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Why FOSS projects are using proprietary, privacy invasive infrastructure? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 6 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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As you can easily notice, today many open source projects are using some services, that are… sus.

For example, Github is the most popular place to store your project code and we all know, who owns it. And not to forget that sketchy AI training on every line of your code. Don't we have alternatives? Oh, yes we have. Gitlab, Codeberg, Notabug, etc. You can even host your own Gitea or Forgejo instance if you want.

Also, Crowdin is very popular in terms of software (and docs) translation. Even Privacy Guides and The New Oil use Crowdin, even though we have FLOSS Weblate, that you can easily self-host or use public instances.

So, my question is: if you are building a FLOSS / privacy related project, why using proprietary and privacy invasive tools?

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[–] [email protected] 131 points 6 months ago (42 children)

A lot of people use Github because it's easy to use and popular. Not everyone wants to self host, although it would be nice if the larger projects did. What I really hate is when open source projects use something like disord for support.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 6 months ago (28 children)

I run a fairly popular open source project called Svelte Material UI, and I can tell you why I use Discord for support. My users want me to use it. GitHub too.

People want to use what they already have, and most people, even developers, don’t care that much about privacy. I would gladly self host a support forum, but tons of people would rather use a different library than sign up for my personal support forum. And the people who really care about privacy wouldn’t trust my self hosted solution either, so there isn’t really a better option than Discord, as much as that sucks.