Those who forget history often inadvertently repeat it. Some of us recall that twenty-one years ago, the most popular code hosting site, a fully Free and Open Source (FOSS) site called SourceForge, proprietarized all their code — never to make it FOSS again. Major FOSS projects slowly left SourceForge since it was now, itself, a proprietary system, and antithetical to FOSS. FOSS communities learned that it was a mistake to allow a for-profit, proprietary software company to become the dominant FOSS collaborative development site. SourceForge slowly collapsed after the DotCom crash, and today, SourceForge is more advertising link-bait than it is code hosting. We learned a valuable lesson that was a bit too easy to forget — especially when corporate involvement manipulates FOSS communities to its own ends. We now must learn the SourceForge lesson again with Microsoft's GitHub.
  • sexy_peach@feddit.de
    32·
    2 years ago

    I have to disagree from personal experience. There has only once in my life been a mailing list that it was useful to have been subscribed to, it was by a friend group. Every other mailing list that I was ever part of was a waste of time.

    • nachtigall@feddit.de
      11·
      2 years ago

      How does that contradict the usefulness of mailing lists in context of software development? It’s not a chat for anything but specifically discussing contributions, thus not any worse than discussion boards below PRs.