GitHub could be acquired by Microsoft

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Thursday, June 07, 2018 20:02:31 Russel Winder via Digitalmars-d-announce 
wrote:
> On Thu, 2018-06-07 at 10:17 -0700, H. S. Teoh via Digitalmars-d-announce
>
> wrote:
> > […]
> >
> > Exactly!!!  Git was built precisely for decentralized, distributed
> > development.  Anyone should be (and is, if they bothered to put just a
> > tiny amount of effort into it) able to set up a git server and send the
> > URL to prospective collaborators.  Anyone is free to clone the git repo
> > and redistribute that clone to anyone else.  Anyone can create new
> > commits in a local clone and send the URL to another collaborator who
> > can pull the commits.  It should never have become the tool to build
> > walled gardens that inhibit this free sharing of code.
>
> I think there is an interesting tension between using a DVCS as a DVCS and
> no central resource, and thus no mainline version, and using a DVCS in
> combination with a central resource.  In the latter category the central
> resource may just be the repository acting as the mainline, or, as with
> GitHub, GitLab, Launchpad, the central resource provides sharing and
> reviewing support.
>
> Very few organisations, except perhaps those that use Fossil, actually use
> DVCS as a DVCS. Everyone seems to want a public mainline version: the
> repository that represents the official state of the project. It seems
> the world is not capable of working with a DVCS system that does not even
> support "eventually consistent". Perhaps because of lack of trying or
> perhaps because the idea of the mainline version of a project is
> important to projects.
>
> In the past Gnome, Debian, GStreamer, and many others have had a central
> mainline Git repository and everything was handled as DVCS, with emailed
> patches. They tended not to support using remotes and merges via that
> route, not entirely sure why. GitHub and GitLab supported forking,
> issues, pull requests, and CI. So many people have found this useful. Not
> just for having ready made CI on PRs, but because there was a central
> place that lots of projects were at, there was lots of serendipitous
> contribution. Gnome, Debian, and GStreamer are moving to private GitLab
> instances. It seems the use of a bare Git repository is not as appealing
> to these projects as having the support of a centralised system.
>
> I think that whilst there are many technical reasons for having an element
> of process support at the mainline location favouring the GitHubs and
> GitLabs of this Gitty world, a lot of it is about the people and the
> social system: there is a sense of belonging, a sense of accessibility,
> and being able to contribute more easily.
>
> One of the aspects of the total DVCS is that it can exclude, it is in
> itself a walled garden, you have to be in the clique to even know the
> activity is happening.
>
> All of this is not just technical, it is socio-technical.

Honestly, I don't see how it makes sense to release any software without a
definitive repo. Decentralized source control systems like git are great in
that they allow you to have your own fork and do things locally without
needing to talk to any central repo and because having folks be able to fork
and muck around with stuff easily is incredibly valuable. But actually
releasing software that way is a bit of a mess, and there usually needs to
be a main repo where the official version of stuff goes. So, the
decentralization is great for collaboration, and it removes the need to
communicate with the main repo when you don't actually need to, but it
really doesn't remove the need for a central repository for the official
version of the project.

Whether that central repo needs to be somewhere like github or gitlab or
bitbucket or whatever is another matter entirely, but ultimately, I think
that the main benefits of DVCS is that it removes the dependency on the
central repo from any operations that don't actually need the central repo,
not that it removes the need for a central repo, because it really doesn't -
not if you want to be organized about releases anyway.

- Jonathan M Davis