this post was submitted on 22 Apr 2025
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Programming
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Pretty dumb not to use a forge. Adds a huge barrier to contribution for little benefit. None of the reasons he gives make sense.
Maybe a good option for projects that you don't want anyone else to contribute to, but then why make them open source in the first place?
Not using GitHub because it's proprietary is an especially illogical stance. Virtually all websites are proprietary.
Because, at least to some people, open source is more about user freedom (to modify the software and share the modifications with anyone they wish) and less about collaboration.
For example every time I publish some simple utility that I wrote for myself and decided could be useful for other people, I release it under a reasonable open source license and pretty much forget about it - I'm not going to be accepting merge requests, I don't have time to maintain random tiny projects. If I ever need to use the utility for something it doesn't quite do, I'll check if any of the forks seem to have implemented it. If not, I'll just implement it in my repo.
The reason I'm publishing the code is because I know how much it sucks when you find some proprietary freeware utility that almost does what you need, but you can't fix it for your usecase on account of it being proprietary for no reason (well, author's choice is the reason, and I respect it, but it's still annoying)
That's a fair point. I don't think that's the case here because he talks about all the bad ways he prefers to receive contributions (email, patch files, git bundle etc.).