GH Issue-only project management and GH Issues Beta

Wanted to point to 2 things I found today. First is doing project management on Github and avoid using a separate tool for that. In such cases where that is used, the code repo’s may be elsewhere. Here’s the article:

Which is discussed on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28258515


In the HN discussion thread there’s a pointer to the new Github Issues Beta feature (which is closed invite-only still). It looks really good, but also it is yet one more example of how Github is turning their platform into a walled garden with FOMO barriers to move your stuff elsewhere and miss out on the great features.

(I might reformulate as: GH’s next step in their own vision of United Software Development)

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I’m not really concerned by services based on proprietary software (such as GitHub actions or their issue tracker, etc.). It may take a while for developers to break free but the proprietary nature of the service has a negative impact that can clearly be articulated. And this justifies putting effort and funds to grow a Free Software alternative. This is the ongoing competition between Free Software and proprietary software.

I would be much more concerned if GitHub was publishing some parts of their proprietary services as Free Software. But in a way that would not allow anyone to self-host it which is the path GitLab took years ago, when they because a proprietary software publisher. This mixture makes it much more difficult to explain the problem of proprietary services.

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True, but GH hosts the most (F)OSS projects, and the feature-completeness of their platform serves as an ever-growing disincentive to use Fedeproxy, if at any other forge you miss out on them. It is just something to monitor and take into account in future roadmap decisions, because - as we discussed before - FedeProxy and/or 3rd-party projects have great opportunities to offer strong counter incentives to this vendor lock-in trend.

You want FedeProxy to be interesting for as broad a subset of the FOSS community as possible I presume, and not just the most idealistic people within it who are content with a reasoning of: “I will put myself at a significant disadvantage out of moral and ethical considerations”.

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While this is certainly true, feature completeness is not always required for people to adopt a given software. I distinctly remember that back when there was a multitude of proprietary operating systems (Solaris, HP/UX, AIX, …) competing with GNU/Linux. All of them had way more features than GNU/Linux but it was not enough to lock users in.

However, I think you are right to think more attractive features make it more difficult for users to leave. It is important to keep an eye on what is popular and what developers like most when working on Free Software.

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