Towards decentralized code collaboration

An overview of Radicle, what we're building and why.

Throughout the last decade, open source has become a standard for software development. Sharing code freely and publicly has made it drastically cheaper and easier to build software—and tech innovation is surging as a result.

Code hosting and collaboration platforms like GitHub and GitLab have contributed heavily to the growth of open source by bringing it to a mainstream audience. They defined standard vocabulary and behaviors, made git accessible to a greater audience, empowered social coding, and created global communities of developers. It is an undeniable fact that they have completely changed the way people write code.

As the status quo for code collaboration, these platforms also host the largest repositories of open source development made up of not just code, but issues, pull requests, reviews, and comments. Even the social relationships—stars, likes, follows—exist solely within these platforms.

These platforms, however, are owned by corporations. They are subject to corporate law and have the right to define their terms of services. They can implement user bans—like those currently in place against Iranian, Syrian, and Crimean GitHub accounts in response to pressure from the U.S. government. They are vulnerable to censorship as well as capitalist ends, which are often misaligned with the goals of free and open source communities.

In a world where nearly all software relies on open source code, maintaining the resilience and health of the free and open source ecosystem is more important than ever. That's why we believe that dependence on centrally hosted platforms and corporations for the distribution of critical open source infrastructure is unsustainable. Reliance on such centralized services contradicts the values of the free and open source ecosystem and threatens its well-being.

Radicle was conceived as an alternative. Its goal is to eliminate intermediaries and create a peer-to-peer ecosystem that is robust, functional, and secure. There must be an intentional shift in narrative to prioritize the adoption of decentralized alternatives for code collaboration that abide by the principles of free and open source software.

"At the core of the open source ethos is the idea of liberty. Open source is about inverting power structures and creating access and opportunities for everyone." — GitHub employees' letter to GitHub

Exploring alternatives

Alternatives to GitHub exist ranging from platforms like SourceForge and GitLab, to more established methods of collaboration such as mailing lists. Platforms like Gitea or Gogs offer self-hosted and open source solutions for code collaboration that have low platform risk but leave developers in isolated environments with no access to the global network of developers. One proposed alternative is federation. Proposals such as ForgeFed and federated GitLab are a step in the right direction, but implementations are underdeveloped or lacking. In addition, federation is dependent on domain names which can and are regularly seized by governments.

Other well-established open-source projects such as the Linux kernel adopt more bazaar and accessible development environments that aren't confined to single platforms, such as mailing lists. These work, but they falter when held to the usability standard that platforms like GitHub have established.

Peer-to-peer protocols like Scuttlebutt have provided us with alternative solutions to share and host information. These protocols are able to work offline without reliance on servers, but applications built on them lack the ability for users to easily coordinate on a global scale. This isn't too much of an issue for a blogging or social networking use case, but when it comes to software collaboration, a canonical global registry is necessary to meet the usability and discoverability standards of centralized platforms today. The ability for anybody to contribute to any open source project no matter where they are is necessary to cultivate a truly free and open network.

Designing by principles

As we set out to build an alternative, we started by thinking about the values that we recognize as integral to free and open source code collaboration. With that said, we developed the following list of guiding principles:

1. It must prioritize user freedom In the words of the free software movement: […] users have the freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software. Thus, free software is a matter of liberty, not price. 2. It must be accessible and uncensorable Anyone should have the freedom to use the software to collaborate with others. No single party should be able to ban users from accessing the system, or content from being shared. It must be auditable and transparent. In addition, users should have the freedom to control their interactions and the content they see on an individual basis. 3. It must be user-friendly The software must be easy to use and not expect tremendous change in behavior from the user. Responsiveness and functionality must meet the standards established by current platforms. 4. It must be offline-first It must not require internet connectivity, DNS or online portals to function. There must be no single point of failure and it must be always available. 5. It must not compromise on security Trust in a third party or intermediary must not be required for use. Every artefact of the system must be attested with cryptographic signatures, and verified.

Let’s look at hosting platforms like GitHub or GitLab in the context of this framework: they succeed by being user-friendly and accessible, but since they are centrally controlled, they are censorable, and do not prioritize user freedoms. If we look at self-hosted solutions like Gitea, Phabricator or Gogs, they are free, uncensorable, and user-friendly, however, they are not easily accessible due to gate-keeping and isolated environments: users across Phabricator deployments cannot interact with each other. This is the case for all currently available self-hosted solutions we've looked at. They also present single points of failure and require internet connectivity for most interactions with the system.

Hypothetically, a federated GitLab could fill all the requirements, however, federated services cannot be offline-first and don’t offer sovereignty over user's identity. Users are tied to specific instances and thus subject to some of the same drawbacks as centralized services.

Bazaar-style solutions like the Linux Kernel mailing list succeed at almost all outlined principles, but are limited in terms of user friendliness. It's hard to compare the usability of email threads to the sophisticated workflows possible on platforms like GitHub and GitLab.

