Firefox moves to GitHub
42 points by Halkcyon
42 points by Halkcyon
Context from reddit:
https://groups.google.com/a/mozilla.org/g/firefox-dev/c/QnfydsDj48o/m/8WadV0_dBQAJ
They made the decision to move from hg.mozilla.org to GitHub last year. They are in the final legs of that migration.
It’s very funny to me that Firefox is moving to GitHub just as other projects like GoToSocial are managing to escape from GitHub. Yes, making it easier for outsiders to participate in development is good. No, locking yourself into Microsoft’s proprietary LLM platform is not good.
Moving to GitHub isn’t the news here. They still can move to a different forge at any time. I agree the choice of GH at this juncture is a bit blasé — the real news is that they have (finally) migrated from mercurial to git. They still could move to a different Git forge at any time, that’s much less involved and has much less impact on the project than the VCS used.
Mozilla using some of their income to pay Microsoft is… rich. That organization continues to lose its way.
Afaik Guix never was on GitHub to begin with.
Whoops, my bad, I misremembered. You are correct, Guix is migrating from Savannah to Codeberg. Funny how I didn’t read my own link.
EDIT: Perhaps I remembered guix-science moving from GitHub to Codeberg, and assumed the main project was following in its footsteps:
Some additional background on the history of Mercurial at Mozilla and how it got replaced by Git that might be of interest:
I like the idea that they are moving to a Git forge but I don‘t like that they are moving to GitHub as their Git forge.
Just when so many projects start to get out of it. It feels like someone saying “Look, I’m cool, I’m smoking a cigarette” : https://ploum.net/2023-02-22-leaving-github.html
Too little too late.
What does that mean? Too little for what? Too late for what?
It feels that Firefox is on the slide and moving to Github was something that you would imagine an org doing 5 years ago, not now.
It’s not just that Firefox is moving to GitHub. They are moving to git. Changing version control systems is very non-trivial at Firefox’s scale. It shouldn’t be a surprise that the timing of a change like this is super conservative.