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Ken Milmore

@jwildeboer +1 from another slightly grumpy old man. This seems like another aspect of the "slow evaporation of the foss surplus". Tying the workflow to proprietary source control / social media platforms cannot be the way forward.

4 comments
Heath Stewart

@kbm0 @jwildeboer how is #git proprietary? Parts of #GitHub are, sure, but you can still submit patches ol’ school to a repo you can clone without an account (unless private) via email or whatever. Not as smooth, but that method never was from my memory of using git before GitHub. Sure beats cvs.

Ken Milmore

@heaths You're right, #git is fantastic and open and decentralised. But those of us who've been around the "embrace, extend, extinguish" rollercoaster a few times tend to get suspicious of hosting platforms and the convenience they bring, which nets users but eventually leads to tie-in. Even more so proprietary discussion platforms which don't work so well as an open record of development the same way that mailing lists do.

Heath Stewart

@kbm0 I’ve been programming for almost 40 years. Used BBSes then IRC. Every BBS was proprietary. Been using git circa 2008 and GitHub circa 2011. Still waiting for that EEE. And one can always move their repo easily - even from a clone if needs be.

No disagreement about non-email forms of comms, though. I only signed up for Discord for a particular game long ago. And while I hate changelogs being put there, if I *have* to contribute using it, I’ll do what the maintainers prefer.

Ken Milmore

@heaths As an aside, in my day job on closed-source software we use M$ Teams a lot for discussion. I often find myself looking for something that was mentioned 18 months ago but the search facilities are limited, and I've not yet found a way to export an entire conversation so I can just grep it. This was always so much easier with email, and illustrates the difficulties with using proprietary platforms for collaboration.

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