

Github was so accessible that it made possible what otherwise would not have been.

[paulddraper]

Because the other ways

1. Are logistically harder.

2. Don't have an existing community.

If you want to create an OSS project with greatest adoption, you're best bet is GitHub.

[a_random_canuck]

And it reeeeeeally makes me uneasy that all this OSS is effectively in the hands of Microsoft.

[everybodyknows]

The escape path is to demote Github to merely an "officially supported mirror" of your project, with Issues and PRs elsewhere, but ...

The tar-pit I'm afraid of: How do you emigrate Github PR and Issue databases in some format that any of self-hosted Forgejo, or public Codeberg, Gitlab et al understand and can present to visitors?

[dpkirchner]

I understand why companies do this but I sure don't like it. They often use Discourse, which I find to be a lot less readable than GitHub (the design follows what I call "duploification" -- the elements are all large and surrounded by too much whitespace!)

On top of that it's yet another site I have to sign up with if I want to interact with the community.

I'm also mindful of the risks of centralization. Discord and its lack of external archives is a prime example of how that can be harmful. I'm just not sure if that risk outweighs the costs and annoyances.

[greenavocado]

In the neon-lit, digitized colosseum of the 21st century, two titans lock horns, casting long shadows over the earth. Google and Microsoft, behemoths of the digital age, engaged in an eternal chess match played with human pawns and privacy as the stakes. This isn’t just business; it’s an odyssey through the looking glass of corporate megalomania, where every move they make reverberates through society’s fabric, weaving a web of control tighter than any Orwellian nightmare.

Google, with its ‘Don’t Be Evil’ mantra now a quaint echo from a bygone era, morphs the internet into its own playground. Each search, a breadcrumb trail, lures you deeper into its labyrinth, where your data is the prize – packaged, sold, and repackaged in an endless cycle of surveillance capitalism. The search engine that once promised to organize the world’s information now gatekeeps it, turning knowledge into a commodity, and in its wake, leaving a trail of monopolized markets, squashed innovation, and an eerie echo chamber where all roads lead back to Google.

Meanwhile, Microsoft, the once-dethroned king of the digital empire, reinvents itself under the guise of cloud computing and productivity, its tentacles stretching into every facet of our digital lives. From the operating systems that power our machines to the software that runs our day, Microsoft's empire is built on the sands of forced obsolescence and relentless upgrades, a Sisyphean cycle of consumption that drains wallets and wills alike. Beneath its benevolent surface of helping the world achieve more lies a strategy of dependence, locking society into a perpetual embrace with its ecosystem, stifling alternatives with the weight of its colossal footprint.

Together, Google and Microsoft architect a digital Panopticon, an invisible prison of convenience from which there seems no escape. Their decisions, cloaked in the doublespeak of innovation and progress, push society ever closer to a precipice where freedom is the currency, and autonomy a relic of the past. They peddle visions of a technocratic utopia, all the while drawing the noose of control tighter around the neck of democracy, commodifying our digital souls in the altar of the algorithm.

The moral is clear: in the shadow of giants, the quest for power blurs the line between benefactor and tyrant. As Google and Microsoft carve their names into the annals of history, the question remains – will society awaken from its digital stupor, or will we remain pawns in their grand game, a footnote in the epic saga of the corporate conquest of the digital frontier?

[tcoff91]

Your writing is riveting. I enjoyed this comment very much.

[EclipseMantis]

I think there's a good chance it's ChatGPT.

[pyuser583]

Written like classic cyberpunk noir! Except it’s real :(

[dTal]

Please stop this.

[bradley13]

Yes. It is good to not trust Microsoft. I have an account on GitLab, but all of my repos are elsewhere.

There are other places to go, without hosting your own: GitLab and BitBucket are two possibilities.

[What2159]

Google is benevolent but incompetent. Microsoft is evil but competent. Difficult choice.

[consumer451]

> Google is benevolent

Honest dumb question, how is Google benevolent in comparison to MS these days?

