Daeraxa

So this is inspired somewhat by a question about somebody wanting to have a non-GitHub way of contributing to Lemmmy. I've really enojyed some other discussions on this community so felt somewhat inspired to ask this one too.

And whilst Lemmy is mirrored to a couple of alternatives (a self hosted Gitea and Codeberg) they can't really be anything more than a mirror and a backup. If one doesn't want to use GitHub they still can't realistically contribute without signing up to GitHub and creating issues and PRs.

So what would it take to actually get people away from GitHub and onto alternatives (GitLab, Codeberg, sourcehut)? The situation seems to somewhat parallel the whole Reddit and Twitter thing. Both have/had a huge monopoly on users to the point where it just wasn't really worth using anything else, at least not if you wanted to be part of a decently sized community.

Other mass migrations

Obviously the difference with Reddit and Twitter is that they both have had their version of "the Event" which cause existing projects (Mastodon, Lemmy amongst others) to suddenly explode in popularity. Has it killed off the originals? No but it has made the alternatives actually viable with enough of a community to sustain them and encourage more to join, even if slowly.

GitHub has had its fair share of controversy, most recently surrounding co-pilot and code scraping but no particular widespread outrage to cause people to leave it in droves.

GitHub is the home of open source?

I think for many GitHub has simply become synonymous with open source. The sheer number of repositories and projects hosted there means that people just use GitHub alone for all of their open source needs and don't even look at other forges. Not to mention all the services offered - most of the alternatives can offer some of the same features but not all of them. Not only do you get space for your project code itself but you get access to their CI/CD platform, a forum through Discussions, a wiki, a project management tool, static site hosting which is an awful lot for smaller projects like GitLab and community non-profit projects like Codeberg to compete with.

There of course are some people that rely on their GitHub profile and their activity chart in order to get jobs and advance their careers - many of these people I suspect wouldn't want to fragment their profile by having to split their activity up over multiple profiles.

So why would anyone not want to use GitHub. Quite simply it isn't really in the spirit of open source is it? Not only is it controlled by Microsoft who haven't historically been the friendliest towards open source but GitHub itself is closed source. You can't host your own GitHub and get all the same features it enjoys. It does seem somewhat odd that the biggest vault of open source projects is itself proprietary and completely closed off.

What would need to happen for things to change?

So realistically what could be done about it? What would need to happen in order to entice people off of GitHub? Something arriving in the hopefully not too distant future is forge federation - projects such as Forgefriends, ForgeFed and ForgeFlux aim to try and create a federation of software forges. One of the main issues about having to create different accounts for every single platform goes away as you just stick with the instance you like best (or host your own) and yet still be able to fully interact with software hosted on other platforms. This means that you should be able to interact with a project hosted on, say, Codeberg, from your sourcehut account. You should be able to see issues, PRs etc. just as if you were on the same website.

GitHub, I strongly imagine, would have no intention of joining in order to maintain and protect their walled garden. I just don't see a world where they would want to join in with federation.

Lastly I just want to add that I'm absolutely not judging anyone for using GitHub. The main project I'm involved with is also still on GitHub for some good reasons. Not only is it intertwined with their ecosystem but it provides services that we just need at this point. We still rely on some of GitHub's services so we don't spend our community donations on hosting stuff that we just don't need to. It lightens the maintenance on us whilst we are still in a very active stage of the project with an awful lot of moving parts. And the bit I hate most, we need to be visible to the community - we aren't big enough to go to one of the alternative platforms because what community engagement we have might well drop through the floor if people are suddenly forced to make accounts on other services just to log an issue or ask a question. I would love to move to a platform like Codeberg and any personal project I make would probably be hosted there but for a big-ish community project we just cannot justify it. So I am well aware of the attraction of GitHub and what keeps people there. What I want to know is what would be needed to actually break that inertia for projects, such as the one I mentioned, to justify a move away from GitHub - particularly people who may be far less ideological about the open source world.

tl;dr

• GitHub offer many nice thing
• Other places have not so many nice thing
• How other place make people change mind up to move from place with all thing and all people to place with less many people and thing?

So I was posting on this thread which is a meme about how everything is Chromium (except Firefox obviously) and was replying to somebody talking about needing the "Linux of browser engines".

This got me thinking about a few things as this is an area which I'm very much for reducing the, honestly slightly obscene, amount of control that Google have over this space with Chromium.

So I thought why not make a quick discussion to showcase some alternatives that are out there in development that people might not know about and bring them some attention as well as just foster a discussion in general on the topic.

So this won't be focusing on Blink and WebKit (nor KHTML which, whilst independent is still closely tied to Blink and WebKit. For those unaware KHTML is KDE's browser engine, forked by Apple to make WebKit which itself was forked to create Blink. It has also recently been killed off entirely for KF6 so is very much dead end now). By extension this also includes things like Qt WebEngine or anything else based on WebKit or Chromium/Blink.

I'm also not touching on Gecko - the other "big" engine out there. Whilst I am a huge proponent of Firefox, Gecko has proven that it just isn't as popular to use in alternative browsers as Chromium or Webkit. I'm not knowledgeable to explain exactly why this is but there are plenty of resources out there. By extension I'm also not expanding upon Goanna.

The reason for my interest is also because it goes beyond just browsers - for example these could be used in Electron-like projects for desktop Javascript apps.

So what alternatives are there or are currently in development?

Servo

A project started by then abandoned by Mozilla to develop a new experimental browser engine. Was picked up by the Linux Foundation and had a recent round of funding to begin active development again. Why do I find this interesting?

• It isn’t being created as part of a larger browser project - i.e. it is a project to develop the engine and not to develop a browser. Hopefully this means it is far more portable and embedabble for anyone who wants to use it for their own project.
• Supported by the Linux Foundation rather than any of the tech corps like Facebook or Google which hopefully means they are more open and friendly to community contribution.
• Written in Rust - I’m not claiming that this is good because of the language technology itself but Rust is currently very popular with lots of people wanting to learn it and contribute to projects so hopefully this inspires people to get involved with it.
• Not a KHTML/WebKit/Blink (or even a Gecko) fork
• Repo is on GitHub - Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a GitHub shill, but generally people monitor and know how to use GitHub better than Google and Mozilla’s systems. I’d honestly be just as happy if using GitLab or any other alternatives as they still confirm to that same user experience (and to be fair WebKit is also on GitHub).

Ferus

A much smaller and lower profile project described as "A toy web engine written in Nim" but one I find interesting enough to be watching

• Written in Nim - I'm all for getting less popular but interesting languages being used in more projects
• Small GitHub hosted and actively developed project that seems would be easy to get involved with if you wanted to help develop or improve the project.

NetSurf and NeoSurf

Not browser engines but browsers that use their own engine and not based on anything else. NetSurf is the original and has been ported to a ton of different OSs (it was actually made for Acorn's RISCOS originally) but development is somewhat slow so it seems NeoSurf is a fork to try and improve and build upon it.

LibWeb and Ladybird

Part of the fascinating SerenityOS project - Ladybird is its home grown but cross platform browser using its own LibWeb browser engine. Honestly I'm not particularly familiar with the project and the first link does a much better job of explaining it all than I can.

So yeah, just thought to put some open source alternative browser engine projects that are out there to draw attention and foster a little discussion in this community. Interested to see what people think.