GitHub could be acquired by Microsoft

[H. S. Teoh]

On Thu, Jun 07, 2018 at 05:11:40PM -0700, Walter Bright via Digitalmars-d-announce wrote:
> On 6/7/2018 10:17 AM, H. S. Teoh 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.
> 
> We have more on Github than just the source code. There are all the
> comments that go with the PRs. I have most of this archived, as they
> get emailed to me by Github, but not all of it and recreating all this
> priceless historical information into a usable form would be very
> burdensome.

And that is why it's a bad thing to build a walled garden around a code
repo, esp. when the underlying VCS is well capable of distributed
development.  If only there has been a standard protocol for
communicating such associated content, such as PR comments and
discussions, bugs and issues (this latter not applicable in our case,
thankfully), then we could have setup an archival system to retrieve and
store all of this information.  Unfortunately, AFAIK there isn't a way
to do this, and so if Github for whatever reason shuts down, all of this
valuable information would be lost forever.

The same problem faces us if for whatever reason we decide to move to a
different VCS hosting provider in the future: the lack of a common,
compatible data exchange format for PRs, comments, issues, etc., means
that it will be very hard (practically impossible) to export this data
and import it into the new system.  It's a mild form of vendor lock-in.
Mild in the sense that we can take the code with us anytime, thanks to
the way git works, but the valuable associated information like PR
discussions is specific to Github and there is no easy way (if there's a
way at all!) to export this data and import it elsewhere.

It's 2018, and history has shown that standard, open data formats are
what stands the test of time. We *could* have had a standardized
interchange format for representing PR discussions, standard
vendor-agnostic protocols for bug-tracking, PR merging, etc.. Yet we're
still stuck in the 1998 mindset of building walled gardens that lock us
into an inescapable dependence on a specific vendor.  Thankfully git
allows at least the code to be free from this lock-in, but still, as you
said, priceless historical information resides in data that only exists
on Github, and the lack of common protocols means we're bound to Github
by the fear of losing this data forever if we leave.


T

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