[pavlov]

Why Github? Copying from one commercial provider to another doesn't solve the fundamental problem. Using git helps, but most of those old repos will never get cloned.

In 10 years time, Github may be the tired old service that gets acquired by a hedge fund that decides to monetize their repos. Such things are part of the corporate lifecycle.

[scrollaway]

> In 10 years time, Github may be the tired old service that gets acquired by a hedge fund that decides to monetize their repos. Such things are part of the corporate lifecycle.

So fix it in 10 years. Git makes that easy.

Point me to a good alternative to github that matches all your ideals. A free alternative to github - free as in beer, unless you're willing to fund this effort yourself, of course?

We migrated one of our projects from Sourceforge to Github, and all the stallmen came out of their rock to tell us how Github is evil, how Savannah is the only true alternative, pah. "Absolute freedom of software" is nice but it's not the only requirement. Savannah has the usability of a rusty wrench and will probably shut down without warning long before Github "turns evil".

Some people are just so far detached from reality when suggesting that stuff isn't perfect. Github is pretty damn amazing. If you want to use foss alternative like Gitlab, more power to you, but that doesn't make them ideal in every situation.

[yellowapple]

> Point me to a good alternative to github that matches all your ideals. A free alternative to github - free as in beer, unless you're willing to fund this effort yourself, of course?

Gitlab? Savannah (of the nongnu.org variety)? Bitbucket? Gitorious? A basic VPS with SSH and git?

[carussell]

The source for Bitbucket is no more available than that for GitHub.

http://atlassian.bitbucket.org/

[yellowapple]

The only explicitly-stated condition was "free as in beer", which BitBucket is for even private repos. BitBucket also has a self-hosted equivalent, though said equivalent is not, alas, free-as-in-beer.

The implicit free-as-in-speech condition is adequately fulfilled by other alternatives, like (as I mentioned) Gitlab and (IIRC) GNU Savannah (along with - again - just installing git on an SSH-able server).

[sytse]

At GitLab you are very welcome. Please let me know if you have any questions or concerns.

[scrollaway]

Props guys, I think you do an incredible job. GitLab is in fact a reasonable alternative, I should have mentioned it in my post.

The reason we went to Github rather than Sourceforge is because of the community. Nethertheless, I think it's fairly foolish to focus on the platform (in the case here of archiving) - it's just a host. Stuff goes on domain 1 instead of domain 2. In either case it's still open source, the archives are all there, git is decentralized and perfect for the job.

[carussell]

Contradictory signals in your rationale here. It comes off as if you're filling in a post-hoc justification.

Is it just an archive or isn't it? If it is, what's so important about the community, then?

It's fine that you chose what you did, of course. It's just that that in your defending it, you can't seem to decide whether you want to have your cake or eat it.

If you wanted, this would have been a perfectly fine reason to give: "We went with GitHub because it's just what we use mostly, and other stuff not so much."

[skitzmikler]

Who fucking cares? He's having it both ways and you can't stop it? Your tone is offensive. Relax.

[scrollaway]

You're very confused. I don't work with the Archive Team, I was offering my experience regarding our project's move move from Sourceforge to Github and why GGGGGGGGP's (or something...) comment was way off base.

[sytse]

No problem, that for your kind comment. And feel free to update your post :)

[scrollaway]

I would, but edits are time-limited on HN.

[goldfeld]

Ten years from now for all we know we could all have so much cheap storage and bandwidth and good, open p2p software that all coders get to archive their own full copy of github's repos. So the focus should be on getting today's job done now.

[hk__2]

> open p2p software that all coders get to archive their own full copy of github's repos

Do you mean git?

[sebastianavina]

first we need cheap 10 Tb hard drives

[yellowapple]

Didn't we all say the same exact thing ten years ago?

[minot]

Now we have SSD which means a small one-step-backward for storage. However, we will supposedly have 10TB SSD and beyond within a couple of years which should give some breathing room.

Even with all this development, I doubt we will be able to have everything on Github locally on our computers. I imagine the typical Github project to be tiny -- probably tens of megabytes at the most so I'd say we can have all the projects that we care about available locally. One can only care about so much.

[Klathmon]

Do you have any other suggestions? Hosting these repos on donated/personal machines is (IMO) significantly less likely to stand the test of time.

At least with a commercial entity there is a bit more "trust" involved that they won't disappear out of the blue one day. And if the time comes that Github starts to collapse, the process can be repeated.

Just because something isn't permanent doesn't mean it's pointless.

[riffraff]

savannah? In don't think it's a very good alternative and I subscribe to the "we'll fix ten years problems in ten years" but it doesn't have the same issues.

[blazespin]

We can't it stand test of time? Wikipedia seems to do well.

[wslh]

> Do you have any other suggestions?

Archive.org ?

And weird that nobody suggested the Bitcoin block chain. I don't think binaries are a good fit but source code doesn't require a lot of space. With the current and future block size it will take sometime to make it happen.

