Kyoto project is moving from GitHub to Sourcehut

https://github.com/kyoto-framework/kyoto

by gkbrk • 4 years ago

211 275 4 years ago

newaccount2021• 4 years ago

last night I checked my billing page on sr.ht and there was a line chart that had "11.2%" to indicate that currently 11.2% of users are paying...there was also a redline at 13% which I assume is some sustainability threshold

if you want viable alternatives to github, pay up!

sr.ht is a nice service that allows some premium features like ssh'ing into ci instances to check failures...there is plenty worth paying for

ok_dad• 4 years ago

The red line is at 13.37 percent, so I assume it's a semi-joke.

You can read about the 2021 financials here; it seems that the project is pretty successful overall: https://sourcehut.org/blog/2022-04-08-2021-financial-report/

ddevault31• 4 years ago

Yeah, it's just a joke. SourceHut is already profitable & sustainable. But, I think that it is important that we establish the expectation that users should be paying for the service. It keeps our interests aligned directly with theirs and we are accountable to no one else.

8organicbits• 4 years ago

As far as a go packaging system makes host changing painful enough, there is no chance to keep old versions on the new host.
If you're using version 0.x, please, make a fork, or create a local project copy.

I feel like an official mirror on GitHub would be cleaner, as the old URLs could still work, but I suppose that doesn't match the vision.

bbkane• 4 years ago

If you're starting a new Go project, I strongly recommend using a custom import path- I host go.bbkane.com with GitHub Pages and it was easy and free to set up with vangen and GitHub Pages (I already own bbkane.com).

https://github.com/bbkane/go.bbkane.com

swagonomixxx• 4 years ago

Just had this thought: are there any decentralized code hosting services?

To me, I don't really see a difference between GitHub and sr.ht. Companies can start out with these "friendly" attitudes towards FOSS, but when they reel in many paying customers, they can pretty easily, and without consequence, change their policies to be more aggressive (geared towards profit) and greedy. It just seems inevitable to me.

However, decentralized hosting and governance might make it so that there can't be a hostile takeover and incorrect (relative to license) usage of FOSS code. I'm thinking something akin to IPFS but more specialized towards e.g git repository hosting.

Not sure how such hosting would be feasible in terms of breaking even between hosting costs, but a decentralized service hosting distributed VCS databases seems more along the lines of the philosophy of DVCS's in general. DVCS's in general do not have timeliness requirements (i.e your "git push" most of the time doesn't have to propagate worldwide immediately) and the other goodies that come with being on GitHub (e.g CI/CD) seem orthogonal to the actual code hosting itself, and I don't see why that can't be built separately without being part of the service.

ranaexmachina• 4 years ago

To me, I don't really see a difference between GitHub and sr.ht. Companies can start out with these "friendly" attitudes towards FOSS, but when they reel in many paying customers, they can pretty easily, and without consequence, change their policies to be more aggressive (geared towards profit) and greedy. It just seems inevitable to me.

But with sourcehut you can just host it yourself or find someone else who hosts that as everything is FOSS.

If you don't want to use the built-in CI, wiki and issue tracker, then Git is already decentralized. You can push and pull easily from and to multiple sources. Git is already built for that exact use case.

capableweb5• 4 years ago

If you don't want to use the built-in CI, wiki and issue tracker, then Git is already decentralized. You can push and pull easily from and to multiple sources. Git is already built for that exact use case.

Git is a great protocol. You can pull/push to HTTPS servers, SSH servers, even directories (so via NFS if you so wish). Really, Git is really awesome in that way.

But Git itself is not a "code hosting service" that parent asked for. That requires more. Something like Fossil SCM would probably fit better, or git-ssb as I mentioned in another comment here.

goodpoint• 4 years ago

I don't really see a difference between GitHub and sr.ht. Companies can start out with these "friendly" attitudes towards FOSS

You are really comparing DeVault with, of all companies, microsoft?

capableweb5• 4 years ago

git-ssb is really nice for decentralized hosting between friends. Uses Secure Scuttlebutt (https://scuttlebutt.nz/) and I've used it for over a year to collaborate on projects with people over ssb.

I'm a bit scared of putting this link here, as the gateway is not super reliable, so I'll ask people who are curious, to get ssb running locally and pull down the data if they want to look into it deeper.

But regardless, here is the link for the curious minds who can't wait, it's the repository for git-ssb itself: https://git.scuttlebot.io/%254Dsh92G6zkkLnR3%2Fys%2Fv42MD0jK...

If you get server errors, jump on ssb yourself, or wait some seconds/minutes and refresh. Be kind to the poor server.

sergiotapia3• 4 years ago

Drew Devault is /g/ incarnate. He won't ever do any bullshit to people using the services. If anything he would just as well burn it all to the ground.

Aeolun4• 4 years ago

The thing is, I’ve said this about many many people that eventually sold out.

I wouldn’t trust anyone that claimed it, not even myself.

skybrian• 4 years ago

Well, there was the Mastodon instance that just disappeared on me one day.

I wasn't paying for it though, or using the account much.

morpheuskafka2• 4 years ago

I don't know the backstory with the sr.ht founder or anything, but I think there is a difference. GitHub always started out as a for-profit company, albeit targeting the market of FOSS developers/communities, and had a closed-source product sold for on-prem use. Sourcehut is itself FOSS software from the beginning and has its own developer community, so it is a little different.

miohtama2• 4 years ago

Radicle is a decentralised Github alternative to the point it does not have any centralised servers. However, because of ”web3” many people here on HackerNews might not take it seriously, even thought it might deserve a closer look.

https://radicle.xyz/

capableweb5• 4 years ago

As long as it's P2P without involving any cryptocurrencies, I don't see why you'd label it "Web3"?

