Git

Quora Answer : Do programmers usually use Github or host Git on their own server?

Sep 23, 2019

I do both.

And have a GitLab account too.

It's a terrible thing, in general, that we're getting locked in and dependent on cloud services that we have no control over. And that will inevitably either disappear or become exploitative.

We desperately need a distributed / P2P infrastructure that can't be enclosed by a single large corporation.

And the great thing about Git (and distributed source control in general) is that it provides a solution to exactly this problem. By removing the sense of a "master" copy of data and making a network of equal peers.

Of course, inevitably one URL becomes de-facto standard. But I'm starting to put references to various alternative repositories in my repositories, eg. in READMEs etc. so that if you have checked out a repo, you will be able to see the various alternative hostings ... and quickly get a sense of which are up-to-date.

Shared platforms like GitHub have the virtue of social coding, collaborative bug tracking etc. And soon will integrate with more and more CI/CD functionality. Even AI assisted debugging and coding.

GitLab offers a similar package for those who want a choice in a traditional market.

But controlling your own address / URL / identity is also important. You can ensure that your URL is there, your repository is there, getting updated, and ready to engage you peers in development, even when Microsoft goes bust and GitHub is unexpectedly off-air.

At some point we need to extend git with more P2P sociality. Why can't, for example, the bug-tracker actually store its data in git too? Why is that valuable data, the bug descriptions, the conversations about and suggestions for, fixes, sitting on GitHub's private servers? There's no reason it couldn't be public and in the repo too. And that any git client / git web interface could use it.