In November of last year, I wrote Richard Stallman’s political discourse on sex, which argues that Richard Stallman, the founder of and present-day voting member of the board of directors of the Free Software Foundation (FSF), endorses and advocates for a ha…
via Drew DeVault's blogAround two months ago, I finally began my migration from GitHub to SourceHut, set up the keys, pushed my Neovim configuration to a non-existing repository, just to get the feel of what I am about to get into. I enjoyed the process, and quickly became familiar with the web interface.
Shortly after, a friend showed me their website hosted on SourceHut pages, it motivated me to port my website made with Astro.bs from GitHub pages to SourceHut pages, this time with Hugo, but that didn’t happen until January 8th of this year, around when I finished sketching the website design in Inkscape, then transformed it to a Hugo theme the next day. It took longer than a day though, but I was sort of done and had published my website on the 10th at 10AM GMT+1, which happened to be right after SourceHut’s first recovery from their longest outage to date. During the entirety of the outage, I closely followed status updates, their transparency behind resolving the issue gave me a sense of solidarity and inclusion. Needless to say that I had good faith on SourceHut team in getting the platform back online.
This has been my initial experience, just a departure, thus why I decided to write down goals I want to achieve:
- Become familiar with
git send-email, the email based workflow is new to me. - Self host SourceHut as an exercise.
- Pay for an account.
Pay for an account ? Yes, I have been using SourceHut rent-free on its alpha phase because of a payment barrier, my country doesn’t make online transactions easy. SourceHut is free for all to participate in existing projects, you literally can send patches via email without an account, you only need a paid account to host your own work, which is what I will do eventually.
Some people already questioned my reasons for moving away from GitHub, so I will answer those inquiries here. GitHub does not align with my values, as they:
- do not really respect FOSS licenses as shown in Copilot.
- are slowly enforcing 2FA on maintainers involved with popular projects.
- are owned by Microsoft, and I’m tired of running into their monopoly enclosing developers in their ecosystem.
Further more, I find it very exploitative to sell seemingly useless certifications for those seeking corporate validation, I recently heard of it in this LinkedIn post (God forbid):
However, one debatable advantage from GitHub, is having more exposure for repositories, therefore more likelihood for feedback. I might host mirrors for repos that don’t really matter that much (i.e: dot files), the rest (other than projects that already existed on my GitHub) will be exclusively accessed from SourceHut.
This concludes my thoughts, If you want to know whether SourceHut is for you, I recommend you read “Should you move from GitHub to sr.ht” by Drew DeVault, the creator of SourceHut himself.