Edit: seems Ethereum is a opt-in optional part of Radicle, so I see how people could believe it to be a part of the whole "Web3" effort.

Well, as long as I can run it without Ethereum, I'm happy.

k__5• 4 years ago

Yes.

Moving to Radicle would completely eliminate the issues the maintainers had.

Moving to another provider seems like they just "hoping" for the best.

chx• 4 years ago

It's not that we don't take it seriously, it's what we condone. Web3 is a scam and destroys the environment.

rychco• 4 years ago

I don’t know Drew DeVault personally, but I feel from his blog that he’s fairly transparent and not interested in attempting to squeeze out every possible cent of profit from sourcehut. I may be proven wrong in the future, but for now I’m happy with the service and hopeful that it will remain affordable, friendly, and fast.

quickthrower22• 4 years ago

I think there is a 10 year "we can have nice things" expiry date on stuff like this. Think Google / Github / Facebook etc.

After 10 years, the thing dies, or grows so big it becomes a corporation, run by suits, hungry for new revenue. There are probably exceptions (HN is one, as it is more of a well kept and groomed "pet" than a business in itself. Meant in a nice way as I love pets).

Death is an interesting one. Reading that Prince's estate is trying to color troll [1], means that regardless of what Prince wanted (not sure what he wanted either way), some other heads with different ethics can take over and do something different from the ethos you thought you were buying into.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31925423

ddevault31• 4 years ago

Founder of sr.ht here. I understand these fears, and I have gone to great lengths to give users tangible assurances in this regard. Trust is something that has to be earned, and it is incredibly important to me that we are worthy of yours.

For a start, the company is bootstrapped and we have no private investors. The revenue to maintain the platform comes directly from users, and all users are expected to pay if they have the means for this reason. We are accountable only to them and we do not have to find "creative" ways to monetize them (or their work) because they are already footing the bill themselves. Every cent paid by users stays in open source, either supporting the platform or the dozens of projects our engineers maintain or contribute to in the FOSS ecosystem.

We also seek to be as transparent as possible. Our financial reports, monitoring system & alarms, security reporting, operational documentation, backups, and so on, is all publicly available. We have hard data that you can use to understand our platform's sustainability, security, performance, uptime, and more.

And, unlike GitHub (and GitLab), SourceHut is 100% bona-fide free software, mostly AGPL. You can run it on your own servers, and we make it easy to import and export your data, in standard, interoperable formats that you can use to move between instances or even between software stacks, such as GNU Mailman or other solutions. SourceHut is also not an ivory tower -- we elevate our users to peers, and many parts of our system are officially maintained by independent volunteers.

I work really hard for our user's trust and I'm proud to know that I have it. If anyone has questions or concerns, I'm always prepared to listen to them and do what it takes to make sure our users are confident in the platform. FOSS is my life's passion and I am committed to doing it right.

sneak3• 4 years ago

I always got the impression that sr.ht was not intended to be social software, but simply a git frontend.

To me, this makes it unsuitable as a frontend for community-focused projects that cater to involving and attracting strangers, and much more something for single-committer repos.

Ultimately, building large software ends up being a team sport, and I never got the impression that your product had the express goal of facilitating (and causing) collaboration; in fact quite the opposite: that those are explicitly out of scope for the project.

20after4• 4 years ago

You're doing such a great job that I subscribed for a year even though I had no need for the service at the time. I just wanted to financially support what I see as a really inspiring project. Not to mention that it is an objectively good product.

I will likely buy another subscription (and actually use it) at some point in the future but until then I'll be recommending sr.ht to anyone in need of lightweight and open development platform.

Keep up the good work!

aquaduck2• 4 years ago

This is somewhat off topic, but I'm wondering if you've considered offering a pre-paid lifetime plan. sr.ht looks great, and I've considered moving my project over from github, but the thing holding me back is that I don't want the obligation to maintain a subscription into perpetuity. Github's killer feature isn't that it's free, but rather, that I can get hit by a bus (or just become busy with other things in life), and my project will remain hosted indefinitely.

ddevault31• 4 years ago

HN believes this comment is spam and I cannot reply to it:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31963630

So I'll reply here instead.

This is somewhat off topic, but I'm wondering if you've considered offering a pre-paid lifetime plan. sr.ht looks great, and I've considered moving my project over from github, but the thing holding me back is that I don't want the obligation to maintain a subscription into perpetuity. Github's killer feature isn't that it's free, but rather, that I can get hit by a bus (or just become busy with other things in life), and my project will remain hosted indefinitely.

There are currently minimal penalties for non-payment, and in the future, they will remain conservative. We will place your account into a read-only mode after a grace period, but will not remove data without consulting you first. We are people first, free software second, and a business third. We would be honored to set profit aside in the interest of maintaining our users' legacies after they're gone.

sharedptr• 4 years ago

What if I wanted to try this out?

In the sense that at the moment I don’t pay for Github and my projects remain there hosted for free.

What would happen in sr.ht jf for whatever event I stopped paying for the service?

johnny22• 4 years ago

I wouldn't want to use any decentralized system for code if there's no discovery, code search, cross instance logins, AND BACKUPS.

It'd suck to end up in a situation like you see with torrents, where there are tons of references, but no access to the data.

I can imagine tons of useful code being lost over time that way.

fiddlerwoaroof• 4 years ago

Git is great because every clone is a backup: if you want public backups, push to multiple upstreams (or setup mirroring): e.g. sr.ht, self-hosted gitea on AWS and self-hosted gitolite on Hetzner

mbreese2• 4 years ago

Git itself is decentralized. It is entirely agnostic from a centralized/decentralized point of view. We tend to centralize things to make life easier. Who wants to pull updates from each contributor as opposed to a hub?

