Argumentation en anglais

Écrite autre part dans le passé, mais toujours d'actualité.

My personal reason for choosing Gitorious over Github is not a matter of taste (in fact I suspect the ease of use of github's tool is currently superior to gitorious', though the difference is not so large as to make gitorious' use unbearable), but because I develop free software and find it important to use free software in the development process. Github is very nice, but it's still a central proprietary service (~software) that can become deeply interleaved to your software project—not unlike Facebook for personal communication.

When a proprietary service or software gain widespread use (and, in Github's case, threatens to create a situation of monopoly), it brings value to its users and fosters competition. When a free software or service gains widespread use, it furthermore becomes a common knowledge that we can all use in innovative ways and build upon.
Imagine a world where the authoritative encyclopedic resources are all proprietary; that's the world we lived in before Wikipedia appeared, and it's bleak. Imagine a world where open source implementations of programming languages have never been developed, and are therefore so far away behind the competition that nobody even tries to compete; that would be a terrible thing. This is the state we are in regarding search : Google has a de-facto monopoly on search, and no remotely-competitive open source alternative exists; we are, at large, ignorant of how to search. If we had had an open-source competitor to search engines a long time ago, staying relevant over time (maybe despite being partially inferior in some aspects all along—only bearably so), we would be able to do a lot of very cool things today that we can barely think of (there is a bit of open indexing/search work in the free desktop area (Strigi, ?) but it's progressing very slowly). I don't want the same thing to happen to the "host a software project" services, and that's why I support free software competition to Github and Bitbucket.

One can use and contribute to gitorious. After some changes of direction, SourceForge is now also running on a free software stack named Allura. And if you're self-hosting, there are even more options such as Gitlab.

(Besides Sourceforge, I'm not aware of any opensource-based Mercurial hosting provider. That's my only reason for not using this reasonable version control system more.)