I agree that NNTP was a nicely federated system, and just a couple of days ago I was pondering the use of NNTP to publish Git pushes. Git's support for signed commits and content addressed objects is a great start for distributed, trustworthy collaboration. I still can't envision exactly how it would all function. There are lots of benefits to the GitHub model. They're a semi-trusted and well-funded entity who guarantee a highly available and fast synchronization. Sure, when it goes down everybody has a problem for a while... but with more distributed models you can get way more complicated failures, like "this object isn't seeded by a connected peer right now" or "this federated shard doesn't carry this repository" or whatever it may be.
I'm really interested in the future of distributed code collaboration. I just think it's not so trivial, and so it's very understandable that people have gravitated towards a semi-centralized model that already works.
> I agree that NNTP was a nicely federated system, and just a couple of days ago I was pondering the use of NNTP to publish Git pushes. Git's support for signed commits and content addressed objects is a great start for distributed, trustworthy collaboration. I still can't envision exactly how it would all function.
Perhaps having something akin to a private NNTP server that requires authentication to post for each open source project, but is publicly viewable. These news servers could be configured to send IHAVE <article> to other news servers to increase visibility. There could be a newserver like gmane to aggregate the feeds from each of those private news servers.
If you could get an authentication system that could work across those news servers, then you could have a decent system for keeping up with and contributing to open source projects.
I'm really interested in the future of distributed code collaboration. I just think it's not so trivial, and so it's very understandable that people have gravitated towards a semi-centralized model that already works.
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