Let's say you had $12m, with the requirement that it be spent on an "interesting problem." What would you spend it on?
These guys picked "distributed source code repositories, with a client idiosyncratically written in Rust and idiosyncratically built with a cryptocurrency idea." Why?
I agree it's intellectually stimulating. But besides that, is there a reason they are particularly passionate about distributed source code repositories?
Thing is, building UIs to clone GitHub is a huge grind. It's not anything anyone asked for, and there aren't any innovations there. Then building all this infrastructure and documentation is also a grind. Then this is a grind, and that is a grind, and you add up all this stuff that is kind of a grind. So you have this original... radical of an interesting idea, that is intellectually stimulating, but then you have to do all this work that is a grind, and it's like, why?
So in my experience there's someone back there who has a certain manic energy, an ability to focus on doing this grind. There's no audience, so there are no bug reports, so it can sort of be all work channeled into product development just for the psychic satisfaction of pumping out GitHub UI clones, documentation, install scripts, infrastructure, documenting and evangelizing a "protocol" etc. I mean that's 90% of the work right? So why not harness that manic energy elsewhere?
I'm not making a judgement, but I'm trying to figure out where the sincere excitement lies. Like if you are willing to put up with this grind, you can also contribute 1 feature to Git, which already exists, and that could get 1,000,000x the adoption and be 1,000,000x more impactful. I don't know. So it's not about that. It's not about growth growth growth, or whatever.
If you have the manic energy to do any mundane task, like if the authors don't really care about which grind it is or how much it is, why not channel it into something else that maybe they are more passionate about? Like who is sincerely passionate about distributed source control, but hasn't already found their proverbial tribe in the many, many places where you can be excited about something like that?
I bring up "video games" because it's stereotypically the thing the quiet kid who suddenly becomes very wealthy doing something meaningless (sorry, that's true about distributed source control) and then now, he has the money to do whatever he wants, so he funds a Diablo clone or whatever. It's only a half joke. But it's like, why? Why this?
Of course one answer is that, for many people, they see $12m as Finally My Payday. They'll say or do anything to make that happen. If it happens to be that their lane is Authoring Idiosyncratic Computer Science Research Projects, that's what will be related to getting the payday. If that happens to be their lane because they look like a guy who plays Diablo and drinks energy drinks and is good at math and has manic energy to program cryptocurrencies... okay. That could be true.
This is just a colorful comment. But I think there's something more sincere there, and that's what I'm asking for, and unfortunately there is a way to tell in writing if someone is or is not sincere, versus just trying to keep their payday, and that's the risk with exposing yourself to the community, and that's fine.
It’s simple: I don’t want my code and code collaborators to be using a platform owned and controlled by a third party. Just like I don’t want my OS or text editor, kitchen, furniture, clothing, books or music to be controlled by a third party that can decide to take it away whenever they see fit. Code and open source are integral to my life, as are the other things cited above, and therefore I’m uncomfortable with the idea of using github for the forseable future.
As it happens there are many others like me, and this helps fuel our excitement and drive to get this out there.
> I agree it's intellectually stimulating. But besides that, is there a reason they are particularly passionate about distributed source code repositories?
I’m surprised the answer isn’t obvious to you, yet again maybe I shouldn’t be as I suspect you’re a nocoiner.
Distributed decentralized anything is fundamentally about censorship resistance. Understanding that, for me, make the answer as to why they are passionate about distributed decentralized version control … they are concerned about coming censorship attempts on software, which honestly seems pretty likely given the current authoritarian direction of western civilization in general.
I’d also speculate that your perception isn’t shared by everyone based on the large number of upvotes on this submission.
For me it is not only about censorship resistance, it is also about having everything stored in git (so you loose nothing if you decide to move around) and about easy way to be a node itself (you installed Radicle? Congrats, you're a node in the network - you participate, you help, you extend. You can make a permanent node with domain name but you're already a node once you installed Radicle and started the node daemon).
It is this radical idea that everyone can easily be an equal participant in the network and that they have power over what they want and don't want. Open source nature further helps you to adapt things - don't like our web UI local-first interface? Build your own one or adapt ours to your need.
