Content warning: this is a rant from a teenager who has strong opinions.
Okay…
However, it holds a monopoly on software.
You don’t know what a “monopoly” is.
they could just go “Boop! You’re gone!” and there’s nothing I could do about it other than move forges.
Yeah, nothing you could do about it, other than moving to one of the many other git hosts. Monopoly!
And then after listing off a whole bunch of alternative git hosts…
Centralization is not bad by itself but it’s bad when there’s no other option. There just needs to be ways to contribute to code without having to use Github.
You have plenty of ways to do that, and you know that because you just listed them. Github is not a monopoly.
Also, I don’t see the concept of open source mentioned at any point in this rant.
So, is google not a monopoly because there are other search engines out there? Does Apple not have a monopoly among US teenagers because there are Android phones available? Does Microsoft not have a monopoly in desktop computing because Apple and Linux exist or because phones exist?
What is your definition of monopoly and how does Github not fit it? I’m genuinely curious.
Anti Commercial AI thingy
Inserted with a keystroke running this script on linux with X11
#!/usr/bin/env nix-shell #!nix-shell -i bash --packages xautomation xclip sleep 0.2 (echo '::: spoiler Anti Commercial AI thingy [CC BY-NC-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/) Inserted with a keystroke running this script on linux with X11 ```bash' cat "$0" echo '``` :::') | xclip -selection clipboard xte "keydown Control_L" "key V" "keyup Control_L"
So, is google not a monopoly because there are other search engines out there?
It isn’t. There are other search engines. People use Google because it’s the best, not because it’s the only one available. If Google became a horrible search engine, people would switch no problem
Does Apple not have a monopoly among US teenagers because there are Android phones available?
Yes. Although Apple is preferred in this public (of which I don’t know a lot about, so I won’t try to guess why), Android is always an option. And a cheaper one, usually. This forces Apple to differentiate themselves by giving the best in what their users want (premium quality and status, I guess).
Does Microsoft not have a monopoly in desktop computing because Apple and Linux exist or because phones exist?
Same point.
What is your definition of monopoly and how does Github not fit it?
A monopoly is when a company is the only one in a market niche. Not the most prominent one.
A monopoly is when a company is the only one in a market niche. Not the most prominent one.
What would you call the latter then?
Anti Commercial AI thingy
Inserted with a keystroke running this script on linux with X11
#!/usr/bin/env nix-shell #!nix-shell -i bash --packages xautomation xclip sleep 0.2 (echo '::: spoiler Anti Commercial AI thingy [CC BY-NC-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/) Inserted with a keystroke running this script on linux with X11 ```bash' cat "$0" echo '``` :::') | xclip -selection clipboard xte "keydown Control_L" "key V" "keyup Control_L"I don’t think there’s a precise name for that, since it can be a lot of complex things. A monopoly is a very defined thing, that was my point.
A company can be prominent because it is just better at giving what the consumers want. That’s the case of Google (as a search engine). I use Duck Duck Go, but very often I have to fallback to Google because DDG’s results are just not quite right.
It can be prominent because what it does is very expensive and so only a few can even try it. That’s again the case with Google. Creating a good search engine is hard, and Google just got more money to throw at it. That’s also the case of Apple. What they are selling (premium products with very high quality and stability) is inherently expensive, and such they don’t face a lot of competition (Sansung I guess). Many big corp will lobby the government to artificially make the market more expensive so they can rule out small fish (don’t quote me on that, I’ll not elaborate further).
A company can also turn itself into a conglomerate, merging, buying and assimilating other companies. That’s the case with AbInbev here in Brazil. They assimilated most of the beer companies. It is very hard (in my opinion impossible) for this to turn into a monopoly, because there will be other big fish trying to play the same game (Petrópolis and Heineken in this case, for example), and there will always be those companies that will not accept being bought, hoping they will be the next big fish.
I’m not making any judgement of value here, I hate big corporations, but I think we should put blame where blame is due, and not attack straw men and use water down terms, because that’s pretty weak.
I don’t think there’s a precise name for that, since it can be a lot of complex things.
