You don't have to visit Github's web ui at all if you're just using it as repository hosting. At least users and contributors don't have to, the maintainer needs to occaisionally for configuration reasons.

Also it's worth noting that github's entire UI, at least for browsing (I didn't try creating an issue or editing a file), works just fine with javascript disabled.

Don't all contributors have to at least set up an account through the web interface?

Even if you can connect to GitHub without ever touching their proprietary JS, that's clearly not the typical route. Just like you can connect to Slack using nothing but open source clients, but one is "enticed" to use the proprietary client.

> Don't all contributors have to at least set up an account through the web interface?

You can clone/pull anonymously from github and eg: email patches.

I'd say using github just for hosting read-only/read-mostly git is a bit like running http on IIS or email on Exchange - or indeed a propietary XMPP server that allows federation.

I'd prefer Free projects to use Free infrastructure - but building on established open protocols is good. Contrast with bitkeeper: you'd have to reverse engineer the protocol to pull/push - or with slack: there's no way to set up your own server snd federate with it.

Oh yeah, good point, projects can't bring their own user authentication system, so all your contributors have to have github accounts.

So OK, sure, github is as bad as slack.

Contributors won't be able to push to GitHub, but they can still push to a mirror repo or some other setup that then pushes to github.

GitHub's proprietary JavaScript is a problem, amongst others.