(18-07-2016, 12:32 AM)venam Wrote: Your real aim is to discuss Github.

Definitely.

I think that releasing source code in the wild is a good thing. I don't like the way github do it.
First of all, it makes you rely on a private company to hold your software. If tomorrow github decides to shutdown, I've found no mention in their policy that they will let you retrieve your own code. That's actually not a problem if you are aware of it though, and take special care to have backups elsewhere. After all, it's no different than bitbucket or sourceforge.

The second point bothering me is how they put forward people instead of code. Code is organised around its author, not around a project. This means the only thing that can differ between two projects is the name of its author. That might only be me, but for an opensource code-sharing plateform, I think code is more important than who wrote it.
Just take a look at someone's page. There's a big picture with their avatar, graphs, stars, followers, etc.. but your need to click on a tab and scroll down if you wanna see the actual work of the author! For a website that is supposedly code-oriented, it shouldn't be this hard to see code.

Third, their "fork" policy. They make it so easy to steal code from other people that it bother me. The idea behind forking is to make it easier for people to contribute. In the end, it makes it easier for people to get credit for someone else's work.
It's easy to fork and not contribute, and you see that a lot. From personnal experience, a bunch of people forked some of my repos, changed a few things they didn't like, and advertised it as a "Fixed version with less crap" or whatever, without even noticing me about the original issue, or submitting the changes. That is a behavior I hate, and github just makes it too easy to perform.

Finally, I hate how they put "fame" forward. With the stars and all. Open-source should be about sharing code, not getting fame for it. I've seen a lot of people submitting shitty/useless pull-requests, simply to get their avatar shown in the "contributors" page.

I much prefer the "old-school" way to share code, using git-daemon and a website, on a custom server. This way, you're responsible for your code, and people refer to YOUR website to access/modify/fix the code. And when they send patches, they do so to get something fixed rather than having their name mentionned.