Things really became one-sided after github started gamifying open-source contributions, and when a new generation who perhaps grew-up in a more competitive academic setting took it as an opportunity to make their resume more impressive.
We peer-pressured ourselves into collectively using a less-than-ideal tech because that was the price to pay to belong.
That's completely made up on your end. I've been doing FOSS for 17 years and the vast majority of people were barely competent with any of them at all beyond whatever their chosen ponyshow was (including off-brand ones like Darcs and Monotone), and any switching from a persons preferred one to the use of another project was often met with grunting and complaining, if it was done at all.
The reality is we only think this because we saw people do this, at great cost of their own time -- but that's the literal definition of survivalship bias. For every 1 person doing this 50 just stuck with whatever they used and wouldn't bother. I've literally seen people refuse to contribute to a project over tabs vs spaces, and people still do this with git vs hg today, just not as much today.
More people use Git and contribute to FOSS in a single day in 2022 than every developer who knew all these tools combined back in 2008 or whatever. Whether this is good or bad is up to you, but you don't need to make up claims about developers being epic journeymen in the past and mastering 50 version control tools to do a single days work. They did not.
> Things really became one-sided after github started gamifying open-source contributions, and when a new generation who perhaps grew-up in a more competitive academic setting took it as an opportunity to make their resume more impressive.
Sorry, but I consider this to be a similarly made up claim that's just sour grapes. I've been using GitHub since 2008, I'm one of the first users. GitHub didn't even have "gamified" social features until the past 3-4 years IME (what, stars are about it?), and before that its product was pretty poor in some key areas like code review and project management, org permissions, on-prem control, etc. I didn't even use GitHub commercially until like, 2018, because most orgs had setups that were better in some key areas. But it was pretty easy to use and get started with, which mattered, and still matters, and soon enough nobody could compete with the same ease of use for free projects.
If I had to "blame" "someone" in this vein, a better place to start: global monetary and fiscal policy for the past 20 years resulting in software development becoming one of the only places with rising wages to meet cost of living demands in places like the US -- resulting in an influx of new blood to increase their wages and quality of life, combined with political choices like low interest rates, and huge explosions in demand for software devs for things like VC adventures, etc. Subsequent developments like bootcamps designed to churn devs out to match rising demand, etc which solidified platforms like GitHub further as it was easier for them to paper over these fundamentals when there was a clear winner (git/github) to focus on and ignore everything else. Forest vs trees and all.
> That's completely made up on your end. I've been doing FOSS for 17 years and the vast majority of people were barely competent with any of them at all beyond whatever their chosen ponyshow was
I doubt either of us has actual figures, so it's "my experience" vs "yours" (and full of anecdotal bias which I'm willing to admit). At least what's factual is that a decade ago, the versoning and tooling ecosystem was much more diverse: where today github/-actions/-CI/-issues/… is a quasi-monopoly you would bump into a new hosting solution/bug-tracking, reviews and CA build systems every other week, and the major open-source projects were either using CVS, SVN, GIT or HG. So, in proportions, more people had to be able to switch from a system to another, just out of practical considerations.
And I'm not even looking back pretending that things were perfect back then, I'm only suggesting that the monoculture which ensued killed a lot of competition, innovation and convenience, from which we could benefit today, on top of increased standardization (did you know for instance that hg can pull and push to git?)
> For every 1 person doing this 50 just stuck with whatever they used and wouldn't bother. I've literally seen people refuse to contribute to a project over tabs vs spaces, and people still do this with git vs hg today, just not as much today.
There's some truth to that, but it's a pretty extreme view. All projects can benefit from a lower entry bar and should be as welcoming as feasible, but optimizing for drive-by contributions at the expense of more meaningful involvement is destructive on the long run: anyone having worked on larger projects knows that the bulk of the effort is carried by a smaller group of dedicated people over long periods of time, not hundreds of over-the-fence-throwing typo-fixes. And I'm totally siding with projects who don't want to adopt the github ways of organizing their work where it means making long-haul contributor's lives more difficult.
> More people use Git and contribute to FOSS in a single day in 2022 than every developer who knew all these tools combined back in 2008 or whatever.
[Ref. Needed]
> > Things really became one-sided after github started gamifying open-source contributions, and when a new generation who perhaps grew-up in a more competitive academic setting took it as an opportunity to make their resume more impressive.
> Sorry, but I consider this to be a similarly made up claim that's just sour grapes.
If "gamified" may not be the right term, you certainly can't be oblivious to how often people equate their github activity to their resume, and how it's used as a token of value by job hunters and recruiters alike. Putting aside the "merit" of most contributions, this really contributed to people "demanding" from projects to move to github, to bring visibility on themselves (before the interests of the project itself), hence the centralization around the single largest platform. I don't know about you, but I find this state of affairs quite discomforting.
