Terrible title. The article is about the risks of everyone using GitHub. That doesn’t mean GitHub is destroying the open source ecosystem. In fact it’s the complete opposite - GitHub massively helps the open source ecosystem. That’s why everyone uses it in the first place!
I know the solution. Starting this year, students will be forced to contribute to a project they use, care about or, at the very least, truly want to use in the long term. Not one they found randomly on Github.
And they’re still going to find things on GitHub. Because so many things are on GitHub.
They’re blaming the students for the popularity of GitHub. If they want students to not use GitHub then just make that a requirement.
Would be nice to see federated PRs. Git is distributed after all!
PSA: GitHub does not have a monopoly, you are free to host your stuff elsewhere (or yourself)
Google “network effect”
Relatively minor for source code forges.
The reasons everyone uses GitHub:
- Free, even for private repos. No ads.
- Free CI - this is huge. Nobody else does this because it costs Microsoft around $100m/year to provide.
- It’s quite good.
If anyone can ever compete with that then I doubt network effects will keep people there.
Yes, and for most of us it’s easy to do so, but I’m not going to explain a noob how to add new repositories. I mean, I did, and I will do in the future, but it’s not my favorite task to do.
I realized my comment was a bit ambiguous. I meant repositories like for Maven, NPM, or package managers. Having stuff on GitHub makes it a lot easier.
