We can & should demand at least gateways & mirrors if not at least a single alternative. Considering they have funding, they can self-host to actually control a forum or chat room as well as a code mirror (even if just HTTP with no forge). Folks are also undervaluing how some users are banned from access to these US-based platforms under US sanctions.
So? Not everything is packaged on all distros & you can benefit from sharing & reusing declarative configuration even if for specific scopes (meaning not just NixOS).
The pro-FOSS stance would be to get your communications off of being exclusively proprietary platforms. Developer & early adopter freedom & privacy matters—but instead they are choosing Discord & Microsoft GitHub as their only platforms.
Impossible to take them seriously if they have already started off on the wrong foot using exclusively megacorpo proprietary platforms for coms. If your developer / testers privacy doesn’t matter since they opted for Microsoft GitHub & Discord, what would lead you to believe their project would take privacy seriously?
They still require accounts with US-based megacorporation (with obligations to say, ban access to Syrians civilians due to sanctions). If your project can do better, it should.
It is entirely centralized in the US—& there is 100% chance the NSA is tapped in on the metadata they can get a hold of. You can’t self-host. They have been hostile toward alternate clients & are very adamant you use one of the duopoly of Google/Apple mobile OSs as your primary device (screw you if you want to run an alternative OS or no phone I guess). There is a hole in the history for the server that leaves room for conspiracy theories.
Signal is adequate for privacy-focused normies, but does not deserve the pedestal it is put on which is why many folks more serious about the ideals instead of focusing on making concessions are skeptical of Signal. This isn’t a hot take or new stance.
I’d be in a similar boat cramming in a project in college that I realized 72 hours before due date that I needed to do all the research. I thought my time to present was the next month, but I wrote it down wrong. I wasn’t foolish enough to not power nap a few times in there so I still had some semblance of sanity to present.
It is a fool’s errand to try to chase Microsoft like this—folks will demand compatibility with all their new Copilot-enhanced CI. Present something better please—this would entice users to leave.
Truly free… yet in its fork of Gitea it is copying more Microsoft GitHub features like Action YAML spaghetti instead of offering an improvement. Instead of being a better offering than Microsoft, they are cloning even more features where it is even more of a hard sell IMO by not offering anything new in the experience.
Note that Git also isn’t the only distributed version control system (DVCS); there maybe be other alternatives out there for you not just in code forge but the system underneath it too.
GitLab is open core, not open source. It is also a publicly-traded company in the US that does have shareholder obligations—which should cause some sort of long-term hesitation. It does have a better CI/CD system than the Microsoft product & the community edition can be self-hosted.
Sometimes a hyphenated adjective