First off, I love the Baserow team. You guys are very knowledgeable and building a great product I use daily.
I know you’re also interested in maximizing growth and building a strong community around Baserow is a big part of that. @olgatrykush is doing a tremendous job on this front and this discourse forum is valuable.
That said, I’m worried Baserow is not getting the recognition or support is deserves because primary development is happening on Gitlab vs. Github. I know that you have a mirrored repository there on Bram’s account with 1.3k stars but consider that Nocodb is, in my view, an inferior offering and it has 34k stars. All those devs working with Nocodb has to be a huge boost for bug fixing and feature dev. Then you have other options like Rowy that have 400% more stars than Baserow’s clone on Github or Baserow’s primary repo on Gitlab. I think a big reason for this is the location of the project.
What: Move Baserow primary dev to the same environment all of its competitors live in.
Bulleted reasons:
- GROWTH: Less friction for devs that want to participate = more participation and free help and growth of usage and product dev
- GROWTH, Discovery: Many devs, I think, use Github’s tagging system to discover options and then look at stars and commit or issue stats to determine usage and Baserow would be better positioned to attract folks with its numbers if primary dev were on Github.
- SIMPLICITY: Won’t have to maintain a mirror on Github that becomes outdated and then makes devs on Github confused and turned off, possibly thinking the project isn’t under active dev
-SIMPLICITY #2: Most of the libraries and frameworks for Baserow are already on Github so the project would live closer to the code that it’s built on top of - MANAGEMENT TOOLS: Github’s project management tools have improved dramatically over the past year with new Kanban projects layout
- ADDONS: Github’s marketplace offers some a large number of options of deployments and CI (if this Gitlab feature is some reason why people decide on Gitlab)
Reasons NOT to move
- VALUES: An idea that Microsoft can’t be trusted
- INTERTIA: Moving would take some work and is a nuisance and its better to focus this energy on the product instead of adopting some new workflow
I can see some merit to both of these reasons not to but given the momentum in this space and huge demand and need to help I think the risks of not having Github be the primary dev hub for the project outweigh the initial time it would take to switch and I think that so far Microsoft has been doing a great job to managing new features on Github and that, at some point, if the largest open source projects in the world are still trusting Github that it’s time for me to relax my paranoia and concerns about entrusting code to “bigtech” …
Important note: I don’t work for MSFT. Just thoughts from someone who cares.