Why FOSS projects are using proprietary, privacy invasive infrastructure?
As you can easily notice, today many open source projects are using some services, that are… sus.
For example, Github is the most popular place to store your project code and we all know, who owns it. And not to forget that sketchy AI training on every line of your code. Don't we have alternatives? Oh, yes we have. Gitlab, Codeberg, Notabug, etc. You can even host your own Gitea or Forgejo instance if you want.
Also, Crowdin is very popular in terms of software (and docs) translation. Even Privacy Guides and The New Oil use Crowdin, even though we have FLOSS Weblate, that you can easily self-host or use public instances.
So, my question is: if you are building a FLOSS / privacy related project, why using proprietary and privacy invasive tools?
Reddit and Twitter aren’t comparable here. I’m not bound to the fediverse just because I post here. I can still use Reddit if I want. I don’t care much if my posts aren’t seen by anybody here either.
Code hosting is a different story. It’s not ideal to host on both Github and Gitea at the same time. It’s a mess to keep track of multiple issue trackers at the same time. If you chose one you’re kind of bound to it, so you better choose the alternative that increases the chances of future success of the project.
You could host on Gitea and mirror to GitHub. Obviously, users may be less inclined to sign up to your Gitea instance, but I hope people being unwilling to register becomes less of an issue once Forgejo (Gitea fork) implements forge federation.
Even the issue tracker?
Especially the issue tracker as thats where folks’ thoughts are being recorded. Many issue will come from non-developers—which if you are going to make them create an account somewhere, would you sleep better at night know you aren’t subjecting those wishing to pitch in to the ToS & data collection machine of Microsoft? Microsoft GitHub doesn’t even let you see collapsed comments unless you are autheticated.