[jay.scot]
[002]
--[ GitHub: The Facebook of coding
In my opinion, there is no question that GitHub is the new Facebook for
coders and geeks. What I mean by the new Facebook is two-fold, first the
type of users you find on GitHub and secondly the businesses shenanigans
over the years.
THE USERS
---------
Essentially, GitHub is now a necessity when you are applying for jobs
inside the tech industry, recruiters look for it, businesses are
requiring it and insist you engage in coding challenges that must be
done on the platform. This doesn't sound like a bad thing really, or
does it?
YES, actually, it does!
GitHub has now become a shit storm of individuals seeking to pimp out
their profiles with bullshit Pull Requests, faking timelines, forking
repos and raising entirely pointless issues. Everything with the goal
of showcasing how much they have contributed to open-source projects. As
a recent example look no further than Digital Oceans Hacktoberfest
clusterfuck, useless PRs such as deleting spaces all in the hopes of
getting a t-shirt.
Another real world dilemma impacting users is the knowledge gap of
actually using git normally, GitHub is NOT git. GitHub is a proprietary
closed-source front-end for a centralized git hosting service. Users
have become completely dependent on features that GitHub have built such
as PRs, forks, online editing, branch protection to name a couple.
I doubt that many users are even aware of commands such as send-mail
which is a core function of many projects outside the GitHub world. Nor
does it help when the web interface of GitHub encourages sloppy git
practices, relying exclusively on one way of doing things, the GitHub
Flow.
THE COMPANY
-----------
Let's start off with the obvious fact that Microsoft owns GitHub.
Microsoft has a long track record of open-source hatred, the CEO has
even gone as far as stating "Linux is a cancer" at one point. This is
not good, Microsoft were outed by the U.S. Department of Justice for
using this internal term. In short, it ties in well with buying their
way into open source projects right? Sounds like GitHub is at the
Embrace stage...
"Embrace, extend, and extinguish" [5]
Electron, the Chromium engine / NodeJS pile of shit that requires a few
Cray supercomputers to run a calculator app on was developed and pushed
into the ecosystem by good friends, GitHub. Now we are blessed with
awesome spyware programs such as WhatsApp, Discord and Skype that will
now run on Linux YAY /s. I mean there is just so much mud around GitHub
that I just don't have the urge to go wading through it, searching even
more than I have already. Here's a short fire list with some sources to
follow-up on, if you are interested.
* Denied employee harassment by CEO
* Blocked users from country's under US trade sanctions
* Have dealings with ICE, they keep kids in cages
Due to an incredibly weak DMCA take down notice by the RIAA, youtube-dl
was recently banned by GitHub. After it hit main stream news GitHub
crapped the bed and started on the news PR. It was not, however, until
after the EFF moved in and sent a letter [10] to GitHub describing how
the DMCA notification was absolute dog shit that GitHub did something.
After this, GitHub went into complete PR mode after and they made it out
that they were the saviours of the day and how they'd stronger and
better in the future.
Anyway, enough of this rant. If you are looking for a 3rd party hosted
git solution then please take a look at these two:
* SourceHut,
https://sr.ht
* GitLab,
https://gitlab.com
Or do what I do an just use the naked git protocol without any front-ends, its
stupidly simple.
SOURCES
-------
>>
https://drewdevault.com/2020/10/01/Spamtoberfest.html
>>
https://git-send-email.io/
>>
https://guides.github.com/introduction/flow/index.html
>>
https://davelane.nz/microsoft-there-way-win-our-trust
>>
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish
>>
https://tknk.io/01P8 Electron
>>
https://tknk.io/xnsf
>>
https://tknk.io/rddV
>>
https://tknk.io/8pfH
>>
https://tknk.io/RMLT
>>
https://tknk.io/XtFd
EOF
