The external developer who started the work and was highly praised by Gitlab offered to work for them if they made a team around federation --> nothing.
A group of French universities are now considering making a group in order to work on it themselves and contribute back to Gitlab.
Gitlab will most likely use it as a big selling point once all the work has been done by externals with little to no cost to Gitlab.
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Not surprising at all. Federation is not a feature that their paying customers likely have much interest in… same for Gitea btw. the developers interested in forge federation AFAIK all went to Forgejo.
Personally I think Gitlab also needs a community driven fork. Maybe a more ambitious https://heptapod.net/ could be a good base to start that.
Considering that git already support email based collaboration, I agree that a federated forge is really niche. It’s more of a frontend bonus. Which, considering the amount of company still using IRC, is not really a priority in the commercial world.
Gitlab will most likely use it as a big selling point once all the work has been done by externals with little to no cost to Gitlab.
I don’t think so. It’d/'ll be a nice feature, and be listed as such. But it’s not one of their primary selling points or marketing targets. Federation will be niche. Most useful in the FOSS space that pays little anyway.
I think you missed the point where 63 universities are using gitlab and actively interested in having federation. And that’s just in France.
So what’s stopping them? Universities have internship programs and internal projects. In a university team of 4 people doing projects, 63x4 252 students could be assigned to a project to build this.
But
The french open science committee (CoSO) is indeed interested in the ActivityPub implementation in GitLab
Good phrasing. They are “interested in the ActivityPub implementation” not “interested in the implementing ActivityPub” - so who gives a shit what a bunch of universities are interested in
Did you stop reading or are you intentionally trying to phrase it as if the universities won’t do anything?
Since many of our universities are using GitLab (64 out of 73 forges are instance of GitLab), we are willing to help making forge federation a reality in GitLab.
That sentence is in the very next paragraph you quoted from.
We are already in touch with GitLab, mainly to understand how their contributor community works [2].
Now we try to build a team of contributors among our institutions.
It doesn’t seem like you’re even trying to make a good faith argument.
Did you stop reading or are you intentionally trying to phrase it as if the universities won’t do anything? […]
It doesn’t seem like you’re even trying to make a good faith argument.My first sentence and first 4 words are “So what’s stopping them?”. So did you stop reading before that - or what are you even arguing about, and where is your ‘good faith’? You’re arguing about meta-nonsense without answering
What’s stopping them? What do they even need from “federation” or “ActivityPub” to just build this?
We are already in touch with GitLab, mainly to understand how their contributor community works [2].
Now we try to build a team of contributors among our institutions.
Good grief, here’s the quote once again. That’s what’s “stopping them”. And if you bothered to click on links, you’d have read that an event took place where they discussed how to contribute and what the goals of contributing are. The comment you quoted from even has a link to a very legible paper explaining what problems they face and how federation can help.
But I get the feeling you just want to be angry at something and dislike universities for some reason. There’s no need to continue this “discussion”.
Right… well clearly I have clicked all the links, and read all the things, and I still don’t understand it. “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”
So assume in good faith, assume I have absolutely no idea what the problem even is due of my own stupidity. So ELI5 and give a synopsis of the problem.
They may advertise it, but they’d be working on it themselves if they thought it would bring in serious revenue.
I encourage you to actually read the link before making such a statement.
GitLab, Inc is a business and it’s not run by idiots. If federation was going to make them a bunch of money, they’d put a team on it. Relying on an outside group to execute your business goals is terrible management. It’s clear federation is not one of their business goals.
I would not do any work for Gitlab nor run any software on Gitlab due to how poor they are doing at software security. https://arstechnica.com/security/2024/05/0-click-gitlab-hijacking-flaw-under-active-exploit-with-thousands-still-unpatched/
Also while trying to look that up there’s a another one that is making the news from just the last couple of days? https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/gitlab-warns-of-critical-bug-that-lets-attackers-run-pipelines-as-an-arbitrary-user/
Good luck to anyone attempting to federate on top of a foundation like that.
I interviewed for them once, got rejected because I didn’t know some tiny corner of ruby on rails syntax despite working on it for 3 years. Huge bullet dodged…
Federation is a bad fit anyway. Gitlab should just state that and reiterate focus on core functionality and sustainability, so we don’t end up with another Gitorious situation.
