Why FOSS projects are using proprietary, privacy invasive infrastructure?

JustMarkov@lemmy.ml to Open Source@lemmy.ml – 156 points –

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?

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I hope this changes (even if a little bit) once Forgejo (FLOSS Gitea fork) adds forge federation.

Federation doesn't really solve the issue that self-hosting takes effort away from working on the actual project.

No but it does solve people not wanting to bother making an account for your effectively single-user self-hosted instance just to open a PR. I could be up and running in like 10 minutes to install Forgejo or Gitea, but who wants to make an account on my server. But GitHub, practically everyone has an account.

This is the main reason why we haven't moved lemmy's repo there (yet). Most of the devs are on board with leaving github tho at some point.

I could be up and running in like 10 minutes to install Forgejo or Gitea

You could maybe do that but only because you already know how unlike most developers and you completely dismiss any active maintenance like updates, moderation, debugging performance issues, resizing storage,...

The whole point is you can take the setup and maintenance time out of the equation, it's still not very appealing for the reasons outlined.

ForgeFed solves a storage issue with Forgejo too… no Git object dedup means that the storage starts to balloon if you require all patches be in the form of pull requests on your server.