Do you understand now why people call it a monopoly? Why the US Department of Justice alleges Apple to be a monopoly?
There are indeed 5 characteristics for a monopoly and only one need fit the target to be called a monopoly, of which your criteria is only one:
- Profit maximizer: monopolists will choose the price or output to maximise profits at where MC=MR.This output will be somewhere over the price range, where demand is price elastic. If the total revenue is higher than total costs, the monopolists will make abnormal profits.
- Price maker: Decides the price of the good or product to be sold, but does so by determining the quantity in order to demand the price desired by the firm.
- High barriers to entry: Other sellers are unable to enter the market of the monopoly.
- Single seller: In a monopoly, there is one seller of the good, who produces all the output.[6] Therefore, the whole market is being served by a single company, and for practical purposes, the company is the same as the industry.
- Price discrimination: A monopolist can change the price or quantity of the product. They sell higher quantities at a lower price in a very elastic market, and sell lower quantities at a higher price in a less elastic market.
Had you provided another term, I would have agreed with you that the author doesn’t know what a monopoly is, but it seems like the inverse is true.
I don’t like to argue semantics on the internet so I won’t answer further than this
US Department of Justice alleges Apple to be a monopoly
With all due respect, I really don’t care what the US government calls a monopoly. It doesn’t make it a monopoly just because some county government said so.
Single seller: In a monopoly, there is one seller of the good, who produces all the output.[6] Therefore, the whole market is being served by a single company, and for practical purposes, the company is the same as the industry.
That’s the most important thing. We agree on that one. A monopoly is the singular provider of a good in the market. Github is not the only provider of git hosting (think Gitlab and Bitbucket). Apple is not the singular provider of smartphones (Sansung, Motorola, Xiaomi, etc), nor it’s the singular provider of laptops (Lenovo, Samsung, Alienware, Framework). All of the other points are things that monopolies do, but alone doesn’t make a monopoly.
This difference is important, because creating a true monopoly is impossibly hard. So hard in fact, that they are usually caused by interference of the government (like Petrobrás here), not the other way around.
Duopoly?
Wouldn’t it be when there are only 2 companies selling a product by @pipows@lemmy.today’s logic? Windows for example has 71% desktop marketshare worldwide, but Apple, Linux, BSD, Redox, TempleOS, and others as “competitors”. Or ~90% of all sunglasses are made by one company in Italy, but there are hundreds of copycats from China and other countries with knockoffs.
What’s that called? I’m still curious about @pipows@lemmy.today’s answer.
Thing about sharing the internet with newly minted teenagers is that they haven’t been around these streets nearly as long as us. They apparently dont know the history of the net as well as the timeline of the most popular sites.
Maybe schools need to start teaching internet history class or something. If only schools in the USA weren’t terrible when it comes to anything tech.
This isn’t even a problem with historical awareness, OP knows that Github isn’t a monopoly. They listed off a bunch of alternatives in their rant. I’m really not sure what they were even complaining about.
You don’t know what a “monopoly” is.
Do you though? A clarification that most people miss : “In economics, a monopoly is a single seller. In law, a monopoly is a business entity that has significant market power, that is, the power to charge overly high prices, which is associated with a decrease in social surplus.” (from Wikipedia) So are you 100% sure that the author was talking from an economical rather than legal viewpoint?
So sure, in theoretical economics GitHub is not a monopoly, rather it’s part of an oligopoly. Yet, in law, it is in practice a monopoly. GitHub is so big that it does shape the market of collaborating on (open-source) software, even though alternatives do exist.
Cut them some slack. They’re at an age where they’re trying to assert their independence and their brain is still developing. They’ve got time to mature and find more worthy fights over which to spill words. Or maybe they’ll remain smooth-brained. But either way, right now they’re not at their best.
Well, if you want to contribute to a project to github then you are pretty fucked if the gate keepers won’t let you
You’re not “pretty fucked”. Just use one of the many other git hosts out there. OP himself lists some of them in his rant.
You didn’t seem to read what I said. I can’t force other projects that I don’t own off github.
