Re: [Freetel-codec2] Microsoft purchases GitHub

[Stuart L. <st...@lo...>]

On 04/06/18 13:23, Bruce Perens wrote:
> Microsoft has purchased GitHub. This is not of concern for the codec2
> and FreeDV sources, since they are hosted on Sourceforge.

I think Microsoft has come to the realisation that "if you can't beat
'em, join 'em".  CodeProject really never took off, and from what I
hear, Visual Source Safe was something of a practical joke.

In order to avoid being an utter laughing stock, it more or less had no
choice to take up Git, and as they failed before in trying to make a
competing project site, their decision to buy up Github is not surprising.

> Microsoft is not the evil empire it once was, and might even see fit to
> sponsor some of my efforts to fight against royalty-bearing patents in
> standards. Which is going to feel very strange if it really happens. But
> GitHub is still too many resources of the Open Source community residing
> in one place. This was never a good idea.

True, but the beauty of git is that it's distributed.  What isn't is the
wikis and issues, but there are ways of capturing that and hosting those
elsewhere.  There are even bug trackers that will operate within a git
repository directly.

So long as commits are signed (and they should be if you care about
people using your code), the mirror can be verified as being authentic.

Look at how the Linux kernel team handled the breach of git.kernel.org:
Linus just pushed his tree into Github and development kept going.  The
world barely noticed.

I experimented with running Gitlab on my own hardware, but found it was
rather a pig when it came to RAM usage.  It would struggle to run on a
host with 2GB RAM.

That, and the fact that it couldn't "mirror" a remote repository unless
you stumped up for the enterprise version was a deal breaker for me.

Presently for my own "incubator" projects, I've been using Gitea, and
found it to be much more lightweight.  It would happily run with 512MB
RAM for smaller repositories.  For mirroring the Linux kernel, I found I
needed more RAM and have it running fine with 2GB.

It is a fork of Gogs, which is also worth looking at (although I found
Gitea first).

Regards,
-- 
Stuart Longland (aka Redhatter, VK4MSL)

I haven't lost my mind...
  ...it's backed up on a tape somewhere.