Comment on Leaving GitHub. Music server alternatives?
ar1@lemmy.sdf.org 3 weeks agoThat’s exactly why I replied. I think you are an upright citizen and you and many others know full well how evil Microsoft is. But the most regrettable thing to do will be to start with a noble cause and end up doing harm to people who you should help and protect.
I am not going to drill into anything political here as it is not the right board. But please think about this - helping developers to move away from Microsoft is punishing the evil; Boycotting projects that are hosted on GitHub, in hope of dealing damage to the evil, is not actually doing it. You are punishing open source developers who are contributing to a free world, and not punishing the evil.
Just like in my original reply, there are many things you can do. Codeberg is doing it by providing a better alternative to developers; Richard Stallman started GNU project and provided a big collection of useful software and libraries to help people move away and fight proprietary tools, not just slapping people who used proprietary software; Even if you help just one more open source project to host on Codeberg, people will be able to find one more project on the Codeberg and can choose not to go to GitHub for that…
FarraigePlaisteach@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Thanks for the response. I also feel that open source projects contribute to a better world, but I think we sometimes have a puritanical view of ourselves. We do not make a better world by supporting Microsoft while they enable a genocide. We do the opposite. Using even their free stuff is support. If genocide isn’t a red line for them, then they have no red lines, and I become very uninterested in their games
I also agree that it’s important to be effective. Richard Stallman et al can do what they do, but I’m not one of those people. Just a consumer. It’s important that we exercise the few rights we have (while we still have them).
I’ve been an open source advocate for years. Helped many people migrate to Linux in my free time, submitted as many well formed bug reports as I could and remained available for follow up requests and further debugging.
The thing is: none of this matters if we’re willing to sit on our hands while people die. Our repositories are not so precious. We shouldn’t let our love of software replace our love of humanity.