alt Hacker NewsIt is us, developers, who convinced our management to purchase GitHub Enterprise to be our forge. We didn't pay any heed to the values of software freedom. A closed source, proprietary software had good features. We saw that and convinced our management to purchase it. Never mind what cost it would impose in the future when the good software gets bad owners. Never mind that there were alternatives that were inferior but were community-developed, community-maintained and libre.
The writing is in the wall. First it was UX annoyances. Then it was GitHub Actions woes. Now it is paying money for running their software on your own hardware. It's only going to go downhill. Is it a good time now to learn from our mistakes and convince our teams and management to use community-maintained, libre alternatives? They may be inferior. They may lack features. But they're not going to pull user hostile tricks like this on you and me. And hey, if they are lacking features, maybe we should convince our management to let us contribute time to the community to add those features? It's a much better investment than sinking money into a software that will only grow more and more user hostile, isn't it?
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GitHub isn’t even good, it’s just the mediocre default everybody uses. PRs were fantastic and the best thing ever - 15 years ago!
Not to defend this behaviour, but a lot of clouds SaaS do require you to pay for both ”management” and for the actual resources. And if you’re using vms in their cloud, you pay twice.
For example, Azure has had a script runner service for ages that you can hook up to your ”own” vm, by installing an agent. But then you pay double, the fee (per second) for the service as long as the script is running, and the fee (per second) for the vm in azure as long as it exists. So, as with GitHub actions, it’s cheaper to run it on their provided crap instances.
To get rid of the double costs I guess you could install your own CI server and agents, that polls the GitHub repo, but then you don’t get the integration in their web gui. That was what you did before gh actions came around, a local Jenkins for example.
> alternatives that were inferior
Actually there were alternatives that were far superior (seriously, no way to group projects?) but also more than 2x as expensive. If GH "fixes the glitch" then it will be plan B time.
There's always been this lesson with CI/CD - don't couple yourself to a specific product. If you do, you're gonna get screwed eventually. It happened with TravisCI, CircleCI, now it's happening with GitHub. The business model only makes sense if you can charge for it, those charges are only ever going to go up.
Whatever your issues with the price, this comment is truly wild. When you’re using commercial PyCharm, you’re paying JetBrains to “run their software on your hardware.”
I use Gitea and think it is superior to GitHub. Can be quite well integrated in the usual Microsoft corporate environment easily as well, so you don't even need to create users. Perhaps setup two or three groups and you are done. Can be up and running in a few little hours if you start with nothing aside your domain controller.
It also doesn't randomly fail and if it would, you can probably fix it yourself.
I don't think actions on a git repository host is a good way to fix poor deployment strategies if it goes beyond pushing a package to npm and co. Just to poke at the wound again.
But Gitea has interfaces here as well, didn't try them though.
I honestly don't have any issue paying the self-hosted runner fee. Paying it and counting it against our total allocated minutes when we bought the machine is going too far though.
it's just software.
it changes and you move on.
Takes like these do not account for the value you gained by using the software in the meantime. Here are 2 scenarios:
1) company uses exclusively free software, spends more time dealing with the shortcomings of said software than developing product, product is half baked and doesn't sell well, company dies.
2) company uses proprietary but cheap/free (as in beer) software that does the job really well, focuses on developing product, product is good and sells well, company how has a ton of money they could use to replicate the proprietary product from scratch if they wanted to.
A purist approach like in scenario 1 leaves everyone poor. A pragmatic approach like scenario 2 ends up earning enough money that can be used to recreate the proprietary software from scratch (and open-source it if you wanted to).
In this case the problem isn't even the proprietariness of the software, it's the fact that companies are reliant on someone else hosting the software (GH being FOSS wouldn't actually change anything here - whoever is hosting it can still enforce whatever terms they want).
FOSS alternatives already exist, it's just that our industry is so consumed by grifters that nobody knows how to do things anymore (because it's more profitable for every individual not to); running software on a server (what used to be table stakes for any shop and junior sysadmin) is nowadays lost knowledge. Microsoft and SaaS software providers are capitalizing on this.
Have any suggestions to those community-developed and maintained options?
I don't understand how once these companies go down the user hostile hell-hole... like why do we allow them to keep operating?
How is there not a collective decision to dissolve them?
> Now it is paying money for running their software on your own hardware.
(facepalm)
> learn from our mistakes and convince our teams and management to use community-maintained, libre alternatives
Every company I've been at that tried to self-host something like GitLab, later moved to GitHub. Nobody in business cares if it's open source/free software. They care about managed hosting, centralized services, invoicing, etc. DIY is great for hobbyists and the cash-strapped.