" Specifically what is there to prevent some third party from buying github, or of github going public and the board taking the decision, or github on its own, deciding to charge for hosting, keeping the data hostage to extract payment? What safeguards are in place to prevent this? I'm not interested in "this will never happen" arguments. I'm interested in hard data please."
On the same note
Specifically what is there to prevent a new fork or a new language appearing that make people mostly abandon if not completely abandon Pharo and Squeak ? What safeguards are the there to prevent this ? I am not interested in "this will never happen" arguments. I'm interested in hard data please.
Actually my scenario is far more likely than yours but lets say your happen. First you need to realise that Github already gives unlimited file size for every github repo and they have have been without exaggeration the roof for most open source software out there. But lets say this happens.
Even if that happens there will be like a ton of candidates out there to jump on the opportunity to do what github already does . Why ? Money and of course popularity. And no most likely you wont lose your github data. First of all Github already offers an API that allow you to get all sort of Github data and not only that you can do things that git is normally doing. For example you can commit, merge pull request, resolve conflicts all that without even having git installed in your system. But even without taking that into consideration the new candidates most likely will offer some kind of immigration of project from github to their website.
In any case its care to note here that not every company sucks big time as Google does, and not every company is kings of abandonware like google is. Github has been listening and respecting its users for a long time. In the end everything dies or at least gets far less popular, this will happen to github as it happened to Squeak as it will happen to Pharo and as it happens to tons of diffirent kinds of technology. Anyone that things that is immune , is crazy or knows something we dont.
The reason for moving to github based on hard data ? the undeniable fact that github is awesome should be enough. Nothing lasts forever, deal with it.
On Thu, Dec 17, 2015 at 8:33 PM tim Rowledge tim@rowledge.org wrote:
Another possibility is to not use gihub but still use git on our own server. Obvious trade-offs, control/ease etc. I imagine we could set up a git thingy on squeak.org without too much trouble.
tim
tim Rowledge; tim@rowledge.org; http://www.rowledge.org/tim It is easier to change the specification to fit the program than vice versa.