drummyfish wrote: ↑05 Jun 2018, 15:51
While it is possible that GitHub will work the same technically, I think most of us agree that the idea of developing a free project under a company that is practically the definition of proprietary software and oppressing behavior and just hoping for the best is not the example a good project should set.
No. The Microsoft of 2018 is
not “the definition of proprietary software”. Visual Studio Code, Powershell, TypeScript, Chakra JavaScript engine, .NET runtime, and quite a few other Microsoft projects are publicly developed on GitHub. And not just a half-assed “dump your internally-developed code every once in a while” open source that other companies do (*cough* Android *cough*), they do it all the same way OpenMW does, accepting PRs from the community, and even doing issue tracking right on GitHub.
Yes, Microsoft did evil things 15-20 years ago Under Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer. Today, the former does charity work and the latter owns the LA Clippers. Microsoft under Sataya Nadella is quite a different company, and to be blunt, it seems that many Microsoft critics are unaware of the changes he brought to the company over the last four years, especially with regards to open source.
Besides, independent GitHub is not a charity.
It’s a for-profit company bleeding money hand over fist. The only realistic outcomes were to close shop or get bought out by a Microsoft-level company. Would you have preferred a buyout from Amazon, Google, Facebook, Apple, or Oracle? Of those, Microsoft is probably the most open source friendly of those choices in recent years. I sure trust them more than Oracle.
Sooner or later, GitLab is going to have the same problem. I doubt the projects that are being moved from GitHub to GitLab were the ones generating any money. Within the next few years, GitLab too will either have to find some magical new source of revenue, get bought out, or close up shop.
werdanith wrote: ↑05 Jun 2018, 16:35
A certain type of people require a level of trust and control over their tools. The kind of people that build and use Linux, or open source game engine recreations written from scratch. Without that mindset projects such as these would not exist. There would be no need for them.
And a certain type of people just want to play Morrowind on a Mac, or play multiplayer Morrowind, or take advantage of any other features that vanilla Morrowind can’t provide. I don’t want to get involved in any ideological FOSS wars. I just want OpenMW to be created on whichever platform will attract the best developers. Then again, I’m a Mac developer who primarily chats about OpenMW on Discord and uses JetBrains CLion, so maybe I’m already too far gone in the eyes of some.
To put it bluntly, I would rather stay on GitHub and risk whatever imagined evil Microsoft is feared to do than switch to another platform, or self-host, where we will have fewer developers that will hinder the growth of the project.