Actually, you can do exactly that. Fork them.
You can’t force the people who are using Github to follow you, of course. But that’s every individual’s choice.
How do you contribute to project on Github from a different git host?
Oh, that’s what you meant. How do you contribute to a project on any git host if that git host won’t let you? In what way is GitHub any different from that?
Its different in that other platforms aren’t run by evil corporations that could decide to deplatform a user.
You think Microsoft is the only “evil corporation” among these? That’s very naive. Any hosting service will deplatform users when they can see a profit to be made from doing so.
My point is don’t go with a corporation. Use open source software. Use codeberg.
Not like you can just visit some other selfhosted community on lemmy or reddit and see how others started hosting a local git appliance for their scripts and what not.
I would recommend that you check Codeberg - it uses Forgejo. If you’re interested in self-hosting, you can also run your own Forgejo instance.
I kinda hope they change the software to also be called codeberg. Its sich a good name and forgejo is so difficult to say and have people know how to spell it
Did you just discover this? It’s a Microsoft site after all.
It is indeed surprising how a Microsoft-owned site has become the default home for open-source projects. Have people thought this through?
They bought it after it was already the default.
So tired of seeing these posts.
Nobody worth listening to is complaining about creating an account on GitHub. Ubuntu brainstorm was a huge success and you had to create an account for that too
It literally takes 30s.
And github has a hugely comprehensive API that allows developers to easily move if that want to.
If Microsoft Open sourced the backend, the reality is, nobody would look at the code, and everyone would still use GitHub because it’s reliable. Vs code is open source, and I’m willing to bet community contributions are limited
And open sourcing the backend just means Oracle will take the code, and set up their own server for marginally cheaper and make GitHub worse… That’s what they did with red hat
What kind of shill is this, advocating for NOT open-sourcing the code?
There is a massive GitHub API which you probably already aren’t using. And now you want them to release the source code which you also won’t look at?
If they open source the code, what contributions would you make? How many contributions have you made to the Lemmy code? How many with vs code?
How would it benefit open source projects given that GitHub hosting is free for open source? How would it benefit GitHub?
Would you host your own GitHub repo when you can host it for free (which it will be for open source) on GitHub or other services anyway
Some projects don’t really benefit from open source.
If it’s a big thing, host your own using an open source project. Compete against GitHub.
But calling me a shill isn’t really an effective argument. I have contributed to a few open source projects in the past and released some of my own.
I don’t feel like forcing companies to open source their projects is the way. Open source needs to win on it’s own merits. And plenty of open source projects have (the Linux kernel as an example).
Have you contributed anything to githubs competitors? That might be a place to start. Because at the moment, there aren’t any issues with GitHub that open sourcing would address. Microsoft don’t need the additional resources
So many ignorant assumptions (first and main one being that I and others aren’t interested, and actively using and contributing to FLOSS forges) it’s not even worth arguing. Blocked.
There’s a reason GitHub is the largest service lol
You need to sell services based on their advantages rather than the politics. The reality is, github allows projects to be very easily migrated to other services anyway.
Using something because it’s open source isn’t helpful at all if it doesn’t work with your workflow easily
Productivity is more important to the success of open source than anything else.
I know this, because a project of mine died because we wasted too much time on infrastructure
Developers don’t need access to the GitHub source to do their job, and there is no advantage to anyone.
In fact, if they distribute the code, it simply reduces the incentive for Microsoft to improve it, and the only ones who will step are, are shit companies like Oracle
Time isn’t the only thing you give up when creating accounts—there is the terms of service, data collection, and supporting a proprietary held by a US megocorporation service by participating on it which is not helping the change many would like to see. This also fails to mention that as a US service they must comply with US sanctions so a section of users couldn’t create accounts if they wanted.
The fact GitHub is not open source on their servers is not really a problem for me, there are many open source platforms to host code. And for centralized platform I won’t be able to change anything myself anyway.
My rant would be about having to run their proprietary code on my machine to use GitHub.
What proprietary code do you have to run to use GitHub???