So the real question is — what are the features of GitHub would you like to see decentralized? CI? Issues? Wikis? Because, you can self host many of these with gitea, GitLab, or sr.ht. That’s the best kind of decentralization, but it does add to your own personal overhead (maintenance, backups), and really limits discovery.

I think what you might be asking for is if there is a federated code repository that supports git. That’s an interesting question, and I don’t know if such a thing yet exists.

quickthrower22• 4 years ago

Is it possible to decentralize "I know about package X -> Find Package X online -> Git Clone"?

While keeping the property of very high availability? And making it convenient.

I think the first two steps could be covered by a source search engine that spans different repository providers, and includes self-hosted git instances.

That source search engine will probably be centralized, although if we are just searching names and descriptions (and not code) the engine could be a fairly small .zip file that anyone can install. So comes down to "passing around lists".

nine_k• 4 years ago

- Code review aka pull requests.

- Issues.

- CI.

- "Home page" with the readme.md rendered.

Easy discoverability is a large concern. Easy discussion with fast round-trips and a trail is important (email or NNTP can help here though). CI is a thing that may need a serious effort to get running smoothly.

These things are centralized because it's easy to implement them once in one place instead of reinventing. But if there'd be an obvious and bullet-proof way to have them replicated (like in Fossil), the need for strict centralization would wane.

Discoverability would still be an issue though. It's like torrents: completely decentralied, but without a directory like TPB it's really hard to find them.

sreevisakh• 4 years ago

I think what you might be asking for is if there is a federated code repository that supports git. That’s an interesting question, and I don’t know if such a thing yet exists.

Sourcehut itself is fully federated if you are willing to learn email workflow. You don't need to register an account anywhere to collaborate on sourcehut. That include feature requests, bug reports, discussions, submitting patches and even pull requests from any public repository anywhere [1]. The discussions also exist on mailing list archives and personal mailboxes. They are not lost even if you decide to change host.

But developers are extremely resistant to email workflows. When I suggest it, people react as if I am suggesting black magic. But in my experience, email workflow isn't that unpleasant. Most of the problems with email workflow are due to poor email clients (issues with plain text, composing, rendering and threaded displays). Setting up git and a good but simple email client for git is not a hard task. The rest of the workflow is actually very pleasant.

[1] https://git-scm.com/docs/git-request-pull

hyperpape• 4 years ago

sr.ht is the vision of one extremely stubborn man who loves free software. I wouldn’t host my material there, but if your worry is that he’ll go corporate, you’re probably pretty safe.

rglullis• 4 years ago

I wouldn’t host my material there

Why?

southerntofu• 4 years ago

Shameless plug: https://staticadventures.netlib.re/blog/decentralized-forge/

I wrote this article about decentralized forging and the different approaches to it, P2P and federated. It's not exactly an in-depth analysis but i believe it's a good high-level overview of the ecosystem which has changed little since then.

sergiotapia3• 4 years ago

I left Codeplex many years ago. I could easily leave Github as well, in fact I'll do that over the weekend.

This article was pretty eye-opening. https://sfconservancy.org/GiveUpGitHub/

capableweb5• 4 years ago

The title confused me at first, "they are moving from sr.ht to GitHub?", but then I realized I'm just used to reading migrations like that in a "from $serviceB to $serviceA" manner and "to $serviceA from $serviceB" made it all wrong in my brain. Funny how that works.

phnofive• 4 years ago

Had the same reaction - skipping prepositions and mashing the nouns into a trained interpretive mold. Guess I need to slow down.

phdelightful• 4 years ago

I like “from A to B” because B happens after A temporally and in the text. It also serves to emphasize A as opposed to B, which is nice because we usually wouldn’t leave A unless there was really a problem with it even if B is better in some way.

29athrowaway• 4 years ago

You will love the Intel assembly dialect.

ternaryoperator• 4 years ago

Was just going to say this. Although, it's not specific to Intel assembly. Many assembly languages use the syntax: move destination,origin

Arubis• 4 years ago

The NYT uses this style (to … from …) deliberately as well. It’s a little bumpier, as you mention, but avoids confusion with describing a range.

dang3• 4 years ago

We've changed it above now. (Submitted title was "Kyoto framework is moving to sr.ht from GitHub")

gigatexal• 4 years ago

Yikes. Mailing list development might work for Linus and the kernel team but the PR approach on GitHub is so much easier for developers to discover and use and even for senior or more seasoned devs I’d rather do this in the open on a PR than in some mailing list. Ugh.

meibo• 4 years ago

Yeah, I was reading this and thought "Have fun!":

I don't know much about it, but I'm going to dig into it in the near future (https://man.sr.ht/lists.sr.ht/). For now, those who want to contribute, I'll just add read/write permissions to the project.

morpheuskafka2• 4 years ago

There's a huge middle ground of running your own instance of Gitlab/etc. versus going to the mailing list style of development (even that could be a lot easier with a more readable web interface and web posting support).

shp0ngle• 4 years ago

I think the mailing list approach would work for giant projects that have many bullshit PRs and issues, and you want to deter the “hello please fix it on my pc” stuff. Not really for small projects where each PR is usually helpful.

I have no idea what is kyoto and if it fits there.

015a4• 4 years ago

To be honest; I think something the creator (?) commented elsewhere here is really apt: no one is born knowing how to use Github. We get used to what we're used to.

I'm not asserting that as an argument for email, or PRs, but rather just that I'm certain there's people who feel, and are, extremely productive in vim, or collaborating over email, or programming in PHP, or whatever tech the younger people in the industry would claim is Yikes or Big Oof.

