Mozilla Firefox – Official GitHub repo

Pretty cool that Linus Torvalds invented a completely distributed version control system and 20 years later we all use it to store our code in a single place.

I get what you're saying, but tbf hosting on github doesn't (yet!) box you out of just moving back to that system. It's still just git. It's still distributed, in the sense that if github goes down you could still generate patches and email them around, and then push back to github when it's back.

Everything surrounding code: issues, CICD, etc, is obviously another story. But it's not a story that is answered by distributed git either. (though I would love a good issue tracking system that is done entirely inside git)

Unfortunately the project is not just code. It also has issues, PRs and other stuff. Github has two kinds of lock in, a) your stuff is there and if you move elsewhere you probably will wipe your issues etc (huge loss of institutional knowledge), and b) there is a network effect because everyone has a github account and people are used to just hop on a repository and file an issue (rather than being greeted by a log in page), cross-reference issues between repositories (hard to make work if repos aren't in the same site, unless both sites use some interop thing like activitypub which github will never use), etc

> Everything surrounding code: issues, CICD, etc, is obviously another story. But it's not a story that is answered by distributed git either. (though I would love a good issue tracking system that is done entirely inside git)

There is https://github.com/git-bug/git-bug - would love if people started o use it, even in a read only way: use github issues normally, but also have a bot that saves all coments to git-bug, so that i can read issues without an internet connection. Then, at a later date, make it so that people that make issues on git-bug also gets the issue posted on github, making a two way bridge.

Then, optionally, at a later stage when almost everyone migrated to git-bug, make the github issues a read only mirror of the git-bug issues. Probably not worth it: you lose drive-by comments from newcomers (that already have a github account but probably never heard of git-bug), raising the friction to report bugs