[joshstrange]

Archive.org (while an amazing resource created lovingly by amaing people) is not a great front-end for stuff like this. Github is very easy to get started with and excels at code hosting. As for the blockchain that's a terrible idea, there are so many things wrong with it including the cost to push all of that data into the blockchain and the fact that while source code can be small it isn't always and it's magnitudes of times larger. Right now each block is 1MB and blocks take some 10 minutes for just 1 confirmation so you are looking at < 1.7KBpss (13.6Kbps) "upload" speeds. IF you actually attempted this you would have to have some sort of header on each transaction to tie it all together which lowers the speed even further. I'd bet money that if you started uploading nodes would either ban you or the core devs would do something to stop the chain from being filled with shit that now has to get replicated to 10's of thousands of machines across the globe.

[wslh]

I received a lot of downvotes but my comment was a bit ironical since in many forums (even in HN in the past) when someone talked about backups many people suggest the block chain.

I said: With the current and future block size it will take sometime to make it happen.

[ajkjk]

The absurdity of that suggestion it not absolved by the fact that someone else has said it before, or by the fact that you said it will take 'some time for it to happen'. It's completely not an option for the migration we're discussing.

[wslh]

It is not absurdity if it is irony and I clearly said that it can't be done now but may be in the future. I can't see the future, do you?

[hydragit]

For now, Github is not ad-ridden as SourceForge is. Github is monetizing some repositories: https://github.com/pricing I don't know if they're sustainable, but from my naive point of view, closed-source projects on github pay for the hosting of open-source projects on github.

[mdasen]

Looking at GitHub's business model, it looks a lot more sustainable than SourceForge's.

My company uses GitHub Enterprise. Unless we have some sort of deal/discount above the built-in, we're paying over $30,000/year for it and we run it on our own servers. I'm guessing a lot of other companies do as well. Developers are quite used to using both git and GitHub and $30,000 is nothing if you have a hundred developers costing you $150k a piece (not just salary, but computers, benefits, desks/office space, payroll taxes, etc).

SorceForge counted on their open-source stance limiting who would use their service and, by extension, limiting the resources they would need to serve those people. GitHub works the opposite way. They want everyone to think of GitHub as "the place I put stuff". Have a code snippet? Stick it on GitHub! Want a basic wiki for something vaguely code related? Create a GitHub repo just for the wiki! Collaborating with friends on a class project? GitHub! And then, years later, GitHub feels like second-nature to you and you love it when employers are using it paying GitHub tens of thousands a year for it.

I'm not accusing GitHub of doing something nefarious to lock people into GitHub. Just noting that GitHub feels very familiar and that makes GitHub a very reasonable choice for companies who pay them money. Without that familiarity, the value of GitHub isn't the same. If you're a company spending millions per year, $30k is a drop in the bucket for software your developers are already familiar with and software that works well, is well supported, and can handle your problem.

Yes, GitLab exists and has both open-source and enterprise versions, but I'm not sure that a business feels that differently about $5,000/year for a 100 person team and $25,000. I'm glad GitLab exists, I'm glad Bitbucket exists. They'll make sure that GitHub has to continue being great and they'll provide services to people that want something a bit different. But GitHub's business model seems pretty sound. The more people use GitHub for free, the more likely high-rollers are to pay for GitHub.

I mean, the GitHub subscription per developer costs less than the additional money my company pays for Apple gear for developers. By targeting open source with a premium, free, non-ad driven product, GitHub opened the door to lucrative business sales. They seem like a sustainable business and it even seems like the free, open-source repositories are part of that business plan.

I'm not saying that Apple gear is so overpriced or that it isn't a better platform to develop on, but we don't need retina displays to do our work. And many people argue that you don't want to force devs to work on a platform they're less productive on. The same applies to GitHub. If your devs are more productive or, heck, even happier or more comfortable using it, $250/year isn't something a company is going to blink at if it's paying $150k+ per dev - just as the company won't mind paying an extra $100, $500, or $1,000 in equipment for that dev.

[sytse]

Just wanted to mention that price is not the only reason why our customers prefer GitLab. The ability to run multiple servers to support many users is one of them, others are outlined on https://about.gitlab.com/better-than-github/

[johansch]

In my naive mind, I think it might be sustainable.

(During the past week I paid for the first month of private github hosting on my personal CC for the company I work for. Will get it re-imbursed and transition it to some company CC when I get the time.)

[duskwuff]

Github may be a commercial provider, but at least it's a commercial provider based on an open protocol. If things do start going wrong at Github, escape is a "git clone" and a "git push" away.

[prezjordan]

Except issues :(

[electic]

SVN isn't?

[duskwuff]

A lot of the content on Sourceforge isn't in SVN. I think some of it may still be using CVS, and a lot more is just in the "project files" catch-all.

Also, SVN is a lot more annoying to copy, especially if you want the whole history. Not that it isn't doable, but it's pretty slow and obnoxious. With Git, every clone includes everything by default.

[Sir_Substance]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace%2C_extend_and_extingui...

https://github.com/blog/1986-announcing-git-large-file-stora...

Githubs strategy is clear.

[hrehhf]

> "Git LFS ... is open sourced under the MIT license."

[jlarocco]

Who cares?

If that happens, the projects can be re-hosted somewhere else. For the time being Github is the best option.

Sometimes the hypothetical situations free software people bring up hurt their cause more than they help.

[readme]

I doubt that. Github is a paid service and has several enterprise level clients. If it's ever going to flip flop, there will be quite a few warnings before hand.

[hippich]

somebody have to pay for git hosting. who will be better alternative in your opinion?

[usaphp]

I like people like you , always slashing ideas and not suggesting your own...