curious: why use own hosting rather than github?

[Ondřej Synáček]

But still, “meteorite” users would probably have to sign up for 
account to post a Gitlab issue. If we’re debating this one, it’s the 
friction of signing up for mailing list vs. signing up for Gitlab 
account.
I think signing up for mailing list is easier and less frictionless.

Not sure if Gitlab allows for anonymous issue submission. They do have 
API though so you could still have a form somewhere that would put it 
inside Gitlab.

On 22 May 2020, at 11:14, J Rt wrote:

> Yes, I agree with you. For me it looks like the 'no github' people
> have the following main arguments:
>
> - github is company owned -> true, and your point about self-hosted
> gitlab may be a very good answer. The other thing is, even if it is a
> company, everybody still have their local copies of the code, and
> anyways, the value of github is probably far too tightly related to
> its relative openness / open -source friendly attitude for it to be
> thrown away at least in the foreseeable future.
>
> - we do not want to change the workflow to make it easy to a category
> of users, as there will always be another category asking for
> something else -> this is quite true. But at the same time, you want
> to choose the solution that makes most people (or a
> 'value-for-the-project-weighted' sum of the people) most happy. Here I
> think for the meteorite / casual users github gives most value, but it
> is a question to know how valuable these people actually are.
>
> On Fri, May 22, 2020 at 11:06 AM Ondřej Synáček
> <ondrejsynacek at fastmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Yes it is interesting conversation indeed. The point made about
>> non-technical users not able to report bugs is a good one, although I
>> still think that can be solved by email as well (just a regular form 
>> and
>> the contents could get posted to this mailing list or different one).
>>
>> If people here are against proprietary Github, why not just use
>> self-hosted Gitlab solution? Personally I prefer Gitlab over GH but 
>> both
>> are good.
>>
>> On 22 May 2020, at 11:03, J Rt wrote:
>>
>>> I agree with you, and I suppose most of this discussion is becoming 
>>> an
>>> interesting pros and cons weighting of different approaches :) I
>>> definitely think that everything is a question of tradeoffs, and the
>>> point made by 'pro github' participants here is that it is quite
>>> likely that github is de facto the dominant platform / way /
>>> methodology used in the open source world, with most users familiar 
>>> to
>>> it, and that, therefore, having a github workflow may be the best 
>>> way
>>> to engage a large(r) community. But I agree that it also comes with
>>> its downsides, to be weighted against the benefits it could bring.
>>>
>>> On Fri, May 22, 2020 at 10:57 AM Erazem Kokot <contact at erazem.eu>
>>> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> This is true, but at the same time, this is 'yet another method to
>>>>> learn', while nowadays a vast group of users are quite proficient
>>>>> and
>>>>> used to github and similar. Using something a la github would take
>>>>> away some entry barrier for most user IMO.
>>>>
>>>> Although I understand what you mean, I don't think just because new
>>>> users want the contributing process to be similar to what they
>>>> already
>>>> know, that projects would have to change their workflow to suit 
>>>> such
>>>> users. This is not a great way to learn for the user and pretty
>>>> pointless for the project, since if for example using Sourcehut or
>>>> Gitlab, users could still use the same argument of comfort with
>>>> Github
>>>> to try and move the project to Github.
>>>>
>>>> Projects shouldn't be forced to change their workflow to suit a 
>>>> small
>>>> minority of the contributors or possible future contributors.
>>>> If you were maintaining a project on Github, you wouldn't want 
>>>> users
>>>> submitting pull requests over email, so why would it be any better
>>>> the
>>>> other way around.