Who Should Pay For Source Code Availability?

A critical challenge facing software developers today is ensuring that source code remains reliably available, even in the face of potential disruptions from popular hosting platforms like GitHub. Zine, a static site generator created by the author, currently faces this issue as dependency builds fail whenever GitHub or Codeberg experiences downtime.

While self-hosted Forgejo instances provide better uptime, they too are at risk of permanent loss. The most direct solution is to fork or vendor all dependencies, which moves them to the same host as the main project for easy access. However, this raises the question of who should bear the cost of making source code available and what options could create a more balanced approach.

Traditional centralized package indices like npmjs.com or crates.io already offer a built-in forking strategy, but this approach ties the solution to package management systems and doesn't fully address the underlying problem. Radicle, a peer-to-peer (p2p) network, offers a different solution where peers can seed repositories they're interested in, with the potential for nodes to make the network more resilient by reseeding everything or specific sets of projects.

Radicle's approach to handling issues differs from centralized platforms, storing them in Git repositories as Git objects that can be synced between peers. This method could potentially offer a more efficient and balanced way to ensure reliable source code availability, balancing the cost equation without relying on large tech companies.