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Some random thoughts and observations after reading this thread: [1] I'm interested in the differences between reactions to this, versus Brendan Eich's gay mar

Some random thoughts and observations after reading this thread: [1] I'm interested in the differences between reactions to this, versus Brendan Eich's gay marriage scandal at Mozilla a couple of years ago. Don't get me wrong... I supported marriage equality then, and I do not support the worst of the statements called out in this story now. However, there are rational arguments that the HN community overreacted in BOTH cases. You have to assume that self-interest factors into the difference. [2] Why are people so reluctant to move from GitHub to Bitbucket or GitLab? I've done work with all three, and personally haven't found any of them to be significantly more or less reliable than the others (i.e. they ALL go down occasionally). GitLab's interface is virtually on-par with GitHub at this point, and frankly Bitbucket is far superior if you're using JIRA. Current architecture trends are moving toward smaller services, with a proliferating number of repositories. So GitHub's pricing model, in which you're charged by the number of repos, is becoming less competitive every day against Bitbucket and GitLab charging per user. I sometimes wonder how many HN people do actual work on teams of significant size, and how many are college students or micro-startup founders who don't really pay much for tooling anyway? GitHub's pricing model makes NO sense for established companies with lots of projects, and it seems weird that so few people here bring this up.

noobermin 11y ago
At least for [2], I'd suggest the community around Github is the reason many are reluctant to leave.
- StevePerkins 11y ago
  That's exactly my point in wondering about the ratio of students to established company professionals. For every company I've ever worked at, the "community" or "network effect" of a source control vendor is meaningless. Because the repos are all private. Sure, the company might have SOME open source stuff mirrored on GitHub for publicity purposes. But the real bread-and-butter daily WORK that pays the bills takes place in private repos. In most cases, private repos that are hosted on-prem rather than in the cloud. Sure, GitHub and its "network effect" matters for open source projects, and for resume-fodder side projects we tinker with as individuals. But all of that is free anyway. What about the scenarios where you'd have to pay GitHub a lot of money? How many vocal people on HN are actually IN that scenario?
  - merlinsbrain 11y ago
    Company I work for pays Github for enterprise. GitHub continuously improves their application and enterprise customers get new features a release or so after its rolled out on github.com. As a tinkerer, I tend to appreciate a feature when I have it missing during the day and rely on it at night. A self-network effect of sorts? As mentioned in another comment, I'm trying gitlab to move my stuff there but I'd be a bit pissed if we got off Github Enterprise at work since it "just works" and "needs no fixing because it's great".
davesque 11y ago
Agreed about Bitbucket. I've used it for a long time and haven't found it to be substantively different from GitHub in either functionality or reliability. The major downside, as I see it, is that it's just not as popular.
- bybjorn 11y ago
  bitbucket for private repos, github for public. No downside there :-)
- StevePerkins 11y ago
  Popularity is certainly important for open source stuff, and personal code samples that you put online for "resume" purposes. Hell, for that use case you might as well be posting your code on LinkedIn. But for the use cases in which people actually pay money (i.e. private repos that you don't WANT outsiders to access), then how is lack of popular visibility a downside?
  - davesque 11y ago
    For open source I suppose, since GitHub being so popular makes it easier for people to contribute to your project. Still, though, the only obstacles in using Bitbucket for those purposes (that I know of) are that you need to sign up for a Bitbucket account and learn how to make pull requests. As far as resume code goes, I wouldn't trust an employer who thinks having code samples hosted on Bitbucket is a mark against you. There's just nothing different between GitHub and Bitbucket in that case. Or is there some other issue I'm not aware of?
- chrisan 11y ago
  > The major downside, as I see it, is that it's just not as popular. Has anyone really thought of this? Do people just happen on to a github project because "it is on github" or because someone linked their work and people liked it and wanted to contribute? Would React, D3, Rails, Bootstrap etc not get what they do now simply because "oh I don't have a bitbucket account, I'm not going to bother" To me at least this kind of argument (I hear a lot of, nothing personal davesque!) is along the lines of "everybody is on MySpace"
codyps 11y ago
I was interested in your comparison in #1, wrt "HN community overreacted". I've been searching through old HN stories about Eich, but can't seem to find any where the comments generally supported firing him due to supporting Prop 8 (banning gay marriage). Is there a particular thread you had in mind? Or are you stating the overreaction was being angry that he might have been fired over that support?