Turn off executing JavaScript code in your browser and you’ll see.
You are not required to visit the website to use GitHub.
If you are complaining because all you know how to use is the website and GitHub desktop, then that’s a you problem and you need to get good. There is a git man page and it is excellent. I suggest you study up.
I know the Git part of the GitHub pretty well, trust me. But you still need to create an account and API keys somehow.
However, GitHub is not as bad as some services, I use it anyway. Just wanted to laugh at the fact half of open source in on that platform.
So it isn’t necessary to have keys and an account on your preferred git server? What kind of insecure dumpster fire server are you committing code to???
Don’t know where this idea come from. You need to run GitHub’s proprietary app in order to create an account and do nessesary things. Meanwhile services like Codeberg have both server and client side open source and there are hosts like SourceHut that does not require running any additional code at all.
What proprietary app do you need to run… The website? Are you seriously arguing that making an account on the website is equivalent to having to run an app on your machine?
You’re weird.
God, what a bullshit, bad faith argument. I’m sure you feel like you have the high ground, but seriously, you sound like an idiot.
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You can use other forges, but they have the exact same issues as GitHub. You need to make an account, you need to accept terms of service and if they feel like it (or are forced by a court) they’ll ban you and your repository.
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git send-emailexists. So it’s not like you absolutely can’t contribute to projects that are hosted on GitHub.
At some point in the future gitlab will get federation, but that’s not a solution for now. It’ll take a while.
Why does everyone shill gitlab as a github alternative. Theyre just another shitty corporate platform
You can at least self host it, though performance isn’t as good as the alternatives
I imagine because it’s more popular and (arguably) more feature complete than Gitea (which I use).
At some point in the future gitlab will get federation, but that’s not a solution for now. It’ll take a while.
Gitlab had more than a decade to implement federation and didn’t give 2 shits about it until one single dude (oelmeki?) decided to start implementing it. And even now, Gitlab hasn’t built a team around federation and only have that single, external contributor writing all the code, tests, etc. . The only thing they’re providing is “guidance”. It wouldn’t surprise me if oelmeki isn’t even getting paid.
Gitlab feels like just another company happy to be #2 and not willing to do anything more to be better because most other alternatives are way behind. I bet if they were #1, they’d be just as bad as any other company that’s #1.
Hopefully forgejo gets complete federation first and becomes real competition for gitlab. Gitlab doesn’t deserve #2.
Anti Commercial AI thingy
Inserted with a keystroke running this script on linux with X11
#!/usr/bin/env nix-shell #!nix-shell -i bash --packages xautomation xclip sleep 0.2 (echo '::: spoiler Anti Commercial AI thingy [CC BY-NC-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/) Inserted with a keystroke running this script on linux with X11 ```bash' cat "$0" echo '``` :::') | xclip -selection clipboard xte "keydown Control_L" "key V" "keyup Control_L"Due to a generation being taught only Microsoft GitHub’s system, many forges have seen it imperative to copy all of those patterns—including all of the bad ones. Being a clone of MS GitHub isn’t a very compelling reason to be on another platform, but so few are looking to actually fix the issues Microsoft would be too big/slow to adapt to—e.g. the entire pull request model being so slow for getting it merges.
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It’ll follow the enshitification path of every other big-tech site, give it time.
If you can’t wait, https://gitea.com/
This is the coolest one I know of Self hosted, open source, good simple project management
OP, if you want an arguably easier escape from MS GitHub, have you considered not using Git? The unfortunate current truth is these two are married to the point that a lot of new (& even experienced) folks think MS GitHub is Git & even if you start a project elsewhere, somebody will fork it onto the platform the the SEO bots will put their fork at the top of the ranks. You might be better off choosing a different DVCS all together as the interoperability will be much more difficult. That said, it wouldn’t just be to escape Microsoft, but also since there are a lot of interesting, less explored ideas in the space (like how learning functional or object-oriented code for the first time will broaden your perspective for tools & ideas you already know). Personally, I find the Patch Theory-based VCSs pretty compelling so it could be worth it to dig into Pijul or Darcs.
