Problem

Security

The source code repositories on centralized platforms are at risk of unauthorized people’s modification if their security is compromised. Malicious actors can modify the git repositories to include commits that can cause harm to the users. This can be fixed easily in blockchain since all the modifications in blockchain have to be signed by the repository owner or the members with access to that repository.

Privacy

We do not know how popular decentralized platforms use our data and how sensitive they are to our privacy. We use all platforms without knowing how they work and how they benefit from our source code. They can change the terms without informing the users and act according to the terms they have changed. We believe this freedom should be in users, not platforms.

Censorship

Centralized platforms thrive on monopoly, which leads to easy censorship. Thus, GitHub’s weakness is the ability for stakeholders to censor anything they see fit, at the detriment of developers. Due to the monopoly and heavy concentration of developers on GitHub, it is easy for Countries and governments to target GitHub to serve their political agenda.

GitHub, in its run, has been the target of censorship from governments of many countries, including China, India, Russia, and Turkey, using many methods like local Internet service provider blocks and denial-of-service attacks on GitHub's servers. GitHub has been eventually unblocked after backlash from users and technology businesses or compliance from GitHub in all of these cases.

Another prominent example of the censorship problem can be seen in how the Chinese government has targeted GitHub. The Chinese government, well-known for its censorship of foreign services, has seen an explosion in open source development. The centralization of GitHub has allowed China to pinpoint and attack GitHub in several ways.

Ownership

One of the important problems in central platforms is project ownership. As a result of the source codes carried out on the client server or transferred to the client server during the job delivery, the developers have difficulties in proving their ownership of the project. Traditional agreements and the terms within the scope of these agreements are not sufficient for both developers and product buyers. Smart contract and timestamp emerge as a solution as a result of these problems.

The fact that developers and product/service buyers feel secure and create added value in a carefree manner will also affect the quality of business processes.

Single Point of Failure

When you have all your code on a centralized platform, there’s a single point of failure. That means that if they suffer a catastrophic event (like getting hacked, or there is a data leak, or they go bankrupt or announce that they’re shutting down), all your code could be lost.

The many service interruptions of the popular platform, GitHub, have shown that such a scenario is possible, and GitHub has a single point of failure.

By design of the platforms, each developer has a full copy of the repository. This means that there’s little risk of data loss for a company that uses a service like GitHub. The problem arises when GitHub has been worked into the core of several companies’ development processes.

For example, companies that have developers work locally and push their code to GitHub for deploys have no control over the infrastructure on which their code resides. If they wish to do a deployment, but GitHub is down, they are unable to deploy their code.