> In my case, if KiCAD were hosted on github, I would have already contributed by now.
I suppose it's useful never to underestimate the role of culture and tradition when it comes to these things. For the Gnome project, it's probably very important not to rely on a closed-source system, and their developers have a long history of using very different tools anyway.
The barrier doesn't work that way for everyone, either. I "grew" up (programming-wise) before Github. It seems way less cumbersome for me to make changes and submit a patch via email or whatever than to go through Github's fork the repo - do the changes - make a pull request - sync the repos dance.
(Edit: this is especially true for early contributions, or for late and complex contributions, where the review process is a little more, you know, long-winded. Github's review tool is quite atrocious.)
> I think its a shame that more of these projects don't adopt a strategy of "let's try github, and if they screw us over, then we'll migrate to a platform with more freedom".
That's a really risky thing to try. First, moving the entire infrastructure to Gitlab has been a pretty massive undertaking for Gnome -- and Gnome is one of those open source projects that really has resources. Most projects with Gnome's size and history can maybe afford to do that once every seven years, when there's a relatively quiet time and whatnot.
Second, you never really know how that "screw us over" thing is gonna happen. What if the way it happens is that, among other things, when they close your repos or whatever, they cut access to the API for your project? How are you going to migrate to a platform with more freedom then? Copy-paste every bug report ever?
IMHO, 10-15 years from now we'll be really happy that Gnome really understood that "there's no cloud, it's just someone else's computer" thing :-).
I suppose it's useful never to underestimate the role of culture and tradition when it comes to these things. For the Gnome project, it's probably very important not to rely on a closed-source system, and their developers have a long history of using very different tools anyway.
The barrier doesn't work that way for everyone, either. I "grew" up (programming-wise) before Github. It seems way less cumbersome for me to make changes and submit a patch via email or whatever than to go through Github's fork the repo - do the changes - make a pull request - sync the repos dance.
(Edit: this is especially true for early contributions, or for late and complex contributions, where the review process is a little more, you know, long-winded. Github's review tool is quite atrocious.)
> I think its a shame that more of these projects don't adopt a strategy of "let's try github, and if they screw us over, then we'll migrate to a platform with more freedom".
That's a really risky thing to try. First, moving the entire infrastructure to Gitlab has been a pretty massive undertaking for Gnome -- and Gnome is one of those open source projects that really has resources. Most projects with Gnome's size and history can maybe afford to do that once every seven years, when there's a relatively quiet time and whatnot.
Second, you never really know how that "screw us over" thing is gonna happen. What if the way it happens is that, among other things, when they close your repos or whatever, they cut access to the API for your project? How are you going to migrate to a platform with more freedom then? Copy-paste every bug report ever?
IMHO, 10-15 years from now we'll be really happy that Gnome really understood that "there's no cloud, it's just someone else's computer" thing :-).