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
    0·
    6 months ago

    @tyler So why are you doing open source anyway, if not for the philosophy? You are completely undermining that by forcing your contributors to stick to proprietary walled gardens. Last time I checked there were hosting providers for both gitea and matrix.

    none of my users have to use any walled gardens. My final artifacts are pushed up to the respective artifactory like npm, maven central, rubygems, pypi, etc. all of which are artifact repositories set up by non-profit foundations that anyone can use. You are talking about being open to contributors, which is an entirely separate thing from users. I’m not forcing anyone to contribute, and no one is forced to use my projects. I can pretty much guarantee I’ve contributed to more OSS in the past year than you have in a lifetime, and it’s going to continue to be that way for the foreseeable future. So you can fuck right off