The Growing Body of Proprietary Infrastructure for FOSS Development: Repeating Bad History

Over the last fifteen years, we have drifted from a nearly fully FOSS suite of community tools to primarily proprietary ones. Most developers lament the outcome, but the classic "convenience factor" of proprietary software has returned with a vengeance. Rarely is this issue discussed, and virtually no one is planning next steps for transition away from the proprietary development infrastructure technologies. Indeed, the culmination of our shared, learned history in this community is the tools we use to develop our software should, themselves, also be Open Source and Free Software. We survived the proprietarization & ad-banner-infestation of Sourceforge. We escaped the proprietary licensing regime of BitKeeper & wrote replacements (Git & Mercurial). Many lessons were learned. Today, however, FOSS projects rely more than ever on partly or wholly proprietary tools, such as GitHub, Slack, Jira, Groups.io & the like. Even worse, GitHub has become a "hub" for sale of third-party proprietary bots, yielding even more reliance on proprietary technology by FOSS developers. This talk is for anyone who works as a developer, community manager, organizer or collaborator in a FOSS project. Nearly every FOSS project today includes a piece of proprietary infrastructure, and often contributors don't even realize what parts of their infrastructure are proprietary. Those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it. This talk is a step in the direction of remembering the past to prevent that repetition which currently seems inevitable. This talk surveys how bad the situation has become, what we can learn from our prior community interactions with proprietary systems and discusses how we can organize to begin solving this problem yet again.