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by kkfx 662 days ago
I'm curious how much time it will take for most FLOSS devs to understand that relaying on third party giant code hosting instead of put back usenet (it's cheap enough) to have visibility and keep the code REALLY distributed and REALLY developed in a distributed workflow...

We have witnessed various GH and co bans for USA orders, often for no reasons (like a Belarus game dev who have nothing to do with foreign gov or intelligence, a USA citizen who have been in Iran for a little time and so on), DMCA and so on. It's astonishing how many develop FLOSS without understanding such basic consideration on depending on third parties opposing the classic "ah, I'm here only for visibility" and than start using PR, CI, ... not even understanding the threat of that and the scale effect.

1 comments

> put back usenet (it's cheap enough) to have visibility and keep the code REALLY distributed and REALLY developed in a distributed workflow

You absolutely don’t need usenet for that. Git is already distributed and any mailing list is fine for discussion. No need for nntp and the associated complexity.

The real issue is that most people have no idea about how to send and receive patches, share git bundles or use request-pull (or really use Git if I judge by the standard of my office) outside of GitHub.

Oh no, that's absolutely needed, because yes, we can develop with git sending patches via and ML, IF people know your project exists. That's why we need usenet where we can have a freshmeat.net and co equivalents to makes new projects visible. This very visibility is the reason why GH and co are popular, because devs attract others devs who casually found their project, and Usenet have a proven history of making knowledge travel fast.

About people knowing how to develop with an ML and patchsets, the issue it's not much in people but in the substantial absence of modern MUAs though ALSO for this simple automation. I use notmuch-emacs, but I can't propose it to most others simply because deciding to keep maildirs on their own homeservers, most do not even have, muchsync-ing against it, maybe also adding a web-MUA and a dovecot to serve the mails on the go also on mobile, ... it's simply way too much work.

That's why again we need NixOS/Guix System to simply say "hey, import this code, change few parameters and there you go your homeserver FULL setup with anything, just choose other modules to discover the FLOSS world.

This damn need usenet to allow newcomers discovering what we have, learning how to use, and learning a model almost all have never known or forgot for some crappy colorful WebUI/walled garden.

We do not need copies of the big tech stuff, we need to show better stuff from a model where big tech can't even exists economically. That's the FLOSS superiority and strength no company can dream to match if it's done on scale.