Re: GitHub has been acquired by Microsoft

[David Kastrup]

Karlin High <address@hidden> writes:

> On 6/4/2018 10:17 AM, David Kastrup wrote:
>>
>> $7.5B in stock.
>
> And their competitor GitLab promptly offered a 75% discount for one
> year of their paid plans. They're claiming a 10x increase in projects
> getting migrated onto their service.
>
> <https://about.gitlab.com/2018/06/03/movingtogitlab/>
>
>> While I am not particularly happy that our issue/review
>> migration plans got us stranded on SourceForge
>
> Back in April their was a discussion about whether GitLab would be a
> good fit for LilyPond development.
>
> <https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/lilypond-devel/2018-04/msg00014.html>
>
> In there, I did not see a lot of input from major contributors with
> the current system. I kept thinking, "We'll hear from David K anytime
> now, with some important foundational insight everyone else is
> overlooking."

Well, I have nothing to offer there.  The work will have to be done by
someone and I am not going to be able to offer help on a reliable
ongoing basis.  Doing that kind of work already tripped the transition
to our own version of Allura that was chosen because we had volunteers
at some point interested in helping with the effort.

> Looking at GitLab's features, their "labels" for status tracking,
> single-checkbox "squash merge" setting, and "resolvable discussions"
> would at least have a chance of meeting those expectations.

Frankly, I'd expect most systems to work better than our current split
between SourceForge as an issue tracker and Rietveld (a
Subversion-centric platform) for git commit reviews.

>> Terms and Conditions for free project hosting already included the
>> caveat that projects may be cancelled at any time for any reason.
>> For strategic projects like, say, Samba, ReactOS, Wine, LibreOffice
>> and a few others that may in some respect be considered a thorn in
>> Microsoft's side, this makes a platform choice of GitHub a quite less
>> appealing option than it had been before.
>
> Definitely a concern for those projects, I agree.

It's like building a house at the foot of a volcano.  Possibly good soil
and pricing but unnerving.

> But Microsoft has seemingly become much more accepting of Linux and
> open-source things in the past few years. With Azure Sphere OS they're
> even sort-of doing their own Linux distro.

I don't see them contributing back voluntarily.  GPL and LPGL draw lines
of accountability based on copyright law and a technological landscape
that has changed since the times even of GPLv3, and Linux is GPLv2 in
major parts.

-- 
David Kastrup