[rescue] Has freshmeat.net disappeared forever? WAS:::Re: What to do with the SS20

[John Floren]

On Tue, Jun 24, 2014 at 4:31 PM, Andrew Hoerter <amh at pobox.com> wrote:
> On 6/24/14, Richard <legalize at xmission.com> wrote:
>
>> Basically, everyone doing new stuff puts it on github and many people
>> (like me) are migrating to github.
>
> Unfortunately, many of those people (not necessarily you) aren't
> stopping to consider the risks of making a single proprietary service
> into the center of gravity for the open source world.  Github didn't
> exist 6 years ago, and it may not exist 6 years from now (or even next
> week), as the existence of this thread ably demonstrates.  I don't
> think it's ridiculous to acknowledge that possibility and express some
> healthy skepticism towards using Github.

The world is full of uncertainty. The traditional method of software
distribution, "sticking a tarball on that old Pentium sitting beside
the rack at work", is also risky. If you're already using git to
manage your code, pushing it up to github is a pretty easy way to save
yourself if your laptop craps out. If github goes away, you'll be left
with just your copy of the repository on your own machine. So it's
probably wise to make your own backups somewhere, but I think it's
silly to say Github is worse than any previous way of managing source
when the previous way mostly consisted of keeping a copy locally and
pushing it to Sourceforge, or just keeping a copy locally and putting
a tarball on your website.

john