- reitanqild 11y ago
  I haven't bookmarked those threads but I'm certain I saw a lot of comments here saying things along the lines of "the right to free speak only protects you against the government", strongly implying that what happened to him was fair game because it wasn't the government who staged it.
  - 13thLetter 11y ago
    I don't recall hearing that much in the context of Eich, but it certainly is a common go-to argument more recently among those who want to see people punished for having incorrect political views. It came up a lot when Strangeloop kicked out Curtis Yarvin, for example.
    - Karunamon 11y ago
      I said it back then and I'll say it here: There's a difference between "having a political view" (thinking that non-heterosexual marriages are icky) and taking positive action to prevent others from having equal rights (donating money to a lobbying/social engineering group) One is a thought, the other is an action. Punishing people for unknowable bad thoughts is an Orwellian nightmare. Punishing people for visible bad actions is how society moves forward.
      - 13thLetter 11y ago
        So people are allowed to have unpopular opinions as long as they don't, you know, tell anyone else about them or anything? Sorry, but that's unacceptable.
sauere 11y ago
It is not about the software. Github has become the number one place to show of your portfolio. Half of job postings these days encourage you to include a link to your GitHub profile.
- Lazare 11y ago
  Do you think a link to a Bitbucket profile would be ignored?
- morgante 11y ago
  > It is not about the software. For me, it emphatically is about the software. Even for totally private repos, where popularity is not a factor, I continue to turn to Github because the UIs for both Bitbucket and GitLab continue to stand in the way of me easily getting shit done.
  - sytse 11y ago
    Anything we can improve in GitLab to make getting shit done easier?
    - merlinsbrain 11y ago
      I'm in the process of moving all my stuff to gitlab.com. There's a lot of stuff going on in the sidebar and it took a while for me to figure out where things were. The mobile experience was also not amazing. If you would like to take this conversation offline, I'd be happy to. I like Gitlab so far, although I'm only 5% in to my "migration" process.
      - sytse 11y ago
        The mobile views for sure needs some work, we're hiring frontend engineers https://about.gitlab.com/jobs/ https://about.gitlab.com/jobs/ and on Friday we hired a second person. If you need any help please email support@gitlab.com and reference this comment. But commenting online is encouraged, all of our issues are public.
adriand 11y ago
> GitHub's pricing model makes NO sense for established companies with lots of projects Totally agree with this assessment. When we were with Github, we actually ended up on a custom plan, negotiated with them directly, because we had too many projects to fit within their normal pricing structure. We eventually moved to Bitbucket two or three years ago and it's far more cost-effective for us. At this point we have 500+ projects on Bitbucket, and we're a company of only 20 people.
- douche 11y ago
  What do you do with that many different projects? Genuinely curious.
  - singlow 11y ago
    I use bitbucket for the same reason. As an agency of <20 employees, we have 30 or more clients and many of them have 5-10 projects. Most of them are small projects that we don't touch often, but bitbucket is the only place we can afford to host with that many. We pay for a plan for our own org and we set up free orgs for most of our larger clients since there are rarely more than 4 devs who need access to the projects.
  - adriand 11y ago
    Agency work, so just repositories for all the various websites, web apps, mobile apps, etc., that we build and have built over the years.
  - StevePerkins 11y ago
    I suspect that the "microservices" craze will soon have reach a "MongoDB moment". Where everyone has gotten burned from jumped in too quickly and blindly, and the pendulum swings back in the opposite direction. However, right now microservices are blowing up. The new greenfield project that I'm working on right now started out a year ago as a monolith with one repo. It now has microservice components scattered across several DOZEN repos, with dev teams finding excuses to refactor into smaller and smaller granularity each month.
aws_ls 11y ago
Sometime back when I moved from svn to git. My default choice was Github. But their pricing was a hindrance. I guess, its more suited for US (or countries with value-equivalence with USD). 7 USD per user, did not make any sense to me, from India. So I went with AWS CodeCommit. And my experience has been good. Finally how bad can any service which uses Git (done by Linus Torvalds) can be? I also did not understand the big hoopla. If you can open source your project, then its good for you (free!). But they depend on enterprise and potentially other businesses with private code. But then it really does not make as much sense - as in whats the real gain - most of the use cases are from command line doing git [clone/pull/push].

