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| title | date |
|---|---|
| On centralized development forges | 2021-12-02 |
Since the launch of SourceForge in 1999, development of FOSS has started to concentrate in centralized development forges, the latest one of course being GitHub, now owned by Microsoft. While the centralization of development talent achieved by GitHub has had positive effects on software development output towards the commons, it is also a liability: GitHub is now effectively a single point of failure for the commons, since the overwhelming majority of software is developed there.
In other words, for the sake of convenience, we have largely traded our autonomy as software maintainers to GitHub, GitLab.com, Bitbucket and SourceForge, all of which are owned by corporate interests which, by definition, are aligned with profitability, not with our interests as maintainers.
It is indeed convenient to use GitHub or GitLab.com for software development: you get all the pieces you need in order to maintain software with modern workflows, but it really does come at a cost: SourceForge, for example, was caught redistributing Windows builds of projects under their care with malware.
While GitHub or the other forges besides SourceForge have not yet attempted anything similar, it does serve as a reminder that we are trusting forges to not tamper with the packages we release as maintainers. There are other liabilities too, for example, a commercial forge may unilaterally decide to kick your project off of their service, or terminate the account of a project maintainer.
In order to protect the commons from this liability, it is imperative to build a more robust ecosystem, one which is a federated ecosystem of software development forges, which are either directly run by projects themselves, or are run by communities which directly represent the interests of the maintainers which participate in them.
Building a community of islands
One of the main arguments in favor of centralization is that everyone else is already using a given service, and so you should as well. In other words, the concentrated social graph. However, it is possible to build systems which allow the social graph to be distributed across multiple instances.
Networks like the ActivityPub fediverse (what many people incorrectly call the Mastodon network), despite their flaws, demonstrate the possibility of this. To that end, ForgeFed is an adaptation of ActivityPub allowing development forges to federate (share social graph data) with other forges. With proliferation of standards like ForgeFed, it is possible to build a replacement ecosystem that is actually trustworthy and representative of the voices and needs of software maintainers.
ForgeFed is moving along, albeit slowly. There is a reference implementation called Vervis, and there is work ongoing to integrate ForgeFed into Gitea and Gitlab CE. As this work comes to fruition, forges will be able to start federating with each other.
A side-note on Radicle
A competing proposal, known as Radicle, has been making waves lately. It should be ignored: it is just the latest in "Web3" cryptocurrency grifting, the software development equivalent to NFT mania. All problems solved by Radicle have better solutions in traditional infrastructure, or in ForgeFed. For example, to use Radicle, you must download a specialized client, and then download a blockchain with that client. This is not something most developers are going to want to do in order to just send a patch to a maintainer.
Setting up my own forge with CI
Treehouse, the community I started by accident over labor day weekend, is now offering a gitea instance with CI. It is my intention that this instance become communally governed, for the benefit of participants in the Treehouse community. We have made some modifications to gitea UI to make it more tolerable, and plan to implement ForgeFed as soon as patches are available, but it is admittedly still a work in progress. Come join us in #gitea on the Treehouse discord!
I have begun moving my own projects to this gitea instance. If you're interested in doing the same, the instance is open to anybody who wants to participate. I will probably be publishing the specific kubernetes charts to enable this setup on your own infrastructure in the next few days, as I clean them up to properly use secrets. I also plan to do a second blog outlining the setup once everything is figured out.
It is my goal that we can move from large monolithic forges to smaller community-oriented ones, which federate with each other via ForgeFed to allow seamless collaboration without answering to corporate interests. Realization of this effort is a high priority of mine for 2022, and I intend to focus as much resources as I can on it.