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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@taladar Discussed in other threads here - forgejo.org is implementing forgefed which will do this, it's a work in progress, monthly reports here https://forgejo.org/tag/report/

Forgefed seems to be ActivityPub based which, judging by Lemmy, doesn't solve the redundancy issue at all, it just allows you to interact with the content hosted in a single place from your own single place, giving you two single points of failure and two points where you can be tracked instead of one. This is not really the same kind of distributed as git repositories.

@taladar

"two single points"

Ok that got me, I have no response.

The term "single point of failure" means that only that point has to fail for the entire system to become unusable. You can easily have more than one of those in a system though.

@taladar Emphasis on "entire system".

Yeah, the whole commenting won't work if the server where the repo is hosted fails or the server where the person has an account. There is no redundancy.