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Some of the responses here are kinda obnoxious. I helped kickstart the original letter and I'm very happy about this response. GitHub more than anything has be

Some of the responses here are kinda obnoxious. I helped kickstart the original letter and I'm very happy about this response. GitHub more than anything has been a blackbox, and this was a very notable first step towards opening up. It should be encouraged, not shut down. Privately (and some publicly), in the past few days, a lot of major open source projects were discussing a coordinated move away from GitHub. This likely puts that all on hold, but we'll see what changes GitHub makes and how people want to respond to it. Again, I'm very happy about this response, as should everyone in this thread. We'll see in the coming weeks what it really means though.

jcoffland 11y ago
I'm not sure it puts anything on hold. Some real action might.
bovermyer 11y ago
Where would those projects move to? There's no real alternative to GitHub, at least none that combines the social side of it with the Gittiness of it. That I know of, anyway.
- scrollaway 11y ago
  Gitlab is a worthy alternative. It's only missing critical mass, which gives Github the upper hand in considerations such as "all my foss contributions are on there in one place and that's what companies look at when they offer me a job". Hey, sytse - I know you're reading this. Have you guys thought about a way of including, in gitlab profiles, user info from Github in a non-intrusive way?
  - zyxley 11y ago
    > It's only missing critical mass As somebody who loves Gitlab... no, what it's missing is Github's reputation of lasting uptime reliability. If they get it to the point where people trust it to always be up to the same extent as Github, the rest will follow.
    - scrollaway 11y ago
      That's one of the definitions of critical mass. Reputation is built up over time and usage. Gitlab's uptime reliability isn't particularly known or unknown, mostly because, compared to Github, it's not used enough for those issues to come up. Try talking to a dev, ask them why they use Github instead of Gitlab. Are they going to tell you "Oh I absolutely would use Gitlab but their uptime is such a problem"? Or are they going to tell you their stuff's already on Github? Their friends/coworkers are on Github? Their employers look for their Github profile? As a sidenote I would totally use MySpace instead of Facebook if not for their notable history of extended downtime...
      - dandelany 11y ago
        I partly agree, but those that have done the research or already use Gitlab know that Gitlab's uptime has been problematic compared to Github's, which is a bigger issue for most companies than the community. As sytse correctly notes below, it's a lot better than it was a few months ago - but the pessimistic/risk-averse way to say that is "as recently as two months ago they were having major uptime issues". I have high hopes for Gitlab and I think they're doing great things, it's always great to see new competition in the space. And I applaud their transparency, it's refreshing! But it'll require some more "burn in" time before I consider it a reliable Github replacement, all questions of critical mass aside.
        sfilipov 11y ago
        On the plus side, if the manage to fix their problems at some point people will start trusting them to be up. It is not set in stone that they have worse uptime.
        dandelany 11y ago
        Absolutely, and I do think most of their problems have been fixed. So it's just a matter of time - the longer they are stable, the better their reputation will become.
      - 11y ago
  - bovermyer 11y ago
    I didn't realize that GitLab had a central hosted option! I thought it was just a download-and-maintain-yourself type of thing.
    - sytse 11y ago
      We have, and both public and private repositories are free without a collaborator limit. For more information see https://about.gitlab.com/gitlab-com/ https://about.gitlab.com/gitlab-com/
      - bovermyer 11y ago
        Pretty long delay on the email verification email. Very excited to check it out, though!
        sytse 11y ago
        Sorry to hear that. Please email support@gitlab.com if it doesn't arrive.
      - maus42 11y ago
        Interesting, checking this up.
      - st3v3r 11y ago
        Basically, it looks like you pay for support? Also, do you guys do Mercurial? Or just Git?
        sfilipov 11y ago
        They only do Git and have mentioned that currently have no plans to support Mercurial.
        sytse 11y ago
        If you're OK with forum support it is free (like Gmail). If you want email support you have to pay $9.99 per user per year. No plans for mercurial support.
