Because they won't have to teach everyone how to use git, and they will have to teach everyone how to use mercurial

git users should pick up mercurial easily due to sharing mostly the same commands and it being simpler. Teaching people git who already know mercurial is harder.

The Linux kernel is not particularly big by comparison.

Although I suppose you could argue the cause is the choice of keeping so much in a single repo (I certainly would).

Kinda... they completely lost any kind of user-lookup or CCs or versions or any other data... but yeah sure they moved comments I guess that's everything ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

What you're saying is that a complex tool requires learning to understand it. Of course it does. Does that make the less complex tool better? No, in fact usually it only makes it better for the occasional user - at the expense of the all-day-every-day user.

They make money off the code hosted on Github, which is by-and-large open source. Github makes money off of open source software whether they themselves run open source software (almost certainly yes) or not.

The question posed is how does github make money off of OSS in a way that other similar services do not. Since they all host OSS software in one form or another, that observation isn't relevant.

> Producing OSS is not the only way to contribute to the OSS ecosystem

Yes, it is. Otherwise, your contribution is not part of the OSS ecosystem.

> github offers free services for OSS developers who otherwise would have to host them themselves

Github offer free services to anyone, OSS or not.

> that's the reason why they got so popular and i think we can all agree on the fact that it's incredibly useful

I think we can all agree it's called a "loss leader". It's not useful whatsoever to those who refuse to further enrich a for-profit company producing proprietary software which considers your own assets to be their proprietary data (see also: Copilot). In fact it makes things more difficult for us because we're locked out of contributing to virtually any OSS project.

> Are we to the point yet that a group with clout can just go write "the standard" representation

I mean, isn't that `-----BEGIN .* PRIVATE KEY-----`? Also obligatory XKCD https://xkcd.com/927/

PKCS 1 and 8 are both DER encoded which uses ASN.1, which the parent post was looking to avoid.

Except the parent post explicitly only cares about the type of key, which you don't need to parse the ASN.1 to know.

> a key use tag? Then each algorithm standard specifies it's own format for a blob of bytes that developers not doing serialization don't have to worry about?

As a developer passing blobs around, you already don't need to care that they're ASN.1, but you can care that you see a private key sitting around.

PS: and more than just X.509 uses those style of headers, too...

Why do you need multiple keys for "a few consulting clients" to begin with?

Yubikey's have a limited number of slots for GPG keys by the way... I'm curious to know how you stuffed as many subkeys as you want into the single AUT subkey slot (or even stuffed subkeys usable for authentication into all 4 of the slots it gives you)...

foreach email_address: if email_address not in recent_unsubscribers: send_email(email_address)

The theory is that they might have already generated the list of subscribers when they wrote up the email days earlier, or be working off some mirror of the data, etc.

It's a really dumb theory and the real reason is "because we can and it's very slightly easier".