An interesting concept would be if all hand on the 12 clocks would work, but the hands of the clock in the middle are stuck at 12 position, this way the hands in the middle would point to the clock showing the correct time.

As I said, it is not impossible to move away from gh compared to many other cases in other industries, just that it is more difficult than necessary because vendor-lockin is allowed.

If vendor-lockin was illegal, companies had more incentives to use established or create new standards to facilitate simpler migration between software stacks, without changing the external interface.

For instance allowing your own DNS name to be used as the repo/project basepath instead of enforcing github.com, Allowing comments, reviews, issues and pull requests via email or other federated services, instead of enforcing github accounts to do so, providing documented, stable and full-featured APIs for every component of their software, so that it is easy to migrate and pick and choose different components of their while stack from possible different vendors, …

There are so many ways that would improve the migration situation, while also providing more ways for other ideas to compete on a level playing field. If a bright engineer has an idea for improving one component from github, they should not be required to write a whole separate platform first.

Well the reason for that is the vendor-lockin and centralized technology.

If your project for instance uses a similar development method as the linux kernel does, e.g. sending and reviewing patches via mailing lists and providing url to push and pull git repos from, it is quite easy to switch out the software stack underneath, because your are dealing with quasi-standart data: Mbox, SMTP, HTTP(s) and DNS. So you can move your whole community to a different software stack by just changing some DNS entries and maybe provide some url rewrite rules without disrupting the development process.

I am not saying that the mailing list development process is the right one for every project, but it demonstrates how agnostic to the software stack it could be.

If vendor-lockin is made illegal, the service providers would have more incentives to use or create standardized APIs, so that their product can be replaced by competitors. So switching to or from github/gitlab/… becomes easier.

It has more than you expect, if your project is established on github and want to move away you have to deal with:

• migration of issues
• migration of pull requests
• migration of all review comments etc
• migration of the wiki
• migration of the pages
• convince all contributors to possible create a new account somewhere else
• changing of the project urls. I don’t think github offers a url rewrite service
• forks on github will not have the new destination as the fork base
• change the ci and release process
• because you cannot add url rewrite rules to your old gh project, you might need to only ‘archive’ the project there with manually written text, to point to the new destination, for people to find it

You don’t know what a “monopoly” is.

What the author is probably searching for is “vendor-lockin”, which is an anticompetitive practice for so long that it became the way many companies rely their business on. It favors established products over new-comers by making switching offerings difficult/expensive or even impossible, thus better products often have no chance of competing in a field, that was dominated by a single supplier for a while.

IMO there should be strict regulations and high fines associated with it, because it hinders innovation massively across all industries.

The cost of switching away from github for a project is high, but not as high as in other fields.

IDK. I think that just causes more confusion. Like with “Use gitlab”, do I mean the application or gitlab.com?

Git bisect?

Nvidia has created a bit of a sore spot for many Linux Developers and thus users. Through their actions and non actions made it impossible to create FOSS drivers for their hardware that work well and are integrated and tested with the rest of the system.

Many fresh users don’t seem to recognize the reason why they are having a sub par experience using their hardware is Nvidia and not the open source community. They often blame and complain to the developers of the open source drivers or applications, who either have to hack around hurdles placed by Nvidia or cannot inspect closed source drivers written by that company.

It is IMO understandable that at some point the community stops providing free and unpaid customer support for hardware and software, they have no control over or don’t even own.

If you would start paying them, then I suspect you might get better answers. Otherwise you just get information about stuff people are excited about.