It's less about pulling and more about tools like DeepWiki making the assumption that its inputs live in GitHub, so repository URLs are expected to be GH URLs as opposed to a URL to a git repository anywhere.
That being said, there's no reason for tools like it to have those constraints other than pushing users into an ecosystem they prefer (i.e. GitHub instead of other forges).
I do wonder how this works in the case of job seeking while still employed. Since there's no commitment on either end, feels like the seeker would have to either take leave or resign, exposing them to a ton of risk while the company has the big end of the stick.
It's interesting to see the periodic rediscovery of "capitalism + technology relies on unpaid, voluntary labour", or as the author puts it, "Open source, the thing that drives the world, the thing Harvard says has an economic value of 8.8 trillion dollars".
The one flaw that I see in the author's analysis though is that they don't seem to account for whether the packages accounted for by their source have dependents or monthly downloads. There's *a lot* of dead code out there. When excluding abandoned packages, I bet the picture is still grim, but it might be less so.
> capitalism + technology relies on unpaid, voluntary labour
You are falling into the breadtube trap of faulting capitalism for a societal issue that has nothing to do with it. Did capitalism force people to have productive hobbies? Would you prefer a system, other than capitalism, that prevented people from having productive hobbies?
Often times this error relies on the assumption that capitalism is what's preventing us from having an "idealized" version of communism that I've heard aptly described as Gay Luxury Space Communism, where anyone can do anything they want and society just magically pays for it. The problem is that GLSC isn't real, we'd need ~infinite resources to do it.
I personally blame this problem on charities. This is the type of problem that charities and foundations should solve but there is no safeguard for charity money actually going to the charity's cause of action, instead the moment you create any kind of non profit it transforms into Non Profit (inc) and all the money it received goes to (1) professional non-profit people for the job of raising money and redistributing it, (2) shuffled to other non-profits, (3) thinly disguised political activism.
I wish I could +1 this many times over. Mozilla and Wikipedia are two great examples of this... so much of the expenses are diverted to busy work and so much less to the added value to society.
It does go in the direction I thought it would though. I'd be curious to see (or to take) a look a little deeper at what those thousand of packages are.
You can frame the "unpaid voluntary labor" as "creative work" and it would start making a whole lot of sense. "Creative work thrives despite being unpaid in capitalist society."
> NL is the most complicity nation to both five eyes and economics agreements woth USA. there's a reason all eu offices from silicon valley companies are there.
Citation needed.
In any case, I wouldn't call divesting from US tech infrastructure a futile endeavour: wouldn't a move to EU services (especially given that the author is based in the EU) allow benefitting from the EU's data protection / sovereignty legislation? That alone would be an net improvement over the laissez-faire approach that US has about people's data, aside from at least trying to go against the flow of technological centralization around the US.
Now, you can debate whether those protections are effective or not, but at least it's something to build from.
> Brave is what Firefox could have and should have become.
On the flipside, Brave went kinda weird with crypto and embedded it in the browser rather than having it be something you can tack on via extension if that's your jam.
They certain bring something interesting to the space, but hitching themselves to the cryptocurrency wagon lost some people (myself included) along the way.
I'm glad to see this come back up (even though the title frames the issue entirely backwards: it's less about one guy breaking things and more about the malpractice of building systems that are brittle from day one) because I don't think folks have really learned from the perils of unnecessary yet load-bearing dependencies.
At the very least, I hope the conversation is still alive enough for groups to invest in mirror registries to have some form control over external dependency sources. At [previous gig], it's something that always felt like an expense that needs a lot of justification with the powers that be despite feeling like table stakes for keeping a revenue-generating app up in the long term.
> Who pays for telecommunication cables on the ocean floor?
TIL, it's a mix of private venture and public money [1], depending on which cables we're talking about. The ownership of those cables is also interesting [2] (granted, the source is a bit dated, but I can imagine that's still a trend):
> The leaders of today’s boom are two of the biggest generators of data traffic: Google and Facebook. Internet companies are behind about four-fifths of transatlantic cable investment planned for 2018-20, up from less than 20 percent in the three years through 2017, according to TeleGeography. Google has become “by far the biggest investor” in submarine cables, even taking full ownership of two of them—a reflection of the vast amounts of data the company transmits, says Mike Conradi, a lawyer at DLA Piper in London who’s been working on undersea fiber deals since 1999. Content companies “can make or break these cables.”
That being said, there's no reason for tools like it to have those constraints other than pushing users into an ecosystem they prefer (i.e. GitHub instead of other forges).