Unless we're talking about Bitbucket. No one is productive in Bitbucket.

xigoi6• 4 years ago

Personally, it took me a long time to understand how pull requests work.

202206241203• 4 years ago

These things are like "Why I left Google" from 2010s.

markphip2• 4 years ago

FWIW, just as Amazon and SalesForce are already doing their version of CoPilot, there is nothing to prevent GitHub from training its models off open source that is hosted on sr.ht or GitLab or anywhere else. If it is open source then the source is going to be available to be used for the models.

bayindirh7• 4 years ago

Showing a reaction is very important in my book. I’m also moving to Source Hut.

Not hosting my code in servers of a company which is openly hostile to open source and Linux is a good move.

Lastly, you can try to prevent scraping. It’s a cat and mouse game, but at least your servers can’t be directly accessed by the training code itself.

e-clinton• 4 years ago

Perhaps the licenses just need to be amended to explicitly say “you may not train AI models with this source code” and then get ready for a court battle.

I think Microsoft gives back to open source almost as much as they take, so I’m fine with them.

quadrifoliate4• 4 years ago

there is nothing to prevent GitHub from training its models off open source that is hosted on sr.ht or GitLab or anywhere else

I disagree. I think that GitHub is training Copilot on only repos currently on GitHub, because they can easily do so due to the Terms of Service [1] which allow them to "parse [user content] into a search index or otherwise analyze [user content] on our servers". They can reasonably show that an ML model fits the definition of "otherwise analyze content", regardless of the license.

If code that was never hosted on GitHub to begin with starts showing up verbatim in Copilot suggestions, it might be a more legally challenging position for them. It is unfortunate grey area if people decide to upload copies of free software repos to GitHub anyway, but perhaps future versions of the GPL or other free/libre licenses could be explicit about usage in training ML models.

I have no idea what Amazon or Salesforce are doing, but it would be interesting to hear what they are using for training data and how they justify compliance with the software licenses.

----------------------------------------

[1] https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/github-terms/github-t...

yakak2• 4 years ago

That's an interesting take but there's not really any protection in current open source licenses to stop someone else from agreeing to GitHub or any other hosting's terms for their clone of your repo.

markphip2• 4 years ago

Anyone could just push the repos to GitHub, including GitHub employees.

Here are links to Amazon and Salesforce

https://aws.amazon.com/codewhisperer/ https://blog.salesforceairesearch.com/codegen/

fartcannon5• 4 years ago

The loss of attribution, for example, is going to become an issue. Especially since copilot barfs out code chunks verbatim at times.

And either way, it's time to yet again to step around Microsoft's interference in the beautiful world of open source.

gsatic• 4 years ago

It's called signalling. The chimp troupe has a wide variety of chimps with different needs. How do you find the ones where needs align? You send out such signals.

minraws2• 4 years ago

Wait Amazon? what are they training it on? code hosted on AWS? what kind of mess are we in...?

Honestly all this is fine but train it on your own code, you have the money to do that, and the scale, why bother us the small fish. What's the worse that can happen, you will have to maybe pay people to write code, maybe start open source sponsor program to get rights to do such things, like based on need of project you might give them free hosting, free services, free etc... for project owners of smaller projects give them all some small grants. If every company did that for such models we will have much better OSS.

Also still IMO there really doesn't seem to be much we can do against it in the OSS space atleast, all code is open-source is hence code that's all openly readable, if a model is assumed to be a system that doesn't do 1:1 copy, the grounds seem shaky for legal process. Though honestly I very much want to be wrong, can we like file a lawsuit against such AIs in general, I see a similar problem with DallE looking at copyrighted art... What's next copyrighted music? Can't believe I am saying this but I feel bad for people who have copyrights. Music labels, entertainment empires, big services companies(like Accenture) and such will probably somehow survive, but the smaller people will get crushed.

And I say that as someone who primarily pursued Machine Learning in academics until graduation.

Maybe getting some "justified" compensation would be achievable...!?

Nextgrid• 4 years ago

I wish Sourcehut displayed code on the repo's primary page (as opposed to a separate "tree" tab) like most mainstream services such as GitHub or GitLab.

quadrifoliate4• 4 years ago

In another of the get-off-GitHub discussions recently, I mentioned to another FOSS project leader that they should consider taking their projects off GitHub to a forge that respects FOSS licenses. Sourcehut was one of the suggestions in addition to GitLab.

I'm glad to see that some projects are leading the way in this direction. To me, this move shows that the devs are competent and not afraid of migrations away from legacy forges if necessary; similar to how people moved from Sourceforge to GitHub 10 years ago.

I'll keep Kyoto framework in mind if need an SSR frontend framework in the future! I suggest others do the same.

----------------------------------------

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31941568

Shadonototra2• 4 years ago

https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/gitlab

it's public, whatever their investor will ask, they'll comply, github is their competitor, they'll want the same product

unless you self host, in that case it is debatable but for how long

we need more services like sr.ht, and less like github/gitlab

Kiro2• 4 years ago

I think people should do the opposite and move their code to GitHub if it helps Copilot. It's the single most important invention of my lifetime. Its existence trumps any ideological or legal hurdles.

bayindirh7• 4 years ago

I'd rather keep my code away from a company and feature which disregards the licenses I prefer for my codebases, thank you.

slickdork• 4 years ago

Why should we provide free data sets for github just to let them privatize gains?

nonrandomstring2• 4 years ago

trumps any ideological

I don't think that word means what you think it means.

The word "ideological" gets bandied about a lot here as a pejorative drop-in for "things I don't support".

Perhaps we could be a bit less dramatic when considering the plurality of values people hold.

carapace• 4 years ago

Although I don't agree with you I up-voted the comment because I think you're raising an important point.

