Open source code is playing a critical role in the present world. Almost every software that we use today, from the smallest embedded systems to the biggest supercomputer, from your phone’s operating system to the software running the websites and infrastructure of the companies we engage with everyday, has some open source dependencies. Our world would not function, or at least not function as well, without open-source software.
A significant reason for the growth of open source today can be attributed to the emergence of Version Control Systems(VCS) and code hosting platforms. git, like other version control systems, manage and store revisions of projects. At the same time, services like GitHub and Gitlab are web-based git repository hosting services with some added features to make collaboration between developers across the globe more accessible and convenient. These services have reduced the barriers to participation in open source projects. Contributors can simply fork their own copy of a repository with one click and issue a pull request from the appropriate branch when their changes are ready.
Code hosting platforms have empowered social coding and helped create global communities of developers. Sharing code freely and publicly has made it drastically cheaper and easier to build software, and tech innovation is surging as a result.
The popularity and benefits of the code hosting platforms have made them an integral part of software development. As a result, today’s vast majority of open source development is done on popular code hosting platforms like GitHub. The dependence on these platforms is worrying because these are centralized, and having open source development dependent on private companies’ platforms is dangerous. It means that your code can become vulnerable depending on those companies’ policies and needs. There are several other problems with the centralized code collaboration platforms and will be discussed later.
Gitopia was conceived as an alternative to these centralized code collaboration platforms, and it solves most of the major problems with the traditional code collaboration platforms.
The Problems with Centralized Code Collaboration are:
- Censorship: They are not censorship-resistant and make your code vulnerable to government policies and malicious takedowns.
- Monopoly: There is a monopoly of centralized players, and users have become over-dependant on these services.
- Imposing Policies: There is no community involvement in the policy-making of these platforms, and hence users have no control over the functioning of the platforms.
- Lack of Transparency: They are not open source and not transparent in the way they use user data and how certain features are implemented.
- Lack of Incentive in product growth: There are no incentivization mechanisms that align developers with platform growth.
- Unsecure: There are security risks with storing code on these platforms.
- They are vulnerable to unexpected outages and have a single point of failure.
- There is no incentivization to motivate developers to create and maintain open-source projects.
- Centralized platforms are not tailored for the Decentralized ecosystem. Web 3.0 should be made with the same principles it follows.
- Lack of Collaboration Export is another problem not addressed so far, all revisions and versions of the source code stay inside the platform, and no collaboration can progress outside the platforms.
Take control in your hand and Migrate your repositories to Gitopia Now!