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Why FOSS projects are using proprietary, privacy invasive infrastructure? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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?

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago (2 children)

so why not do it from the beginning?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago

Because its a very low risk, both in terms of likelihood and impact

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Because the downsides completely outweigh the upsides by a massive amount. Risk of GitHub removing any of my projects is practically 0, while the upsides of hosting elsewhere is also almost 0.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

but does it really matter where your personal project with maybe 10 stars resides? if not why not choose something like codeberg?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

Yes because every company I work at uses GitHub, I use GitHub actions at work, and the majority of programmers on the planet use GitHub. So I’d not only need to maintain another account, use a different build system, and spread my project in some other manner, but I’d be losing the majority of my contributors (my most starred project has 100 stars, second most is 50). If that’s on a platform with the _most _ contributors then I literally wouldn’t have any on a different platform. I have 40+ FOSS projects (source, not forks) and I’m not going to maintain all of those somewhere where they won’t get viewers.