For all the touted distributed version control advantages we now have one world global centralized repo. Yeah, yeah, I know you can clone it locally. But of course if all the issues, and testing, and build tools are tied to Github. Isn't it a bit disconcerting?
Maybe I am just paranoid. And not saying that Google code was going anywhere, I saw more and more projects switch to Github and Google code receiving less and less attention.
You're not paranoid, but there are also lots of advantages to centralization, as the article touching on this in Wired says "Having one central ___location allows people to collaborate more easily" (I'd love to know if anyone has attempted to quantify this).
What to do about it?
* Use other would-be global centralized repo to create competition, eg Gitlab.com (or if you demand 100% FLOSS, maybe notabug.org though it is a very long shot for achieving such centrality)
* Discount centralization benefits and self host, eg using gitlab, gogs (which notabug runs), kallithea, or various other FLOSS code hosting applications
* Work making migration between hosts easier (eg issue and other configuration import/export)
* Work on harder problems of federation among code hosts; distributed bug trackers have been reinvented many times but never taken off, but maybe just the right approach hasn't taken off yet, or maybe there is something in federated social web approaches
* Do one or more of the above and treat Github as marketing and backup for your main platform (or vice versa), analogous to what the indieweb people recommend for dominant social networks http://indiewebcamp.com/POSSE
Some monocultures are natural, and may well be in the best interests of everybody. I certainly believe that the dominance of Google in search, Wikipedia in facts, Stack Overflow in programming Q&A, and GitHub in open source project hosting have all made my day-to-day work easier/faster/better.
It's not monoculture, there is also bitbucket which IMHO is much better product. Problem is that all the cool kids are now using github and if you want to look cool you also have to use github. Or you could just ignore the hype and use bitbucket.
I migrated all my projects to Bitbucket when GitHub decided they do not want to host release downloads (they reversed the decision after that). I also use other Atlassian products and I trust the company to maintain the product, much more than I trust GitHub.
Bitbucket has much better review tools - hierarchical comments, approve button, side-by-side diff (GitHub has added that recently).
You can see commit log as a "graph", not just a simple list. It's easier to identify merges.
And it does not charge for personal private repositories.
GitHub decided they do not want to host release downloads (they reversed the decision after that)
AFAICT they haven't, at least i don't see any way to upload release tarballs. they certainly let anybody download tarballs generated for any annotated tag. but those tarballs are not immutable! once in a while, these tarballs start coming down with different hashes, presumably as github changes the code which generates those tarballs. that makes them less than ideal as package sources.
I really love the branch-level access control on Bitbucket. Being able to say that developers A,B,C have access to the repo, but only A can push to master, is incredibly useful.
I use GitHub, but I concede Bitbucket has cooler features (free private repos, password protected repos, etc). It can't beat GitHub's UI/UX and community though.
I don't expect Github to go away anytime soon (though if it did---yes, it would be very disruptive; your paranoia is not unjustified). I'm more concerned about compromise of a single high-value target; anyone remember when rubygems.org was compromised in 2013?
I confess to actually trying to get http://suckless.org/ at least mirrored on Github. But I was wrong and the current suckless system is decentralised and works.
I am.
For all the touted distributed version control advantages we now have one world global centralized repo. Yeah, yeah, I know you can clone it locally. But of course if all the issues, and testing, and build tools are tied to Github. Isn't it a bit disconcerting?
Maybe I am just paranoid. And not saying that Google code was going anywhere, I saw more and more projects switch to Github and Google code receiving less and less attention.