• floofloof@lemmy.ca
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    26 days ago

    Git is a distributed version control system. There doesn’t have to be a single copy of the repo on which everything depends. What GitHub provides that’s hard to do without it is not the repository but the stuff that goes around it: issues, communications, discoverability, etc.

    So if people take the distributed nature of Git seriously and make sure they all have a local copy of the repo, we won’t lose the repo itself to Nintendo’s actions. But we may lose the tools that make it easy to coordinate work on the repo.

    Before we had GitHub and issue trackers we had mailing lists and Usenet groups. Not as convenient, bit they allowed people to coordinate work on open source software without a central, corporately owned point of failure. Maybe we should be looking to the early days of FOSS for ideas about how to make these projects resilient against corporate persecution. Not for the exact tools but for decentralized ways of coordinating collaboration.