Why FOSS projects are using proprietary, privacy invasive infrastructure?
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/15691030
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?
Gitlab is crazy. They require my phone number and credit card details just to create an account.
This makes this platform next to impossible to recommend to users outside of the US, since credit cards are very uncommon in e.g. Europe.
Maybe debit card would also work, but why they need this info at all? I wanted to create new issue for app, but Gitlab required card details. I had to write to the developer in Matrix.