I think that federated gitlab instances could be a good next step forward for becoming independent from big companies.
At the moment I host a lot of my code to Github because of discoverability, but I do not feel comfortable with depending on Microsoft for this service. Gitlab is a self hosted Git server, but there is no way to federate the instances like on Lemmy. Are there any projects that deal with this?
Why don’t you feel good about it? When Microsoft acquired Github, the worst things were predicted by some users. That was in late 2018 if I’m not mistaken. Now it’s 2023, what terrible things have happened so far? From my point of view, Github has actually developed very positively since then.
Sure, Github could delete repositories at any time. But so can any other provider. However, this is not a big problem for the code alone, since you always have at least one current version stored locally. Issues and pull requests can be exported, albeit unofficially. Corresponding scripts for this are even offered directly on Github.
What else could Microsoft do? Use the code that is available in a repository. Microsoft can also do this if the code is stored by another provider. Git clone <repo> is already sufficient for this.
So I personally see few problems to use Github. Especially since there are the most users and therefore the probability is higher to find people who participate in a project.
But apart from that, I host a few projects at Codeberg.org. Responsible for this is a non-profit organization in Germany. Except for some technical problems when switching to better hardware a few months ago, I can’t complain.
[https://techcrunch.com/2019/07/29/github-ban-sanctioned-countries/](Github has banned developers in Crimea, Iran, Syria) because of US export rules. This is a good enough reason for me to be worried.
Apart from that do you trust Github not using your private projects for their AI training?
The idea popped up in my head because I am planning to open-source some of my work, and my organization wants me to keep it on our Gitlab instance. The problem there is that nobody will ever run into this project, which is why I want to keep it on Github ( only for discoverability ). But this would not be necessary if our Gitlab instance would be actually discoverable from other Gitlab instances, hence the federation.
I wasn’t aware of the sanctions, so thanks for sharing that! As for the AI, it is inevitable if the source code is public. Having it hosted elsewhere might slow the consumption, but it’s coming regardless.
Still, I do think a federated platform is a great idea. The more we can do without relying on a centralized, corporate platform, the better off we’ll be as a society.
You know I had the same feelings about Reddit and yet here we are …
Edit: to clarify - same feelings from point of trust, I mean Reddit is a friendly website, what could go wrong?
Microsoft is surprisingly pro-FOSS - probably more than any of the others in “big tech.” It’s the same reason MS isn’t in the FAANG acronym. They’ve consistently forwarded and contributed to the FOSS community over the past several years. They have massive stakes in the linux foundation, which is either conspiracy or just a shift in attitude (i haven’t decided myself yet). For a more concrete example, with LLMs, Microsoft (despite basically owning OpenAI) is contributing to free and open-source language model development, with Orca and TBAAYN, as well as publishing free and open-source tooling for LLM, such as the
guidancerepository.