Ownership of GitHub by Microsoft - risk assessment

Currently the whole project and all ancillary projects are hosted on GitHub, the proverbial eggs all in one basket scenario. This is something we should consider even without the change of ownership.

Should we consider mirroring to GitLab?
Or is the sky never falling?

At this point, "least concern". Being a distributed VCS to start with, moving Git projects around is easy.

The biggest concern is the issue database, and what to do about that if moving or renaming the project. There is an importer for GitLab:

https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/import/github.html

I think we should test this and do a test import which we can then delete.
Never testing backup procedures is never a good idea.

1 Like

Instead of deleting it, just keep it private. Might as well have a backup.

I'd wondered if there was a cheap option for having GitLab hosted under one's own domain, where if something about GitLab became unacceptable you could smoothly transition into a self-hosted version. I've noticed has canceled their hosted offering, where they run basically a docker image on a VM for you, and manage the upgrades for you...

They still have docker images, as Discourse does:

https://docs.gitlab.com/omnibus/docker/

Being an open source project which you can host on your own system is certainly appealing. You aren't beholden to the policies of an organization that can co-opt your user accounts or projects; you won't be impacted by pricing changes, and you can be robust in terms of owning your links (to the extent the DNS system is still around).

I'm not sure how well the OpenID stuff works; if people with GitLab or GitHub (or Discourse forum) accounts could federate the login. It may be worth a try to see.

It seems most problems with the forum surround upgrades, and I'm guessing running a GitLab instance would probably be the same story.

I can't really tell if it's worth it to future-proof in this fashion or not. But in thinking about "new launch, new license, new name" it's a thought about where to do that.

The MS ownership has been brought up before. Guess there was not much of a problem when all conditions stayed about the same. At least in the sense that it would be too much of a hassle to move when other things got higher priority.

Still, having a new place that would also help in having the sources being searchable again (now only the master is searchable) would be a huge benefit.