Christoph,

On Tue, Oct 6, 2020 at 6:48 AM Christoph Thiede <
christoph.thiede at student.hpi.uni-potsdam.de> wrote:

> Phil, you called GitHub & Co. one trend of many that's durability is
> uncertain (correct me if I misunderstood you). I see this point, but
> looking
> at the current numbers I strongly believe that GitHub has reached a
> critical
> mass of developers and projects that won't move so quickly again. How many
> large global players have decided to use GitHub, including competitors of
> Microsoft itself such as Google, Apple, Facebook, etc.?
>

You can always switch from github to gitlab to some other 3rd party to self
hosted which is key.  If that weren't an option, I think there's about a 0%
chance most of us would be using github as the entire conversation about
migrating would have been a non-starter.

Separate git from github.  I don't doubt the durability of git as a VCS,
github is just a convenient server implementation.  As nice as github is, I
believe the open source world flocked to github because of its underlying
use of git rather than github itself.  I do very much doubt the durability
of github issues, especially given github's corporate ownership.  As has
been shown repeatedly over the decades, if Microsoft (like any other
for-profit entity) decides it's in their best interest to deprecate/migrate
this functionality to something else (say a Teams-centric solution or
whatever) they *will* leave people who don't want to migrate high and dry
or left with some semi-functional solution that tries to push them into a
commercial offering.  Since it's a proprietary solution, Smalltalk users
would be stuck in that scenario if they become dependent on it.  The
majority of projects I follow that existed pre-github migrated to github
with one eye on the door (i.e. 'what will we do if github ever shuts down
free access or otherwise does something anti-open source?') and are very
reluctant to embrace github issues for that reason: it makes leaving harder
should the situation change.  The smart move is to remain skeptical and
keep your options open given how many different times and ways this has
played out badly in the past.

There have been numerous times in the past when 'everyone' (esp. major
companies) flocked to things because they had achieved critical mass and
weren't ever going to go away.  Visual Basic and Java come to mind.
SourceForge used to be that type of solution  for a number of open source
projects and see how well that turned out.


> At least, according to the trends GitHub is way more popular than
> SourceForge, for example, has ever been, actually, it has even overtaken
> git
> itself on Google Trends:
>
> https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=github,sourceforge,gitlab,bitbucket,slack


Popularity is fleeting.  Notice how that red line (SourceForge popularity)
comes in on the left? (which probably also represent the years it was in
decline, BTW)  For the first 5 years of that graph one could have made the
argument 'look how popular SourceForge is, we should be using it' (oh boy,
did people make that argument back then!)... it's a bad metric to base
decisions on.


>
>
> (By the way, if you search any old threads you can also find it on
> web.archive.org in most cases).
>

A truly awful solution only viable if you've bought into the 'it's never
going to go away' line of thinking and then it does.


>
> > Here you're showing you've already fallen behind: the github trend for
> > discussing things is already fading and those trendier than you have
> > already moved on to the next thing: Slack  is where it's at!  In a year
> or
> > two it will be something else... and the treadmill keeps going but not
> > really going anywhere.
>
> Slack is a group messenger used for communication in small to medium teams,
> but I can hardly imagine someone seriously uses this as a bug tracker for a
> large-scale software project with a big community, there is just too much
> noise when pressing Enter sends a new message. The same goes for social
> media platforms such as Google Plus that do not even offer basic tracking
> features such as closing or labeling. I don't think you can compare this.
>

I don't disagree re: Slack but I've seen plenty of younger people not care:
they want to use Slack because it's what they know.  That's basically your
argument for Squeak to use github issues: that's what you, and people in
your peer group, know and use.[1]  I actually don't take issue with that:
if github issues really were a better, viable, long-term reliable
replacement for open source projects I think most of us would bite down and
make the switch (as many did when the discussion of migrating to git
occurred).  The problem is github issues isn't that.  I can hardly imagine
open source projects even considering using a proprietary solution, which
is very different from using commercial hosting of an open solution, but
here we are discussing even thinking about github issues.

[1] Which I'd counter with: learn something new (to you), not something
that is merely new.


> Best,
> Christoph
>

Thanks,
Phil
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