Post #1776379

2026-04-29 14:13 UTC

Universities and other academic institutions should run their own source code repository service. A replacement for github if you will (i'm politically neutral on whether it should be gitlab, gitea, forgejo, or SSH, or whatever). They have a civic and academic duty to preserve the research artefacts of their workers; which unquestionably includes code. It is unacceptable that for the entirety of the 21st century almost every single part of the Academy has punted this service onto entities outside of their control, funding, and jurisdiction—latterly github. Yes, tarballs of code on departmental ftp servers (the 1990s practice) was literally better than this.

Replies (5)

@hcayless@hcommons.social 2026-04-29 14:38

@drj Many of the better funded universities already do this. The public availability of the code varies and I think the visibility of it is relatively low. Certainly compared to stuff on GitHub. Unfortunately, outsourcing tech functions is very popular in academic admin and the not so well funded institutions are probably not equipped to do it.

Open ##2050765
@edwiebe@scribili.masto.host 2026-04-29 21:56

@drj They shoud do it but they all run Microsoft everything so they would just provide github.

Open ##2050766
@michael@toot.mynameismwd.org 2026-04-30 13:06

@drj I thought about this a bit, and I both agree with you, but also "it's complicated", and again shows the need for a federated solution. Firstly, most the people writing the code are on short term contracts: professors have tenure or such, but most the code is written by PhD students or RAs on short fixed term contracts. Once they're done, if it's in a university gitlab instance, they will no longer be able to contribute. Similarly, if I'm on a project that is across institutions, then it'll be unlikely my collaborators can get an account on my university's gitlab (we do have one), and vice versa, so we're pushed to use somewhere that we can all access. That isn't to say you're wrong, far from it, but more that there are other institutional barriers in the way, and a federated git thingy would make it a lot more credible. That's not to say we couldn't archive things to our institution gitlab, but that feels like a place projects will go to be forgotten, not to be maintained.

Open ##2050772
@geospacedman@mastodon.social 2026-04-30 20:30

@drj I ran a small research group level Gitlab for years, eventually the central IT service caught up and... bought a locally-hosted *Github* service. *sigh*

Open ##2050775
@markiejiang@mastodon.social 2026-05-01 15:14

@drj the org I'm in is a massive MS shop but they do provide org gitlab ... so they *can do it without MS after all...

Open ##2050777