Radicle: A p2p protocol for code collaboration 🌱

Radicle adopts the Scuttlebutt social overlay paradigm by establishing a peer-to-peer replication layer on top of distributed version control systems, starting with git . User accounts and login is replaced by public key cryptography, hosted issue trackers are replaced by local peer replication, and the idea of a single canonical upstream is replaced by a patch-based peer-to-peer or "bazaar" model.

To complement the replication layer we introduce a totally-ordered consensus-backed registry which holds canonical project metadata. This allows projects to anchor important information—such as project state and repository head—with the guarantee of global availability and immutability.

The three major themes to highlight are the decisions to focus on a peer-to-peer code collaboration model, to build on the underlying distributed version control system for replication, and to adopt a protocol-first approach.

Revisiting the Bazaar

The Cathedral and the Bazaar describes two approaches to free software development. The cathedral model, exemplified by projects like Emacs, makes releases open and available but keeps development exclusive to so called "individual wizards". On the other hand, the bazaar model—popularized by Linus Torvalds and validated by the massive success of Linux, calls for completely open development with frequent and early releases, delegation throughout communities, and as many "eyeballs" on the code as possible. The conclusion of the essay speaks to the success of bazaar development practices in open source projects. In other words, given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.

Peer-to-peer networking makes it far easier for developers and maintainers to develop not just a shared, but a trusted representation of project state grounded in actual source code and secure peer identities. With peer replication, patches become more comprehensive because they are tied to local issues, comments, and reviews connected to the development process. With more comprehensive patches, bazaar-style development can retain its flexibility while supporting more sophisticated workflows. This is why Radicle replaces the idea of a single canonical upstream with a peer-to-peer model familiar to the open source hackers of the 90s and early 2000s. It makes bazaar-style development easier and better.

This potential is what caused Radicle to settle on a gossip-based "social overlay" built on distributed version control systems that is free and always available without the hassle of self-hosting or trusting companies with user data.

Git gossips well

The next design decision came as a result of our experimentation with decentralized storage. After building the first version of Radicle on IPFS, we ran into performance and functionality issues. A more detailed analysis can be found here, but the major realization was that replicating git repos peer-to-peer on the storage layer left us no choice but losing the packfile protocol, one of the things that makes git fast. This approach would make source code a second-class citizen—making it impractical to store repositories with large histories.

When reflecting on the above, the almost obvious thought returned: why not use git itself to distribute data? Storing collaboration artifacts (issues, pull requests, comments, ...) in git has been done before and the data structures available in git satisfy all our needs. Paired with a gossip layer, git becomes exactly what's necessary to store, replicate and distribute code and collaboration artifacts.

By building a peer-to-peer overlay on top of git, we find not only a performant solution, but one that is better adapted for code collaboration. Issues, comments and reviews become local artifacts that are cryptographically signed and interacted with offline.

Protocols, not platforms

The story of the big code hosting platforms coincides with the general shift of the internet from open protocols to privately-owned platforms. Most social coding platforms today actually leverage open protocols (git, mercurial, ssh) but have built up closed gardens.

Radicle's approach is meant to return to the protocol-first philosophy by focusing on building code collaboration primitives instead of user experiences, and to reject data collection and siloing by intermediaries. This is reflected in the decision to build on and extend git. Having it as the nexus of replication builds on its strengths and decentralized nature. Having issues, pull requests, comments, and reviews locally gives developers the tools to manage and design their workflows without locking them into a new "experience". Despite any front-end interface that will be built (😉), Radicle exists foremost as an open protocol — not a platform.

To complement the eventually-consistent peer-to-peer replication layer, a global registry that holds canonical project metadata is also desirable. This can provide functionality that is difficult to address at the gossip level, such as globally unique human-readable identifiers, as well as giving the ability for projects to anchor important information about their project in an immutable and totally-ordered way—for example, the latest repository head. This can alleviate weaknesses at the replication layer which is unable to prove to the user that the information shown is the latest available. In essence, the registry can provide users with the trusted, auditable and shared view of the network that is otherwise lacking, delivering the same connected "social" layer that attracted developers to platforms like GitHub. Designing such a system as an open protocol is challenging, and requires a consensus-based approach which we will discuss in more depth in the future.

_(_)_ _(_)_ @@@@ (_)@(_) @@@@ (_)@(_) @@@@ @@()@@ wWWWw (_)\ @@()@@ wWWWw (_)\ @@()@@ wWWWw @@@@ (___) \|/ @@@@ (___) \|/ @@@@ (___) / Y \| / Y \| / Y \ | \ |/ | / \ | \ |/ | / \ | \ |/ \\|// \\|/// \\\|// \\|// \\|/// \\\|// \\|// \\|/// ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

With all of these pieces in place, we see Radicle starting to take shape as a high-potential alternative to code hosting platforms like GitHub. Our goal is to develop Radicle to support the resilience and health of the free and open source ecosystem in a sustainable way. We have a lot to share over the coming months so please stay in touch.