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GitHub Is Not Open Source, A Rant
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this post was submitted on 11 Apr 2024
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The fact that GitHub is owned by Microsoft alone makes it not open-source.
Microsoft has developed many open-source projects. The view of Microsoft as some kind of anti-open-source crusader is 20 years out of date.
I will now attempt to invalidate your opinion by parroting the words "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish".
:^)So has Google, they've done the Chromium browser, but everyone on Lemmy sees that so called "open-source project" with suspicion.
There's quite a series of leaps of logic here.
Because Google (not Microsoft) released a project under the BSD license (an open source license) but "everyone on Lemmy" doesn't think it's open source, therefore a hosting site owned by Microsoft (not Google) is not "open source."
I'm not even sure what is meant by GitHub being "open source." It's a hosting provider, not an actual piece of software. The site itself doesn't have a source license. The individual repositories can have licenses, which can be whatever the user who created the repository sets it to be - including open source licenses. Do you mean GitHub Desktop? Microsoft released that under the MIT license. And you don't need GitHub Desktop to use GitHub anyway.
GitHub is a git hosting provider, but it also has its own service software for all the peripherals - organizations, issues, pull requests, all the user account management stuff, etc. AFAIK those parts are mostly/all proprietary.
So we've moved from "GitHub is not open source" to "GitHub has some support software for peripheral features that is not open-source?" I'm definitely failing to see the rant-worthiness of it at this point. It's certainly not monopolistic, platforms like GitLab and Bitbucket also provide these features. And I'd bet that some of them have their own proprietary software to support these things too.
"We" haven't moved anywhere, I just chimed in for the first time with my interpretation of what the other person was talking about. Jeez.
"We" as in the conversation as a whole. You joined an ongoing thread.
Insanely useful info. Thanks.