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Mozilla Firefox – Official GitHub repo

(github.com)
848 points thefilmore | 4 comments | 13 May 25 05:23 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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floriangosse ◴[13 May 25 06:55 UTC] No.43970232[source]▶
I think it's actually an understandable strategical move from Mozilla. They might loose some income from Google and probably have to cut the staff. But to keep the development of Firefox running they want to involve more people from the community and GitHub is the tool that brings most visibility on the market right now and is known by many developers. So the hurdle getting involved is much lower.

I think you can dislike the general move to a service like GitHub instead of GitLab (or something else). But I think we all benefit from the fact that Firefox's development continues and that we have a competing engine on the market.

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fhd2 ◴[13 May 25 08:14 UTC] No.43970680[source]▶
In my experience, most contributors who are deterred from contributing because they can't use GitHub aren't particularly valuable contributors. I'm sure there's exceptions, but I haven't seen any for non-trivial open source projects I've been involved in. I might even argue that it could be good to have a slightly higher bar to deter low quality one time contributors.
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1. Philpax ◴[13 May 25 09:01 UTC] No.43970955[source]▶
I can say that I've chosen not to bother when submitting a fix requires me to stray away from GitHub, and doubly so when it doesn't use a PR/MR workflow. There are only so many hours in the day, and I don't have the patience to deal with unconventional workflows when there are other things I could be doing with my time.

For projects that I'd be interested in being a long-term contributor to, this is obviously different, but you don't become a long-term contributor without first dealing with the short-term, and if you make that experience a pain, I'm unlikely to stick around.

A big part of this is the friction in signing up; I hope federated forges become more of a thing, and I can carry my identity around and start using alternate forges without having to store yet another password in my password manager.

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2. Handler9246 ◴[13 May 25 11:17 UTC] No.43971666[source]▶
Sad we're at a stage where people don't contribute to free software projects because the service it's hosted on isn't the proprietary, corporate giant.

"Friction in signing up" being a big part for you is also weird, considering basically all free software GitHub alternatives (Gitea, GitLab, Forgejo) support SSO via GitHub.

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3. encom ◴[13 May 25 13:29 UTC] No.43972746[source]▶
Requiring a Microsoft account, and handing over my phone number is extreme friction in my book.
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4. BenjiWiebe ◴[14 May 25 16:45 UTC] No.43986624{3}[source]▶
Just checked, and it looks like my GitHub account is not linked to my Microsoft account, nor does it have my phone number.

I just signed out and started the signup flow. It allows me to use an email on my own domain, and I got as far as verifying my email before I canceled the flow, and there hadn't been any requirement for phone number of Microsoft account yet.