What Git repo to use for hosting open source

[Danie van der Merwe]

It was suggested at te Oct 2022 meeting that we create a presence on a site such as Github or Gitlab, with the ability for various SA companies, gov depts, state entities to have projects there where they can manage their code, collaboration, etc to further innovation in SA. Then we’d look at having a page on your website which points to the various projects if anyone else is wanting to collaborate, and gives us an idea of the quality of the code being produced. However we need to decide where to host as GitHub itself is not actually open source, although it hosts open source code.

Most people are familiar with Github, but it is actually a proprietary platform owned by Microsoft, which is why quite a few projects left and moved to other platforms. So we need to discuss and decide, as we may asked at some point why we host on a proprietary platform.

Gitlab for example is at https://about.gitlab.com/why-gitlab/ and is an open source repository. However the SaaS cloud hosted version is only free up to 5GB of storage and is intended for individual users. Or you can host it yourself and run it free (but where to host?). It is an open source, powerful, secure, efficient, feature-rich and robust application for handling software development and operations (DevOps) lifecycle. This is possibly the number one alternative for Github.

GitHub is at https://github.com/about. Free for individuals for up to 500MB of package storage. We cannot self-host it.

But another alternative is we just host a holding site on one of these, and point to the actual projects elsewhere that we are aware of and support. The “popular” choice for most will be GitHub.

Or maybe simplest of all is we as SAOSS ourselves don’t register on either – and we just maintain a page on our website that links to any and all relevant open source projects, no matter where they are hosted or published.

• This topic was modified 1 year, 6 months ago by Danie van der Merwe.

[Yogan Naidoo]

Thanks Danie, you have given us a lot to think about.

Personally I just like to see more code being open sourced.
IMO, SAOSS as an overarching OS movement, creating interest and motivation for more SA/African open software should be good enough. So, essentially, your last option should be good enough.

That being said, there will be ad hoc software contributions where a whole bunch of files will be sent. I guess for those we could just compress them into a single file.

When we start our project, we will use Git internally and probably host on GitHub since it’s so popular. However, Bitbucket, GitLab or others are also acceptable since they support Git. I like GitLab since they support the whole software cycle and promote CI/CD. However GitHub, I know, can also get there by integrating to 3rd party tools like Jenkins.

I think the idea is let’s just get started and see where we get to. We can easily migrate to a cloud repository later.

The other query I have, is what is deemed a contribution? Software and other artefacts like dev., analysis, design docs? Also should the contribution emanate from Africa only? The reason I ask is that big multinationals like Suse, Redhat, Google, etc could easily crowd our hall of fame.

[Danie van der Merwe]

Yes, the last option does give a lot of flexibility, and can be got going immediately with little effort at all. It could serve as a starting point to have a snapshot of what is currently published out there.

It will also be a useful starting page for others to take stock of, and may be able to get some media attention.

It also won’t require anyone with existing projects (those that already took initiative) to uproot themselves and move to another project, and does allow them to retain full management over their projects.

Yes certainly all the other forms of contribution are just as valuable to projects, but it may be difficult to see where say one of our local departments or citizens is say contributing to someone else’s project? If there is some way, we can certainly link to that contribution too eg. SA departments using, say Alfresco ECM, may contribute a patch that allows for SA localisation, or they may make a substantial contribution to updating documentation on that project, even though it is not one of our local projects.

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