Re: Github mirror and archive

[Ricardo Wurmus]

Pjotr Prins <address@hidden> writes:

> First of all
> github provides me an internet personae. Anyone who wants to assess my
> work can visit github and get a clear picture of what I am working on.
> This is a valuable resource, but I can probably move it elsewhere
> without too much loss. Github has a nice way of showing work, though,
> and it is easy to see what organizations I am contributing to and what
> type of comments I post. I always tell students that the github track
> record is more important (to people like me) than the publishing
> record in scientific journal. […] I therefore use github to assess and monitor
> other peoples work. Hosting your code elsewhere, as long as it has a
> decent interface, is good enough for me - I'll change that
> recommendation to something more generic. Commenting on multiple sites
> will need multiple accounts.

This is what I find scary.  I’ve received job offers from people who
apparantly judged my skill based solely on what I published on Github.
Ironically this happened right after I moved most of my projects to my
private server, so there wasn’t really much to look at anyway.

There also appear to be a number of researchers who think they can
derive trends and representative statements about free software from a
survey of what’s on Github.

> People wrote me that they are concerned about other trends. For
> example the Julia language is basing its package infrastructure on
> github and therefore compromises robustness for convenience. The only
> setup that is robust is a distributed setup - i.e., to not depend on
> one party.

The “devtools” package for R is also a popular way for people to install
software directly from Github, giving others an incentive to use and
publish their code on Github.

Does Julia really *depend* on Github, or is this a more generic
dependency on any git repository?

> If github changed its ways (e.g., add advertising, a new charging
> model, sell user behavior to 3rd parties or government) or its
> policies (i.e., repository incompatibility with GPL - they are border
> line already) and we would want to move out, it would be incredibly
> hard, not least because some of our software is built on top of
> github's interface and API. And because github's software is non-FOSS
> we'd be stuck somewhere in a dark land.

Things like that have happened to hosters in the past.  It’s not just a
“what if” scenario.  People are forgetful.

> I hereby decide I am going to (gradually) move all my projects off
> github and remove my main account. This won't happen within a year, I
> expect, but it is clear to me that I need to do this. I will still
> have github accounts, but plan to change them on a regular basis.

I applaud this decision.  I have done something similar by removing
*most* of my personal projects from there, except for those that I’m
required to work on at my job and those where I still haven’t taken the
time to work off the issue tracker…

Changing accounts regularly seems like a good idea, too.

--
Ricardo

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