Since Microsoft owns Github, Gitlab is Corp owned now since 2022, why are so many who preach privacy or using Linux, etc, still using a MS product?
Genuine questions. I’m assumming either familiarity & simplicity with GH or difficulty migrating elsewhere?
It’s not just familiarity, it’s lack of awareness of the history of how we got to here.
Part of what made OSS into what it is was the last 30 years of advocacy. A lot of those advocates are now middle-aged and thinking more about retirement than about the next wave of OSS that needs to supplant the Big Tech that OSS built.
Back in 2001, OSS development centered around mailing lists. https://marc.info/ is a graveyard of OSS mailing lists that largely died off somewhere between 2010-2015. Just as most of the earlier wave of OSS folks were having kids and settling into their middle-tier jobs with the Big Tech firms they helped build.
Gen A / Gen Z needs to step into the advocacy shoes that the Gen X / Millenial OSS advocates filled 20-some years ago. Figure out where next-gen OSS will be built and get to it.
When going so far back: Please do not leave out the FL part of FLOSS. Free/Libre software kicked this all off, the OSS is a later attempt to “sell” the development process FL software came up with to companies, stripping out all the pesky ideas about society benefiting for moving all the benefits over to the companies using OSS. Free/libre softwsre and OSS are technically the same, but the idea behind the licenses are so very different: Free/libre software wsnt to give rights to end users, OSS cares about the freedom of the developers between yourself and end users – giving the companies the right to commercialize your work for you.
The moment you stop caring for the social and societal aspects of software, it becomes OK to host on a proprietary service. That was never the case for the free/libre parts of our community. Those projects tend to shun proprietary services like discord, github and stuff. Pretty old fashined… not very sexy for young devs:-(
Agreed. That’s my point exactly - some folks pulled the ladder up behind themselves, others just kept their head down and stuck to their own project. Far too few maintained the advocacy loudly enough to maintain the momentum or to keep their corporate overlords honest. And now, projects are dying from lack of maintainership. nginx-ingress is a good example.
the xz supply-chain attack highlights another issue confronting modern FLOSS efforts. what’s a community to do when their software is the target of nation-state actors interested in playing geopolitical games with their software? and now they need to grapple with AI-generated bug reports, AI-generated contributions?
It’s an interesting time. I wish I had better ideas about what possible solutions might be.
To be fair: Free software projects were and also are dying from lack of ownership.
And the existing free software projects tend to be old and make it really hard for young people to join IMHO. They avoid the popular (and proprietary) stuff, which makes them hard to discover and their processes seem archaic.
Hell yeah! Great perspective.