Those who forget history often inadvertently repeat it. Some of us recall that twenty-one years ago, the most popular code hosting site, a fully Free and Open Source (FOSS) site called SourceForge, proprietarized all their code — never to make it FOSS again. Major FOSS projects slowly left SourceForge since it was now, itself, a proprietary system, and antithetical to FOSS. FOSS communities learned that it was a mistake to allow a for-profit, proprietary software company to become the dominant FOSS collaborative development site. SourceForge slowly collapsed after the DotCom crash, and today, SourceForge is more advertising link-bait than it is code hosting. We learned a valuable lesson that was a bit too easy to forget — especially when corporate involvement manipulates FOSS communities to its own ends. We now must learn the SourceForge lesson again with Microsoft's GitHub.
  • @nachtigall@feddit.de
    0•2 years ago

    Mailing list is actually very accessable IMO. You do not have to sign up for any service (with another account or some hostile captcha) but just drop your changes via e-mail (which everyone on the internet has).

    With that workflow you just do your changes locally and once done you create a patch from the diff and send it afterwards to the mailing list. It is super easy with git send-mail and you should check out git-send-mail.io for infos about the git mail workflow (the site is actually by the devs of sourcehut).

    EDIT: Drew also made a nice video about PR vs mail workflow here.

    • @sexy_peach@feddit.de
      1•2 years ago

      I have to disagree from personal experience. There has only once in my life been a mailing list that it was useful to have been subscribed to, it was by a friend group. Every other mailing list that I was ever part of was a waste of time.

      • @nachtigall@feddit.de
        0•2 years ago

        How does that contradict the usefulness of mailing lists in context of software development? It’s not a chat for anything but specifically discussing contributions, thus not any worse than discussion boards below PRs.