Automating code generation is part of the self-accelerating process of the techno-singularity, eh?

masukomi• 4 years ago

It could be easily argued that nuclear bombs are one of, if not the, most significant inventions in the past century, and their existence continues to have a singnificant geopolitical impact. I think it's safe to say that the vast majority of humanity is ideologically opposed to their use.

BUT, they're one of, if not _the_ most important technological invention that currently effect us. So, that trumps ideological and legal hurdles, and thus we should use them.... right?

I would like to presume you would disagree with that assertion.

With that in mind, would you like to reconsider your justification for continuing to use GitHub?

To be clear, I'm not arguing that you shouldn't use GitHub. I'm arguing that the importance, or impact, of an invention is irrelevant to its continued use.

What's important is the short, and long term _effect_ of continuing to use it.

sgift• 4 years ago

All I see when I look at Copilot is code written by the most stupid coworker that could ever exist - and now, my job is to review it. I really hope we had better inventions in your lifetime than that.

xigoi6• 4 years ago

Thanks, but I don't want a huge company to sell my code without giving me anything back.

Shadonototra2• 4 years ago

I approve the move, congrats!

andybak2• 4 years ago

If there's a big migration away from Github then I really worry what I'll do about discovering interesting stuff. I spend an hour or so a week looking through my Github feed. Something genuinely valuable will be lost once that is no longer a rich seam of new repos.

apetresc• 4 years ago

The likely solution to that problem is ForgeFed, a kind of ActivityPub for federated source-control systems: https://github.com/forgefed/forgefed

Jaxkr• 4 years ago

Unfortunately this suffers from compounded niche-ness. Even with huge interest and constant public f-ups from social media companies, the Fediverse has failed to gain any real traction (likely due to the unintuitiveness of cross-server identity).

GitHub is already niche for the general populace, most people haven’t heard of it. Among programmers, alternative SCM platforms outside of GitLab and Perforce are niche. When we multiply the two together we get an incredibly small set of potential users (and the UX challenges of ActivityPub are still there).

remram8• 4 years ago

Is there any working implementation of ForgeFed at the moment?

rambojazz3• 4 years ago

ActivityPub does not address or solve the problem of discoverability, which is what the parent comment is talking about. So it's not a solution to that problem.

Shared404• 4 years ago

I quite enjoy looking at the sr.ht project listings myself: https://sr.ht/projects

Usually I find at least one or two new things that are interesting.

MikusR• 4 years ago

Every project already migrated from GitHub when Microsoft bought them.

andybak2• 4 years ago

You know that's not true, so why say it?

O__________O• 4 years ago

Does Kyoto license explicitly forbid the code from being cloned to GitHub? If not, seems like at best buying time until someone else does.

listenallyall5• 4 years ago

Recently I contributed to a new project which needed repository hosting, and I was excited to suggest Sourcehut. But when we learned of the email-only collaboration, it was too uncomfortable for this particular group (and I include myself). Most devs are used to pull requests, it seems awkward that Sourcehut doesn't support them.

Anunayj• 4 years ago

sourcehut in particular was designed with email based collaboration in mind, and I like they've stuck to it. There are so many alternatives out there for Github like pull requests.

There are projects like linux that don't accept PRs on github and swear on sending patches. Obligatory Linus Rant: https://github.com/torvalds/linux/pull/17#issuecomment-56546...

u801e6• 4 years ago

But when we learned of the email-only collaboration, it was too uncomfortable for this particular group

What makes using email or certain technologies uncomfortable, but using a new language or framework comfortable?

(and I include myself)

The link with the associated comment threads we are paticipating in could have easily been an email and every comment could have been a direct reply to that email or a reply to one of the comments. Would that be more or less comfortable compared to just having this discussion on the web interface on https://news.ycombinator.com?

kcb• 4 years ago

Less comfortable, way less. Email chains that become trees are a nightmare to deal with when they happen in practice.

listenallyall5• 4 years ago

As John McEnroe said, you cannot be serious. Are you trying to claim that Reddit, HN, and perhaps Facebook and Stack Overflow would work just as well if they were isolated to email and had no website? If email is so great, why are Slack, Trello, Discord, Notion, Basecamp all so popular?

bravogamma• 4 years ago

Questions for whoever was involved with this decision or might know:

Why was Sourcehut chosen? Any specific appealing features?

Any alternatives considered?

remram8• 4 years ago

The fact that it's not intended to be a free service (only free during alpha [1]) is a non-starter. Asking people to change their workflow is bad enough, asking them to stop getting it for free is a joke.

[1] https://sourcehut.org/pricing/

ddevault31• 4 years ago

If you don't pay, someone else will. GitHub is funded by private investors demanding a return, which incentivizes behavior like repurposing your code to facilitate mass license infringement. SourceHut is entirely funded by its users and is therefore only accountable to their needs.

SourceHut's fees are very cheap ($2/mo) and users who cannot pay for any reason are offered free service.

If you will only use services that you don't need to pay for, that's your choice, but you should respect the choices of others who consider these incentives and their outcomes more important.

stjohnswarts• 4 years ago

Isn't this moving from proprietary repo provider to proprietary repo provider (albeit a smaller one)?

ddevault31• 4 years ago

SourceHut is not proprietary. It is 100% free software (mostly AGPL) and provides tools to migrate your data between hosted or self-hosted instances.

Arnavion2• 4 years ago

There's no guarantee that sr.ht (the "repo provider") is running upstream SourceHut (the AGPL software). I do believe that it is, but there's simply no way to guarantee it, so it would be reasonable to consider a non-self-hosted SourceHut instance as proprietary.