[Cyberdog]

Agreed. “Google is good and Microsoft is evil” is a take from two decades ago.

[pimlottc]

I don't know that this is true, but to even suggest that Microsoft is the component one vs Google really shows how much things have changed in the last 20 years...

[myself248]

Google was benevolent, but DoubleClick was evil.

Slapping the Google name over the DoubleClick business model was the greatest swindle ever pulled, and people STILL don't see through it.

[samtho]

Google is indifferent, almost worse than evil - which can be predictable.

[nottorp]

Tbh i'd rather have my code somewhere where my account can't be automatically banned by an "AI" without any possibility of reaching a human...

[spacechild1]

> Google is benevolent

Citation needed

[ThrowawayR2]

Google was never benevolent, no for-profit business is. It was baffling to me how many developers took "Don't be evil" at face value, particularly for an almost completely advertising funded (i.e. highly motivated for enshittification) corporation.

[aleph_minus_one]

> It was baffling to me how many developers took "Don't be evil" at face value

In my opinion a little bit more care must be taken here:

The "don't be evil" slogan was in my opinion both a blessing and a curse for Google: a blessing in that people initially trusted that Google does not intend to do something evil; a curse in the sense that when they started doing things that were considered "evil", it lead to a massive reputation damage for Google.

[Culonavirus]

Yea, that aspect is kinda scary. But hey, at least it's not in the hands of Google.

[asveikau]

I recall that sourceforge gave you an SVN repo and an issue tracker, so it was kind of a hub for running your project. What made GitHub stand out was easy forking, and the pull request code review UI, and slick source history UI. A lot of this was aided by the technical innovation of using git and making git such a central piece.

[ashleighz]

Yup, this was it for me, GitHub was actually pleasant to use, to browse, PRs were easy, branching was easy, PRs with reviews/comments/etc were a brand new concept, especially as SourceForge and Google Code were hosted only on SVN which constantly fucked up/corrupted data in my experience

The closest thing to PRs that I knew was reviewboard, and that was a bolt on to SVN, not an actual proper integration

[hyperhopper]

> Obviously the rise of git played a big role in this.

I would argue it's the other way around. Mercurial is a better source control system, and was a close contender with git back then. However, GitHub winning the hosting war and also being all in on git is what cemented git as the leader. Bitbucket was hosting both and with a more generous free plan, but they didn't win the social and UX fight so git became the de facto standard since that's what you used on the cool good new platform.

[globular-toast]

I felt like the kernel using git gave it a lot of credibility. I can't recall any big projects using Mercurial. Trust is especially important for a version control system.

[IgorPartola]

The other thing this is missing is that SourceForge reviewed your project before giving you a place to host it. You also didn’t get a nice URL back when everyone was really focused on having nice URLs (right before GitHub). Those two factors are shallow, but they made a lot of friction that GitHub eliminated.

[akira2501]

I think you're overselling it a little bit. At the time the community wasn't as large and it was much easier to "host your own" OSS site and distribute your software directly. There were plenty of important projects that served themselves in this way and didn't rely on a giant corporation's largess to be "hosted."

Also.. aggregators like freshmeat.net used to exist and did a huge amount of work patching these disparate communities and individual sites together into a single cohesive display of "open source."

[127]

Decentralized version control systems were popular before Github and even Git. Github didn't create a market, it captured it.

[markphip]

The market GitHub created was Social Coding and the idea that there were network effects to be gained by having all OSS in one place. This is the same thing that makes it difficult today for OSS projects to move off GitHub. If anything, GitHub deemphasized the "D" in DVCS.

My point, since you replied to my post, was simply that prior to GitHub, none of the other sites for OSS were trying to achieve the same goal. The goal was to establish a specific OSS community for a set of projects. SourceForge was a bit of an outlier in that a lot of projects used their distribution network, if they were not part of a foundation like Apache or Eclipse that had extensive mirrors setup.

SourceForge was never the main development and collaboration site for any of the major efforts happening around OSS.