We need Free Software Co-operatives, but we probably won’t get any

The recent GitHub craze got a number of Free Software fundamentalists to hurry away from GitHub towards other hosting solutions. Whether it was GitLab (a fairly natural choice given the nature of the two services), BitBucket, or SourceForge (which is trying to rebuild a reputation as a Free Software friendly hosting company), there are a number of options of new SaaS providers.

At the same time, a number of projects have been boasting (and maybe a bit too smugly, in my opinion) that they self-host their own GitLab or similar software, and suggested other projects to do the same to be “really free”.

A lot of the discourse appears to be missing nuance on the compromises that using SaaS hosting providers, self-hosting for communities and self-hosting for single projects, and so I thought I would gather my thoughts around this in one single post.

First of all, you probably remember my thoughts on self-hosting in general. Any solution that involves self-hosting will require a significant amount of ongoing work. You need to make sure your services keep working, and keep safe and secure. Particularly for FLOSS source code hosting, it’s of primary importance that the integrity and safety of the source code is maintained.

As I already said in the previous post, this style of hosting works well for projects that have a community, in which one or more dedicated people can look after the services. And in particular for bigger communities, such as KDE, GNOME, FreeDesktop, and so on, this is a very effective way to keep stewardship of code and community.

But for one-person projects, such as unpaper or glucometerutils, self-hosting would be quite bad. Even for xine with a single person maintaining just site+bugzilla it got fairly bad. I’m trying to convince the remaining active maintainers to migrate this to VideoLAN, which is now probably the biggest Free Software multimedia project and community.

This is not a new problem. Indeed, before people rushed in to GitHub (or Gitorious), they rushed in to other services that provided similar integrated environments. When I became a FLOSS developer, the biggest of them was SourceForge — which, as I noted earlier, was recently bought by a company trying to rebuild its reputation after a significant loss of trust. These environments don’t only include SCM services, but also issue (bug) trackers, contact email and so on so forth.

Using one of these services is always a compromise: not only they require an account on each service to be able to interact with them, but they also have a level of lock-in, simply because of the nature of URLs. Indeed, as I wrote last year, just going through my old blog posts to identify those referencing dead links had reminded me of just how many project hosting services shut down, sometimes dragging along (Berlios) and sometimes abruptly (RubyForge).

This is a problem that does not only involve services provided by for-profit companies. Sunsite, RubyForge and Berlios didn’t really have companies behind, and that last one is probably one of the closest things to a Free Software co-operative that I’ve seen outside of FSF and friends.

There is of course Savannah, FSF’s own Forge-lookalike system. Unfortunately for one reason or another it has always lagged behind the featureset (particularly around security) of other project management SaaS. My personal guess is that it is due to the political nature of hosting any project over on FSF’s infrastructure, even outside of the GNU project.

So what we need would be a politically-neutral, project-agnostic hosting platform that is a co-operative effort. Unfortunately, I don’t see that happening any time soon. The main problem is that project hosting is expensive, whether you use dedicated servers or cloud providers. And it takes full time people to work as system administrators to keep it running smoothly and security. You need professionals, too — or you may end up like lkml.org being down when its one maintainer goes on vacation and something happens.

While there are projects that receive enough donations that they would be able to sustain these costs (see KDE, GNOME, VideoLAN), I’d be skeptical that there would be an unfocused co-operative that would be able to take care of this. Particularly if it does not restrict creation of new projects and repositories, as that requires particular attention to abuse, and to make good guidelines of which content is welcome and which one isn’t.

If you think that that’s an easy task, consider that even SourceForge, with their review process, that used to take a significant amount of time, managed to let joke projects use their service and run on their credentials.

A few years ago, I would have said that SFLC, SFC and SPI would be the right actors to set up something like this. Nowadays? Given their infights I don’t expect them being any useful.