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GitHub Issues. Pull Requests (and their comments). And so on.

How do you migrate this data? There's ALREADY some lock-in.



Well, to be fair, I think pulling out Issues is quite doable via the API right now. Like I said, I'm not after panicmongering; I just advocate a healthy dose of critical thinking. As in, did you check you could pull out Issues via the API before comitting to the service, and did you make sure the service vendor is committed to offering that API going forward? If you're actually on a paid plan, if you actually intend to make your livelyhood depend on the vendor, do you have any hard guarantees on that in the contact? And so on.

FWIW, I was involved with putting together the git hosting infrastructure used by the KDE community (which I wrote about at length here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2972107), which incidentally was done only after negotiations with Shortcut AS - then the company behind GitHub competitor Gitorious.org - fell through, since we couldn't come to an agreement acceptable to both sides. Things like data export guarantees were part of our goals back then.

And there's more data you want to be able to export than you might think, too. For example, if you actually let accounts push directly to your repository, you very likely want to have logs of what account was used to push what data for liability reasons - that's data that's not in the repo, because push != commit. Rather, it's data coming from the infrastructure that handles authentication for you.




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