noobermin 11y ago

At least for [2], I'd suggest the community around Github is the reason many are reluctant to leave.

StevePerkins 11y ago
That's exactly my point in wondering about the ratio of students to established company professionals. For every company I've ever worked at, the "community" or "network effect" of a source control vendor is meaningless. Because the repos are all private. Sure, the company might have SOME open source stuff mirrored on GitHub for publicity purposes. But the real bread-and-butter daily WORK that pays the bills takes place in private repos. In most cases, private repos that are hosted on-prem rather than in the cloud. Sure, GitHub and its "network effect" matters for open source projects, and for resume-fodder side projects we tinker with as individuals. But all of that is free anyway. What about the scenarios where you'd have to pay GitHub a lot of money? How many vocal people on HN are actually IN that scenario?
- merlinsbrain 11y ago
  Company I work for pays Github for enterprise. GitHub continuously improves their application and enterprise customers get new features a release or so after its rolled out on github.com. As a tinkerer, I tend to appreciate a feature when I have it missing during the day and rely on it at night. A self-network effect of sorts? As mentioned in another comment, I'm trying gitlab to move my stuff there but I'd be a bit pissed if we got off Github Enterprise at work since it "just works" and "needs no fixing because it's great".

davesque 11y ago

Agreed about Bitbucket. I've used it for a long time and haven't found it to be substantively different from GitHub in either functionality or reliability. The major downside, as I see it, is that it's just not as popular.

bybjorn 11y ago
bitbucket for private repos, github for public. No downside there :-)
StevePerkins 11y ago
Popularity is certainly important for open source stuff, and personal code samples that you put online for "resume" purposes. Hell, for that use case you might as well be posting your code on LinkedIn. But for the use cases in which people actually pay money (i.e. private repos that you don't WANT outsiders to access), then how is lack of popular visibility a downside?
- davesque 11y ago
  For open source I suppose, since GitHub being so popular makes it easier for people to contribute to your project. Still, though, the only obstacles in using Bitbucket for those purposes (that I know of) are that you need to sign up for a Bitbucket account and learn how to make pull requests. As far as resume code goes, I wouldn't trust an employer who thinks having code samples hosted on Bitbucket is a mark against you. There's just nothing different between GitHub and Bitbucket in that case. Or is there some other issue I'm not aware of?
chrisan 11y ago
> The major downside, as I see it, is that it's just not as popular. Has anyone really thought of this? Do people just happen on to a github project because "it is on github" or because someone linked their work and people liked it and wanted to contribute? Would React, D3, Rails, Bootstrap etc not get what they do now simply because "oh I don't have a bitbucket account, I'm not going to bother" To me at least this kind of argument (I hear a lot of, nothing personal davesque!) is along the lines of "everybody is on MySpace"

codyps 11y ago

I was interested in your comparison in #1, wrt "HN community overreacted". I've been searching through old HN stories about Eich, but can't seem to find any where the comments generally supported firing him due to supporting Prop 8 (banning gay marriage). Is there a particular thread you had in mind? Or are you stating the overreaction was being angry that he might have been fired over that support?