(Again, to be clear I'm just playing devil's advocate with the semantics. I personally don't believe that sr.ht is doing anything nefarious.)

tptacek3• 4 years ago

It would be useful to know what this project is. Lots of projects are on other code hosting services. Is this is a particularly important project? Go has been my daily driver for almost a decade and this is the first I've heard of it.

quadrifoliate4• 4 years ago

The move is more of interest to commenters than the project itself, as an instance of an explicit action to move code away from GitHub, which seems to have gained the general status of "place where source code on <any project> is found" over the past decade.

Lots of projects are on other code hosting services.

Yes, and they usually tend to stay there, unless the code hosting service starts doing unusual things with your code. The README of the linked project is quite explicit about all this.

ddevault31• 4 years ago

Just click through to their new readme on sourcehut:

https://sr.ht/~kyoto-framework/kyoto-framework/

tptacek3• 4 years ago

I did. Do lots of people use this library? I guess I'm wondering what the relative "newsworthiness" of this announcement is, because, like I said, people move things off Github all the time.

remram8• 4 years ago

That doesn't tell us how important this project is. I am not a Go dev, all I can see is it's some template-rendering lib, 500 stars on GitHub, 3 contributors on opencollective.

The discussion on this thread is great but I am not sure that this project is that significant.

akudha3• 4 years ago

As a rule of thumb, it is a good idea to support smaller and indie companies than mega corporations, IMHO - even if those mega corporations aren't doing anything that is ethically dubious. That is doubtful, as it is likely not possible to become that big without trampling on some toes or bending some rules.

Why support Github when there is st.ht? Why support Starbucks when you can support a mom & pop coffee shop? Why buy books from Amazon when you can buy from a Indie book store? Granted, not everyone has the patience, time and money to vote with wallet, but we can try wherever possible. I hope more people ditch Github

BeetleB3• 4 years ago

Last time I checked, sr.ht was mostly an email based workflow, and many teams wanted an issue tracking system that is web based

ddevault31• 4 years ago

SourceHut offers an email-based workflow with a web application built on top of it. You can file tickets via email, but you can also file tickets on the web:

https://todo.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/hare

The same goes for patches. You can submit changes directly via email, but you can also use our web interface. We're also working on web-based tools for code review built on top of our mailing lists, which will provide a complete experience similar to GitHub's pull requests, but built on top of the decentralized, standardized protocol that git was designed for.

yowmamasita• 4 years ago

Email is still the most robust communication medium. But I have also observed that it has also prevented emoji-only replies which is great.

spoils19• 4 years ago

Then those teams are wrong considering email is more robust, efficient and overall a better tool for the job.

akudha3• 4 years ago

That is why I said "wherever possible". If your team is going to quit their jobs (I doubt it) because they will only deal with a web based issue tracking, then sure, go for GitHub.

The point I am trying to make here is - by default people spend their money with mega corps, because of brand awareness, convenience etc. Instead, it would be nice if the default is indie/small businesses.

In other words instead of "the mega corps aren't working for me, let me look for smaller/indie options instead", it would be nice if we all did "smaller indie options don't fit my requirements, let me go with Microsoft/Apple/etc instead".

Maybe this is too idealistic?

wnolens2• 4 years ago

I don't follow what you've taken for granted.

Why not buy the best product at the price you're willing to pay for it, even from a company with the values you share? Where does company size take precedent?

RootKitBeerCat• 4 years ago

Who shares Microsoft’s “values”, and what are they?

MatthiasPortzel• 4 years ago

Two reasons.

If you don’t make an effort to try smaller company’s products, you’re going to be biased towards bigger companies by virtue of them having better marketing and network effects. Some conscious preference to smaller companies can help counteract this.

And even if the smaller company has a worse product initially, some people using it anyways can help keep them alive in order to fund innovation. Smaller companies tend to be more willing to experiment or innovate, but that can’t happen if no one is willing to make a long-term bet.

kelnos3• 4 years ago

I think it's more nuanced than that. I'm happy to buy from a smaller producer that may not have the absolute best product, as long as it meets my needs. I think consolidation and concentration of capital is one of the worst features of capitalism, and we should patronize smaller producers when it's reasonable to do so.

Having said that, I still buy a lot of things from Amazon because it's much more convenient than the alternatives. It's a habit I've been trying to kick, but I have a ways to go.

RicoElectrico• 4 years ago

On the B2B and B2G side economic patriotism is strong in Germany and France, but it seems that as a result local companies don't have to try as hard. Why bother if they will choose you based on nationality, not necessarily merit?

Remember OVH server room fire? Was there any failure of such magnitude in AWS/Azure/GCP?

Macha• 4 years ago

OVH is not playing in the same market as the big cloud providers - its primary business is doing commodity dedicated servers with the primary selling point being low cost.

It's hardly surprising that low cost options are more prone to failures in many markets.

Aeolun4• 4 years ago

Why support Github when there is st.ht?

Github is about 1000x more user friendly?

015a4• 4 years ago

I would argue, that depends on the user.

xigoi6• 4 years ago

If by “user-friendly” you mean “slow”…

badrabbit2• 4 years ago

Are you kidding me? Smaller companies will use you to make mistakes and learn. And when they can't support something because of resources then you bear the consequences. Nice notion but not a rule of thumb in my opinion. Mega corps like google are terrible as well. Newish companies that have been in the industry a few years are the rule of thumb unless you can afford to be their guineapig/stepping-stone.

echelon• 4 years ago

Smaller companies will use you to make mistakes and learn.

And the big ones don't ever do this? You're probably shielded from the jira ticket backlogs that are thousands deep.

While there's no hard and fast rule, small companies tend to care more, as they're closer to the pain. A loss of a customer isn't just "churn".

