Most FOSS projects are jailed in Microsoft Github’s access restricted walled garden. The 4 freedoms are very basic. Sure I can grab the code and do what I want with it, but then what? Rage fork because devs only pay attention to a bug tracker hosted by a corporate oppressor?

Of course devs rightfully get to choose the venue for their work. It’s astonishing how many are okay with licking MS’s boots.

The free world can do better. The current hack: if an app has official Debian support, we can report upstream bugs to the Debian bug tracker (or Launchpad for Ubuntu). Any others?

For non-Debian, it really gets shitty. You can stash a bug report here, where it gets seen by sideline hecklers, not devs or users, and only gets retained as long as sopuli.xyz has resources. If they one day need to free up disk space, they will erase old posts.

Select apps that exist in Debian when possible

Debian has a higher quality standard than most distros and it’s also mainstream. When an app becomes officially maintained in Debian, a right of passage of sorts has been demonstrated. It’s not a high bar but it’s relatively the best measure of quality and maturity there is. Many FOSS projects cannot manage to satisfy Debian’s standards.

So if you have a choice of apps, it’s a good idea to short-list those that appear in https://packages.debian.org even if you run a different distro than Debian. You can participate in bug discussion at https://bugs.debian.org without registration. And if you verify a bug exists in Debian you have a decent place to report it (yes, even if the bug originates upstream).

  • wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    3·
    8 hours ago

    Using an LLM to slop out your post in a FOSS community is a bold choice.

    Beyond that, there are plenty of ways to engage with github while protecting your personal privacy. You can use a throwaway email address to make an issue on github asking them to migrate to a better alternative. You could email them directly by grabbing their email from the merge logs (if I recall right, I haven’t worked with github in a while).

    You could contact them on other socials they list. Usually those also aren’t privacy respecting or FOSS, but it’s something.

    The best any of us can do is to not use github ourselves for our own projects. If enough projects are elsewhere it can just be normalized away from github.