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Open tech, be afraid. Be very afraid. Microsoft owns both Visual Studio Code “VSCode” and MS-GitHub, two intertwined and utterly proprietary product-service ecosystems with a bit of open-source in their core to lure us in. Because they love open source? Yeah, no.
Soon after leaving GitPod whose technology links the two, Geoffrey Hunt last year explained their strategy and what it’s doing to our open tech world, in a great and “harrowing” article, “Visual Studio Code is designed to fracture” https://ghuntley.com/fracture/
“The future of software development tooling that is being built is closed as ****, and people seem to be okay with it…”
This is why MS-GitHub is not our friend.
This is why falling for their trick, disguising MS-VSCode as a neat “free” editor, will come back and haunt and hurt us.
Vendor lock-in double-whammy. Using open source as “a financial weapon”.
“… the biggest challenge for Gitpod, GitLab, Datacoves, OpenBB, Foam, et al lies ahead - developing open language tooling for each community where Microsoft has forked the communities over to proprietary language servers…”
If we have a grain of public spirit, if we are motivated at all by the Freedom that’s supposed to be afforded by Free-Libre Open-Source Software, we must #GiveUpGithub, we must recognise the trap, we must choose truly open #FreedomTech.
- See also my FOSS Apps Live in FOSS Forges .
FOSS Apps Live in FOSS Forges
Software is a process, and whoever controls it ultimately decides what the developers can do and how they communicate.
Have the Freenode sell-out (2021) and the Twitter fiasco (2022) taught us nothing?FOSS thrives in FOSS ecosystems.
The ForgeFriends “State of the Forge Federation” newsletter puts it like this:
Millions of Free Software developers forgot why it matters to own their tools. They know, better than anyone, how to fix and improve them. But when they choose to collaborate only via the most popular proprietary software forges, they are denied the right to use their skills and cannot work with fellow developers who are banned because they reside in the wrong country. They have been made to believe that the tools they use daily to craft their own software are out of reach. As if their software was a product that could be separated from the other software running the tests, allowing changes to be merged or bugs to be filed. But software is a process, and whoever controls it ultimately decides what the developers can do and how they communicate.
The source code and the development process of so many great Free-as-in-Freedom projects are currently hosted on the proprietary Microsoft Github. This makes me sad. In my strong opinion, to better serve FOSS as a whole they would GiveUpGithub and move to a FOSS software forge provider such as Codeberg.org and/or host a FOSS code forge at their own domain.These fine FOSS people do it right
... in their own code forge such as gitea or self-managed gitlab, or on a FOSS code forge such as Codeberg or Framagit:
- Domain at Codeberg
- FediLab at Codeberg
- Fediverse Enhancement Proposals (FEP) at Codeberg
- ForgeFed at Codeberg
- Funkwhale at their own domain
- FUTO Circles at their own domain
- GadgetBridge at Codeberg
- Hubzilla at FramaGit.org
- Interpeer Project at Codeberg
- KeyOxide at Codeberg
- Libravatar at Ubuntu's LaunchPad.net
- Mobilizon at FramaGit.org
- NextPush at Codeberg
- Plume at their own domain
- Simple-Matrix-Bot-Lib at Codeberg
- (streams) at Codeberg
- Ubuntu at their own domain
- UnifiedPush at Codeberg
- Vocata at Codeberg
- Wordpress at their own domain
- ... and thousands more.
Pwned by Big Tech: these fine FOSS people need a nudge
I love these fine people. I value what they are making. I understand these fine people had to choose something and they chose to prioritise the convenience of Microsoft Github, but I feel more and more every year that our world of FOSS overall is stifled by being owned by such megacorps and I want to take a stand in support of prioritising our FOSS values. I would be joyful to see them improve their relationship to the FOSS world by putting their assets in FOSS infrastructure under their own control.
- Authelia
- Authentik
- Calibre-ebook
- Diary by Bill Farmer
- Element [matrix] software
- Elementary OS: AppCentre apps “must be hosted in a Github repository”
- Fediverse Enhancement Proposals (FEP)
- Gitea
- Healthchecks
- Homer by Bastien Wirtz
- InfiniTime
- Jellyfin
- LibreTranslate
- Mailspring
- Mastodon
- Navidrome
- Nextcloud
- ntfy
- OpenAndroidInstaller
- Photoprism
- PocketCasts
- Sandstorm
- Syncthing
- Traefik
- Vaultwarden
- WriteFreely federated blogging
- YunoHost
- ... and thousands more.
(I'm linking only to their free/libre/open home pages, not to github.)
I'll repeat and emphasise, I love these fine FOSS projects I have listed here. I value, use, support, and/or contribute to, and recommend them to you for the fine work they are doing in free software world. I would also love to see them adopt FOSS principles when it comes to their choice of code forge.
Related: – I Can't Wait for Forge Federation– Your FOSS Project Deserves its Own Domain– FOSS Apps Live in FOSS App Stores!
More: #awesomeFOSS #selfHosted #GiveUpGithub #DitchDiscord #forgeFed #forgeFederation #ForgeJo #Codeberg
Feedback:
- email me:
julian@foad.me.uk- matrix me:
@julian:foad.me.ukDonations gratefully accepted
Feedback:
- email me:
julian@foad.me.uk- matrix me:
@julian:foad.me.ukDonations gratefully accepted
Visual Studio Code is designed to fracture
A couple of moments ago, I finished reading the article by Rob O'Leary about the pervasive data collection done by Visual Studio Code.Geoffrey Huntley