We should strive to have at least four to six alternatives for every type of system. It keeps pricing competitive, gives users lots of alternatives, and prevents single players from strong arming behavior.

Right now there are too many monopolies and duopolies in tech.

vlunkr• 4 years ago

Smaller companies are a much bigger risk as a dependency. Whatever GitHub may do in the future, they are unlikely to disappear in any time frame I care about.

ddevault31• 4 years ago

This is why we take pains to be transparent about things like finances:

https://sourcehut.org/blog/2022-04-08-2021-financial-report/

SourceHut is profitable and sustainable, thanks in no small part to the fact that we expect users to pay if they have the means. Small companies providing free services with investor subsidies are much more likely to disappear than a company with a service you're paying for which isn't beholden to any investor demands for infinite growth.

015a4• 4 years ago

Tell that to the people who relied on Google Wave and Wunderlist. Or to the people who said "Linux will go the way of every other hobbyist OS" in 1994. I knew several orgs who were devastated when Atlassian shut down Hipchat.

If you want the only guaranteed probability about the future: its that most predictions about the future are wrong. Everything dies eventually; the things you least expect last longer than you expect them to; or sometimes much shorter. I do feel pretty confident that both Github and sr.ht will be operational tomorrow. But, not 100%; and even less than that next Tuesday; and even less by September.

Actually, Github has had 12 public incidents since May. So... maybe I shouldn't be so bold with my predictions about Github's operational status.

When people say "something is unlikely to happen" what they really mean is: I really hope that thing doesn't happen. Me, personally; I hope both Github and sr.ht continue to see success. As you say; me choosing to pay Github $5/mo won't change anything for the better or worse; but paying that to sr.ht, now that impact is much bigger. If you distil it down to the manifestation of your own hopes: I think the choice of who to support is obvious.

josephcsible2• 4 years ago

They're less likely to disappear, sure, but they're way more likely to permaban you and lock you out of your stuff, with no way to get ahold of a human who can undo it for you.

throwaway8943452• 4 years ago

Why support Github when there is st.ht?

I’m not super opposed, but Drew can be pretty over the top ideological/irritable for my tastes (at least that’s my perception from reading his blog). I’m not sure I want to invest in his platform if he could just boot me over an Internet disagreement or something. Yeah, I can back up my stuff, but at a certain point I may as well self-host.

akudha3• 4 years ago

I only gave source hut as an example. Maybe there are other projects like source hut that you might like, but are not ethically challenged like GitHub, that you might support?

The larger point still stands though. Instead of consumers simply supporting the biggest players in the market (because of convenience), it would be nice to give smaller players (who are not shady) a chance?

yellowapple• 4 years ago

I’m not sure I want to invest in his platform if he could just boot me over an Internet disagreement or something.

Has that happened?

josephcsible2• 4 years ago

I’m not sure I want to invest in his platform if he could just boot me over an Internet disagreement or something.

But the FAANGs do that to people all the time.

indrora• 4 years ago

I at one point encountered Drew at a meetup.

He basically ignores anyone who has or currently does work at any company he deems unethical (read: Google/Amazon/Facebook/etc). You're forever tainted in his eyes, and your opinions are always only useful if someone else agrees with you that isn't tainted.

Which really sucks because his entire software stack depends on the work (and opinions) of the people that he discards: Go, Python, and Git for a few.

pmontra2• 4 years ago

Self hosting is OK. I self host my personal projects and a few work ones (the ones with a customer that basically doesn't know what code is.) I usually don't want anyone else to look at them though. I let some friends work with me on some of them. If I need strangers or customers to look / work at the code it's been GitHub, GitLab or Bitbucket.

eesmith2• 4 years ago

The iPhone App Store terms still conflicts with the GPL, right?

If so, isn't that also "over the top ideological"? After all, we know Apple's opposition to the GPL dates back to the early 1990s when NeXT used gcc for Objective C, and their rejection of GPLv3 caused them to ship ancient versions of bash, recently replaced with zsh, so it's not like they weren't aware of the GPL.

Some people use Linux (the moral equivalent to "self-host") to avoid Apple's ideological stance.

Which, from a business standpoint, makes for a marketing opportunity for a FOSS-aligned source code hosting company. Which takes us from an ideological position to an economics one.

(To quote Bill Hicks: “Oh, you know what Bill’s doing? He’s going for that anti-marketing dollar. That’s a good market. He’s very smart.”)

mariusor2• 4 years ago

I’m not sure I want to invest in his platform if he could just boot me over an Internet disagreement or something.

There's a wide gap between being irritable and being unprofessional. Nothing I've seen so far in regards to how SourceHut is being managed, indicate that you'd have such problems. (I'm saying this as a long time user of SoutrceHut and as someone that got into arguments with Drew)

ddevault31• 4 years ago

In the history of SourceHut, only one person (setting aside spam/crypto-miner bots) has been banned from the platform. They were harassing maintainers and failed to respond to an email inquiry seeking to discuss their behavior before resorting to a ban.

I have strong principles and I stand steadfast by them. However, one of those principles is tolerance for different views. I want SourceHut to be available for everyone, even if we don't see eye-to-eye. You won't be booted off if you and I happen to end up in an argument somewhere online.

