Three Systemic Problems with Open-Source Hosting Sites
This anecdote illustrates the most serious manifestations of the data-jail problem. Third-generation version-control (hg, git, bzr, etc.) systems pretty much solve it for code repositories; every checkout is a mirror. But most projects have two other critical data collections: their mailing-list state and their bug-tracker state. And, on all sites I know of in late 2009, those are seriously jailed.
I’ve been wondering lately if UTForge shouldn’t switch to git from subversion, and this is one of the reasons.
I’m a git fanboy, so this idea sounds wonderful to me. In a meeting recently, someone mentioned that GitHub offers a self-hosted option (so that UT wouldn’t have to store code outside our own machines). It was suggested that it would be really hard to get people to use git… just look how hard it is to get them to use svn. This was somewhat confusing to me, but then, as I said, I’m a git fanboy.
As an update, esr is looking to do something about the data jailing problem. From this post: http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1302 it looks like he’s trying to figure out how to screen-scrape prominent hosting sites to extract the data.