4 ms·

It would be nice not to have to rely on centralized servers at all. A P2P/torrent client built specifically for sharing code from git repositories, perhaps?

• madez 11y ago
  But there is much less commercial incentive behind a p2p alternative. Centralized services are easier to monetize. I look forward to the day governments start to fund free software, for example through the GNU project. Then we'll all have better tools. Actually, there were already some fundings. Germany funded GnuPG to port it to Windows. What do I care what is the new world record in sprinting? But I very much do care about a new release of libreboot, libreCMC/openWRT or Debian! I hope one day we will see peaceful international competitions between nations of who can provide the best/most used free software.
  • dTal 11y ago
    Hear, hear. I've talked about this with people and it's surprisingly hard to convince them that government-sponsored software is a good idea. While a tiny fraction of the amount we already spend on commercial software would utterly transform the free software landscape, it's not politically viable as long as commercial software vendors have lobby power.
    • danieldk 11y ago
      Let's not forget that it is not in many governments' interest to have distributed tools (with strong encryption). It is much easier to take down stuff on centralized services. BTW, it is hear, hear ;).
      • chopman 11y ago
        But of your government is at odds with an oppressive government, it would make sense for it to fund that kind of software so the people could take it down, or at least make trouble, themselves.
      • dTal 11y ago
        Thank you for the correction :)
    • wtbob 11y ago
      > it's surprisingly hard to convince them that government-sponsored software is a good idea That's because it's not. Governments are not reliably good, and their money comes with far more strings than private money. The FSF have it right: people should write free software because proprietary software is immoral.
      • simoncion 11y ago
        > [Government] money comes with far more strings than private money. Have you ever worked on a government-funded project? The Tor folks have and do. :) > ...[P]eople should write free software because proprietary software is immoral. USGov does fund Libre and Open Source software. One big example is the Tor Project.
  • honest_joe 11y ago
    If you want to live in a twisted communist utopia go to some island please.
  • narrowrail 11y ago
    Instead of gov. funded software, I like the idea of hedge fund backed FOSS, where the commercial software competition are publicly traded. This would allow the hedge funds to realize returns, but only if the FOSS produced is viable. Such an arrangement would probably benefit under a non-profit foundation to administer the project(s).
    • scourge 11y ago
      I'm just back from lunch, so I'm struggling to follow. How would the "hedge fund backed FOSS, where the commercial software competition are publicly traded" work?
  • feld 11y ago
    The government is funding free software. Just not in the way you might expect. :-) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jQoAYRKqhg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jQoAYRKqhg
  • ilaksh 11y ago
    Free distributed P2P software makes technopolies like Github AND mafiaficialities like nationstates obsolete. We do not need to and should not rely on the government to fund that.
• mallamanis 11y ago
  There is this https://code.google.com/p/gittorrent/ https://code.google.com/p/gittorrent/ although I've never tried it... edit: a more recent (?) link https://github.com/cjb/gittorrent https://github.com/cjb/gittorrent
  • ywecur 11y ago
    It would be really nice to get it to succeed. Decentralisation is almost always preferable.
  • jlcx 11y ago
    I think they're two different projects, but this is exactly what I thought of. A separate Chinese DDoS was even mentioned by cjb in his announcement of GitTorrent a few months ago: http://blog.printf.net/articles/2015/05/29/announcing-gittorrent-a-decentralized-github/ http://blog.printf.net/articles/2015/05/29/announcing-gittor...
• david_ar 11y ago
  See http://ipfs.io http://ipfs.io and https://github.com/cryptix/git-remote-ipfs https://github.com/cryptix/git-remote-ipfs
• hadeharian 11y ago
  IPFS, anyone?
  • leni536 11y ago
    Yeah, I'm hyped too.
• tomphoolery 11y ago
  > A P2P/torrent client built specifically for sharing code from git repositories, perhaps? Or, we could both set up HTTP servers on our respective machines and simply push to each others repos.
• JustSomeNobody 11y ago
  I thought that was the point of git...