On Mon, May 18, 2020 at 11:07:23PM +0000, arthur miller wrote:
> Haha, yeah I know. I actually once  created a gitlab project for a customer on girlab, I just didn't know it was open source. Or I have just forgot . But even if gitlab is open source, what says that their web interface is? How do I know with my data and me, that I can't know? :-) Is it just "open source" or  "free" as in fsf free.

A service per se isn't "open source". The programs it is based on
can be... and Gitlab scores decently here (it's "open core").

> Anyway, convenience is just one part of equation. The big issue is convenience of group. Everyone is on github. One fork a repo, make a commit and create PR. PR is the new patch. People don't send patches in emails longer (ok kernel a d Emacs folks does), it is kind of getting out of fashion. And github makes that  very convenient.

This is called network effect. And yes, it's part of convenience.

> Anyway, the forking culture has more to do with business then just for the service providers. Small companies create projects, and let people fork, the more people fork, the  better it looks in presentation for in estors: ohook, we ha e 5000 firks and 10 000 downloads, we are popular, grant us funding for next year and we can do this and that....

That's my guess too: some shiny pseudo-metrics (that what made
Github 7.5B dollar worth in the first place).

Cheers
-- t