What is Gitopia?
Gitopia is the next-generation Decentralized Code Collaboration Platform fueled by a decentralized network and interactive token economy. It is designed to optimize the open source software development process through collaboration, transparency, and incentivization.
Gitopia provides developers a community-governed decentralized platform where they can host their git repositories permanently and collaborate with others on code without worrying about getting censored or losing access to their code. Gitopia also leverages open source incentivization to reward open-source contributions and help maintainers sustain their open-source projects.
Why Gitopia?
Open-source software development plays a critical role in the present world. Almost all software that we use today, from the smallest embedded systems to the biggest supercomputer, from a phone’s operating system to the software running the websites and infrastructure of the companies people engage with every day, have some open source dependencies. Our world would not function, or at least not function as well, without open-source software.
A significant reason for the growth of open source today can be attributed to the emergence of Version Control Systems and code hosting platforms. Git, like other version control systems, helps in managing and storing revisions of projects. At the same time, services like GitHub, which are basically web-based git repository hosting services with some added features, have made collaboration between developers across the globe more accessible and convenient. These services have reduced the barriers to participation in open source projects. Contributors can simply fork their own copy of a repository with one click and issue a pull request from the appropriate branch when their changes are ready.
Code hosting platforms have empowered social coding and helped create global communities of developers. Sharing code freely and publicly has made it drastically cheaper and easier to build software, and tech innovation is surging as a result.
The popularity and benefits of the code hosting platforms have made them an integral part of software development. As a result, today's vast majority of open source development is done on popular code hosting platforms like GitHub and GitLab. The dependence on these platforms is worrying because they are centralized, and it is a significant cause for concern to have open source development dependent on the whims of private companies. It means that your code can become vulnerable depending on those companies’ policies and needs. The users who contribute the massive amounts of code hosted on such platforms have very little say in their policymaking.
Gitopia was conceived as an alternative to these centralized code collaboration platforms. It was designed to tear down the barriers that hindered the developers worldwide from collaborating openly and transparently and drive innovation. With the rapid growth of the decentralized ecosystem, there is an ever-increasing need for an open collaboration platform.