Goodbye Mac OS Forge, hello GitHub

[Kevin Walzer]

On 8/19/16 8:18 PM, Ryan Schmidt wrote:
> Since 2006, Apple has hosted MacPorts on its Mac OS Forge service. In the
> decade since Mac OS Forge was created, collaborative software development
> platforms like GitHub and BitBucket have become very popular and successful,
> and when I was hired as Mac OS Forge sysadmin last year, part of my job was
> to evaluate whether such services could be a suitable replacement for those
> offered by Mac OS Forge. We determined that the answer was yes, and that
> GitHub was the best choice, due to its overwhelming popularity. Other Mac OS
> Forge projects including XQuartz, CUPS and CalendarServer are already in the
> process of moving to GitHub, and the time has now come for MacPorts to
> likewise bid a fond farewell to Mac OS Forge and move on.

This is certainly an interesting development. I hope this works out well 
for the MacPorts project. What will become of MacOS Forge if all its 
projects migrate off it? Is Apple ceasing support for MacOS Forge?

I understand that a lot of thought has gone into this decision, but it's 
also not hard to view one of its primary motivators--"all the cool 
projects are on Github, and it's crucial for developer mindshare"--as 
something to view with concern. Competition in this space is healthy. A 
decade ago SourceForge occupied the place in the community that Github 
does now, and there was hardly any place else to go if their site was 
down. One reason Tcl/Tk moved off SF to their own Fossil repo was 
because of a serious outage at the site that prevented commits for weeks.

This is more of a hope that Github does not become the kind of 
monoculture that SF was than any criticism of Github--as long as 
Bitbucket and other platforms are around and still have some volume, 
that will help.

--Kevin

-- 
Kevin Walzer
Code by Kevin/Mobile Code by Kevin
http://www.codebykevin.com
http://www.wtmobilesoftware.com