reitanqild 11y ago
I haven't bookmarked those threads but I'm certain I saw a lot of comments here saying things along the lines of "the right to free speak only protects you against the government", strongly implying that what happened to him was fair game because it wasn't the government who staged it.
- 13thLetter 11y ago
  I don't recall hearing that much in the context of Eich, but it certainly is a common go-to argument more recently among those who want to see people punished for having incorrect political views. It came up a lot when Strangeloop kicked out Curtis Yarvin, for example.
  - Karunamon 11y ago
    I said it back then and I'll say it here: There's a difference between "having a political view" (thinking that non-heterosexual marriages are icky) and taking positive action to prevent others from having equal rights (donating money to a lobbying/social engineering group) One is a thought, the other is an action. Punishing people for unknowable bad thoughts is an Orwellian nightmare. Punishing people for visible bad actions is how society moves forward.
    - 13thLetter 11y ago
      So people are allowed to have unpopular opinions as long as they don't, you know, tell anyone else about them or anything? Sorry, but that's unacceptable.

sauere 11y ago

It is not about the software. Github has become the number one place to show of your portfolio. Half of job postings these days encourage you to include a link to your GitHub profile.

Lazare 11y ago
Do you think a link to a Bitbucket profile would be ignored?
morgante 11y ago
> It is not about the software. For me, it emphatically is about the software. Even for totally private repos, where popularity is not a factor, I continue to turn to Github because the UIs for both Bitbucket and GitLab continue to stand in the way of me easily getting shit done.
- sytse 11y ago
  Anything we can improve in GitLab to make getting shit done easier?
  - merlinsbrain 11y ago
    I'm in the process of moving all my stuff to gitlab.com. There's a lot of stuff going on in the sidebar and it took a while for me to figure out where things were. The mobile experience was also not amazing. If you would like to take this conversation offline, I'd be happy to. I like Gitlab so far, although I'm only 5% in to my "migration" process.
    - sytse 11y ago
      The mobile views for sure needs some work, we're hiring frontend engineers https://about.gitlab.com/jobs/ https://about.gitlab.com/jobs/ and on Friday we hired a second person. If you need any help please email support@gitlab.com and reference this comment. But commenting online is encouraged, all of our issues are public.

adriand 11y ago

> GitHub's pricing model makes NO sense for established companies with lots of projects Totally agree with this assessment. When we were with Github, we actually ended up on a custom plan, negotiated with them directly, because we had too many projects to fit within their normal pricing structure. We eventually moved to Bitbucket two or three years ago and it's far more cost-effective for us. At this point we have 500+ projects on Bitbucket, and we're a company of only 20 people.

douche 11y ago
What do you do with that many different projects? Genuinely curious.
- singlow 11y ago
  I use bitbucket for the same reason. As an agency of <20 employees, we have 30 or more clients and many of them have 5-10 projects. Most of them are small projects that we don't touch often, but bitbucket is the only place we can afford to host with that many. We pay for a plan for our own org and we set up free orgs for most of our larger clients since there are rarely more than 4 devs who need access to the projects.
- adriand 11y ago
  Agency work, so just repositories for all the various websites, web apps, mobile apps, etc., that we build and have built over the years.
- StevePerkins 11y ago
  I suspect that the "microservices" craze will soon have reach a "MongoDB moment". Where everyone has gotten burned from jumped in too quickly and blindly, and the pendulum swings back in the opposite direction. However, right now microservices are blowing up. The new greenfield project that I'm working on right now started out a year ago as a monolith with one repo. It now has microservice components scattered across several DOZEN repos, with dev teams finding excuses to refactor into smaller and smaller granularity each month.

aws_ls 11y ago

Sometime back when I moved from svn to git. My default choice was Github. But their pricing was a hindrance. I guess, its more suited for US (or countries with value-equivalence with USD). 7 USD per user, did not make any sense to me, from India. So I went with AWS CodeCommit. And my experience has been good. Finally how bad can any service which uses Git (done by Linus Torvalds) can be? I also did not understand the big hoopla. If you can open source your project, then its good for you (free!). But they depend on enterprise and potentially other businesses with private code. But then it really does not make as much sense - as in whats the real gain - most of the use cases are from command line doing git [clone/pull/push].