Free software alternatives [was Re: gitorious limitations]

[Alexandre Franke <alexandre franke gmail com>]

On Fri, Aug 16, 2013 at 10:24 PM, Jasper St. Pierre
<jstpierre mecheye net> wrote:
> GitHub is architected a bit differently […]

> If there's anything I want people to do, it's to stop the countless "open
> source versions of proprietary services" things there are. The "X but open
> source" (Twitter/Identi.ca, Facebook/Diaspora, GitLab/Gitorious/GitHub,
> Askbot/StackOverflow) are some of the most hurtful things to the brand of
> both free software and open source that I can think of, and they're probably
> the biggest thing right now that give open source software a bad name. I'll
> elaborate if you would like me to, but this is another tangential
> discussion.

Have you ever considered that sometimes being free isn't the main or
the only concern of these alternatives (or clones, as you call them)?
Centralization is a bad thing too and the alternatives also aim at
fixing that issue, first by allowing anyone to run their instance, but
also in some cases (e.g. Identi.ca and Diaspora in your list) by
adding a missing feature, federation. So, as you said, it's
architected differently and often it is part of the reasons people
work on that.

I'm not saying this is an excuse for providing a bad user experience,
and I'm not saying that because of that you should immediately stop
using the ones you prefer and switch to the alternatives. I'm just
trying to get you to be a little more open minded about this topic,
and hopefully you'll understand and respect what people working on
these projects are trying to achieve.

-- 
Alexandre Franke