Thanks? You completely missed the point of my post if you are taking this as an assault instead of criticism of the alternatives.
So I'm going to repeat myself here:
- Savannah is shit. Zero UX effort. Atrocious home page, branding, atrocious everything.
- Unfunded efforts are unreliable. Get a grip on reality, man. This isn't afound foss or proprietary or whatever - it's about having a business model.
- If you think it's OK to recommend shit products as alternative to good products because of ideology, you are a detriment to the cause you claim to promote.
BTW, I'm the LXQt project lead and a huge proponent of free software. Some advice next time you attack someone, look them up.
Oh and here's another piece of advice: Don't attack people.
All of your criticisms of Savannah seem oriented around aesthetics rather than its actual functionality. Personally I don't need much eye-candy for a git host because 99% of my work is done from the command line, but even if I cared about that I'd still pick Savannah over SF any day of the week.
I thought this had been resolved years ago, but aesthetics aren't about eye candy. They are about productive and pleasant experiences.
As a tangible example, imagine yourself working in a dank, contaminated 6' diameter sewer pipe with spotty pirated electricity, vs. a well-designed, large interior space with plenty of natural light and reliable utilities. Regardless of how irrelevant appearances are to you, I'd wager you'd get more work done in the second environment than in the first.
To the point of Savannah vs. SF, I'm inclined to agree. I have projects from the early 2000s still on SF and I need to move them off.
It does actually. UX, aesthetics, all of it is important and stuffing your head in the sand saying "Hey, I don't care about aesthetics, I just use the command line" is a very irresponsive attitude.
That's not what I'm saying at all. I'm saying that Savannah's website being ugly is not a reason to say "it's no better than SF", because it's still miles better.
I'm simultaneously honored to have been flamed by the lead of a project I'm interested in, and saddened to learn that the best source of attacks against us will be words our project leaders used first.
At the same time, if we're the ones generating our own bad press, we at least control the overall narrative. I guess that's a net win.
To answer your comment and dbbolton's simultaneously: My criticism of Savannah is based on aesthetics, but also on their model. Savannah has virtually zero funding.
What do you think will happen, exactly, when an unfunded host can't keep running? Maybe their gnu website will receive some donation from Facebook or Google or something, but there is no incentive to keep the nongnu part running. It's just volunteer work.
That model can work (cf wikipedia), but it's extremely rare, requires a lot of effort, a lot of bootstrapping and a lot of luck. It also requires $1 to pay for more than itself, so there are extra requirements regarding efficiency of spending, and diminishing returns of donations.
Gitlab has a good model. In fact, I'd be curious to see what their CEO makes of what I'm saying here - I always find him scouring HN comments about github, git, hosting, sourceforge, all of these. This is the sort of effort you have to put into to get your product out there into the ears and minds of people.
As I said earlier, yes there is a risk Github will turn evil. If they do, there will be warning signs (there have been warning signs about SF for 5 years). If such is the case, there will be alternatives by then (ever heard "if there aren't, I'll build one and get rich"?).
If Savannah runs out of money and has to turn off the lights, how much of a warning sign will there be? A few weeks maybe? Maybe there just won't be any. And this is a very real situation, which you absolutely need to be ready to confront. Putting your fingers in your ears and calling everything "an assault" won't help.
> if we're the ones generating our own bad press, we at least control the overall narrative
It's a very bad sign that you care so much about the "overall narrative". It's reminiscent of your approach to flag criticism as assault again. You care about what people say, not why they say it.
I'm not paid by an anti-FOSS group or just felt like shitting on the work of random people. There's a reason behind everything I wrote here and above; it's backed by experience. And you'll be hard pressed to find people disagreeing that Savannah is pretty terrible... you can't just go around "controlling the narrative" like you own the media. You have to fix the problem at the root.
Scouring GitLab CEO here, as requested :) You asked for feedback on your negative comments on Savannah. We love free software and the ideals of the FSF, so I hope you understand I'll refrain from commenting. I do want to share something interesting with the caveat that it is a 'GNU projects for network services' server, not an official one, but we're happy to host https://git.gnu.io/explore/projects
We make almost no money on the hosting. Almost all of our income comes from on-premises installations at larger organizations. So that is why I can recommend monetizing open source with an open core business model.