I've made myself personally available to users, as a person they can directly reach about problems and concerns with the services, rather than a support ticket answered by a random lackey. I think this is very valuable. Software is made by people. One of the risks that comes with this, however, is that people can start to view SourceHut and my private identity tangled together. Rest assured, they are separate, and I treat SourceHut with a great deal of deliberate professionalism and reverence for our users.

snapetom3• 4 years ago

Why support Starbucks when you can support a mom & pop coffee shop

Because small, local is not always better. It's quite common to find coffee shops here in the PNW that make a horrendous espresso. Most roasters here in Seattle are pretty mediocre and only capitalizing on the Seattle reputation. I can rattle off all the "local" and "small-batch" bourbon/gin/vodka distilleries that use sourced alcohol and are over-priced train wrecks powered only by marketing and no skill. At least with Starbucks, I get consistently bad coffee. I'm not risking over paying for coffee that I spit out.

Definitely have been looking at st.ht but if github fulfills my needs better, I'm sticking with that.

petre4• 4 years ago

I'm not risking over paying for coffee that I spit out.

That's exactly what happened to me at Starbucks. I had to wait for a small cookie shop to open up in order to buy an overpriced decent espresso. They had an Illy logo which helped a bit.

In Italy and Greece you specifically want to avoid big chains as almost every small shop makes better coffee.

rendaw• 4 years ago

You're alienating the vast majority of devs by choosing sr.ht, who don't have accounts there and don't want to set up yet another account, don't want to use mailing lists, etc.

In the end it's an ideals tradeoff. Are you going to prioritize the growth of your project ecosystem but give into megacorps, or are you kneecap contributions by choosing esoteric ethical workflows.

freeopinion• 4 years ago

I'm not here to defend any one service specifically. But I would like to let anybody with an aversion to Github know that they are not alone. And you are not some pariah. For that matter, it's ok if you don't even use git. If you have an interesting project, people will still be interested if you're willing to work with them.

Many a would-be contributor has lost interest when a project was entirely dependent on github, too. It's pretty telling when a contributor uses git, but can't contribute to a project that also uses git.

tssva• 4 years ago

Having dealt with many local small businesses owners I'm not sure there is any significant difference in their propensity for ethically dubious behavior vs mega corporations.

astrange• 4 years ago

Why support Github when there is st.ht? Why support Starbucks when you can support a mom & pop coffee shop?

Small businesses usually treat their employees worse than chains do (because "we're all a family"). Also… coffee shops seem to have big opinions of themselves but the farmers do all the work. Baristas just have value unfairly credited to them by the customers because the product is addictive.

manfre• 4 years ago

Another generic rule that is worth following is to not depend on software or services self labeled as alpha, beta, or any other pre-release.

ddevault31• 4 years ago

It's a useful shorthand, certainly, but what is it shorthand for? Sophistication of the software, availability, performance, sustainability, security? We have many of these things and we offer transparency and data to back it up. SourceHut has a proven record of better uptime than GitHub and GitLab over its entire lifetime and is the highest performing forge platform available. We can offer many guarantees, backed by public data, which many platforms which label themselves as production-ready cannot.

We hold ourselves to a higher standard than most and we have a specific and documented set of goals to accomplish before we declare the alpha complete. However, any potential user who wants to use SourceHut today can find a wealth of information to secure peace of mind in their choice.

nathants• 4 years ago

git-remote-gcrypt + rclone + s3.

dang3• 4 years ago

Recent and related:

Give up GitHub: The time has come - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31932250 - June 2022 (544 comments)

armchairhacker• 4 years ago

Any good reason(s) why SourceHut and not Gitlab?

SourceHut is missing a lot of features from GitHub, I'm not even sure if SourceHut has a file tree. It's interface is also much different than GitHub's.

Meanwhile GitLab is almost an exact clone of GitHub. It has discussion boards, pull requests ("merge requests"), even CI which replaces GitHub actions.

I figure SourceHut is more FOSS-friendly than GitLab. But GitLab still supports self-hosting, and AFAIK is open-source and FOSS-freindly itself. The KDE and GNOME project even have their own hosted GitLab versions. All-in-all I just think migrating from GitHub to GitLab seems much easier than migrating to SourceHut.

michz• 4 years ago

Can't speak for others but I would choose sourcehut over gitlab any day; having used gitlab at work, it's a hot mess of JavaScript that tries to replace command line workflows that work-- it's terribly slow, and once even used 60GB of memory on my machine.

On the other hand, sourcehut promotes better workflows, in favor of a really snappy web interface.

For those who are attached to forks and PRs there's also a web UI for submitting a "patch set" which basically walks you through the process the same way as a pull request.

CoastalCoder• 4 years ago

Something I've been unclear on for a while, and I'd be grateful if anyone can explain it.

The project points to [0] as its rationale for leaving Github. One of that document's complaints about Github is that they do business with the US's ICE department. It's not the only group from which I've heard such thorough contempt for ICE.

I understand why people might have problems with some aspects of ICE's activities, e.g. charges of inhumane treatment of people crossing the border without authorization. So it makes sense to me that they'd protest those particular behaviors.

But protesting all of ICE makes no more sense to me than un-nuanced calls to entirely defund the police, or abolish the entire DoD. I.e., it seems obvious that totally eliminating any of those government functions would cause problems that almost nobody would find acceptable.

Is there something I'm missing?

[0] https://sfconservancy.org/GiveUpGitHub/

MaxLeiter• 4 years ago

People want a spectrum of things. Often, “defund the police/ICE” means “replace them with something better”, not eliminating them and forgetting about their original purpose. A few (or many, depending who you ask) bad apples spoiled the batch.

karaterobot• 4 years ago

For what it's worth, none of the reasons listed for switching away from Github in that SFC article are persuasive to me, but that's my choice. Kyoto project is free to choose what's best for them.

lifeplusplus• 4 years ago

Copilot shouldn't be paid service of it's based on someone else work

thinkpad13• 4 years ago

this makes me want gitlab to focus more on the software development side instead ci cd devops

Kyoto project is moving from GitHub to Sourcehut

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