cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/15691030

As you can easily notice, today many open source projects are using some services, that are… sus.

For example, Github is the most popular place to store your project code and we all know, who owns it. And not to forget that sketchy AI training on every line of your code. Don’t we have alternatives? Oh, yes we have. Gitlab, Codeberg, Notabug, etc. You can even host your own Gitea or Forgejo instance if you want.

Also, Crowdin is very popular in terms of software (and docs) translation. Even Privacy Guides and The New Oil use Crowdin, even though we have FLOSS Weblate, that you can easily self-host or use public instances.

So, my question is: if you are building a FLOSS / privacy related project, why using proprietary and privacy invasive tools?

  • tyler@programming.dev
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    2
    ·
    2 months ago

    Because foss is usually not the easiest option. In fact it’s often quite difficult to maintain. So not only creating foss but then hosting your projects on foss is not tenable. Where does the line get drawn? OK you’re running forgejo. Are you running it on infrastructure that you control? You don’t control the DNS, you don’t control the ISP, you don’t control the fiber, you don’t control most of the stack. Putting something on GitHub is really inconsequential if you’re making your project open source since anyone can use it for anything anyway, so who controls the platform doesn’t matter in the slightest.

  • Alex@lemmy.ml
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    2 months ago

    Self hosting takes time and energy and most open source developers join projects because they are interested in the project not becoming admins. On top of that building a CI system is an expensive undertaking when a lot of hosting solutions provide a fair amount of compute for free to qualifying projects.