  - sytse 11y ago
    Great idea! I created an issue https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/13401 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/13401
    - tzs 11y ago
      While you are here, I have a question. As far as I can tell neither your service nor Github nor Bitbucket have a way for a user to organize their repositories other than a list. This gets annoying if one has many unrelated projects. For instance, I have some chess projects, some math projects, some Warhammer Online projects, and so on. With the linear list approach if I want some semblance of order I need to resort to a kludge like prefixing the names with chess- and math- and WAR- and so on and using sort-by-name. It would be a lot easier to deal with if I could have a chess folder and math folder and WAR folder and put the appropriate projects there. Even better would be multiple levels of folders, and allowing a project to be in more than one folder at a time. In the project information, there is a field to enter a list of tags. I tried using that, with the idea that someone who wanted to see all my chess projects, say, could look for all projects I tagged "chess". Two problems: (1) I could not figure out what these tags actually do other than show up on the project settings page, and (2) I could not find any help on them in the Gitlab documentation because searching for "tags" brings up a bazillion things about Git tags. Maybe these should be called "labels" instead of "tags"? I see that there is a Groups feature, and I have not yet had a chance to delve into that to see if it can substitute for folders.
      - BWStearns 11y ago
        Definitely agree. I have a project that has iOS, server, and android reopos and it'd be nice to have there be some notion that they're related, maybe even have issues sharable? Though I guess that could get really messy.
      - kannonboy 11y ago
        Just a small clarification, both Bitbucket Cloud and Server have Projects[1] that allow you to organize related repositories together. [1]: https://confluence.atlassian.com/bitbucket/projects-792497956.html https://confluence.atlassian.com/bitbucket/projects-79249795...
  - macawfish 11y ago
    gitlab doesn't have the same appeal to me for browsing projects... at least not on the surface. the amazing thing about github is that you can go to github.com without signing up and search a multitude of projects and their forks. that's awesome. it's a level playing field.
    - wldcordeiro 11y ago
      Is this not available to view signed out? https://gitlab.com/explore https://gitlab.com/explore if not I think that's something Gitlab should make visible to anyone. But the problem here isn't that Gitlab lacks this it's that no one is using it to make the explore page interesting.
      - sytse 11y ago
        https://gitlab.com/explore https://gitlab.com/explore should be viewable when you're signed out. There are not many projects there yet, but when I just looked I saw that iterm2 moved their issues to GitLab.com https://gitlab.com/gnachman/iterm2 https://gitlab.com/gnachman/iterm2 Projects fully on GitLab.com include F-droid and Mailman.
        wldcordeiro 11y ago
        Tested it in private browsing mode and can confirm. The problem then is just the number of high profile projects on Github vs Gitlab.
        r0muald 11y ago
        The "problem" would be the number of high profile projects on GitHub.com vs GitLab.com - a subtle but important difference, I think.
      - x0 11y ago
        Yeah, I can see it and I don't have a Gitlab account.
  - at-fates-hands 11y ago
    It's also backed by Y Combinator.
    - mcguire 11y ago
      Is that an advantage or a disadvantage? :-)
  - munificent 11y ago
    Critical mass is hugely important, but it can also be surprisingly fickle. I remember when MySpace hit the tipping point and it seemed like Friendster became a ghost town overnight. A few years later when Facebook opened up outside of colleges, MySpace turned into a dead zone. It's possible for the same thing to happen with GitHub, though Facebook's continued entrenchment is also a signal that it may not.
    - girvo 11y ago
      Facebook is entrenched still, because they deliberately tried to avoid the mistakes that MySpace and Friendster (et al) made. They grew and expanded, changed their feature set to ensure that Facebook had everything your average person needed. GitHub haven't been doing that so much, but hopefully this response is the beginning of a change in that direction
- blktiger 11y ago
  I'm curious, what about bitbucket prevents it from being a real alternative to github?
  - markeroon 11y ago
    They often have issues, in my experience. Not bad, but shouldn't be the backbone of every package manager out there.
  - kitwalker12 11y ago
    IMHO it's the code search (which they've been planning for months now)
    - jschumacher 11y ago
      We haven't been planning it for months, we've been working on it for months. It's a big project to implement search at the scale of Bitbucket.
  - BloodOfSokar 11y ago
    Their pricing model is different, which I think keeps the base feature-set neutered. They try to up-sell you to JIRA and Confluence, which disincentives them from improving the base tools, IMO.
    - jschumacher 11y ago
      Yes, the pricing model is different with the goal of making Bitbucket affordable for individual developers and small teams, no matter whether they work on public or private projects. Do we want people to use JIRA? If they require more than simple issue tracking, absolutely. But that doesn't mean that we aren't improving the base tools. For example, Bitbucket already provides the ability to vote for issues and recently added rendering of the CONTRIBUTING.md file for pull requests (http://blog.bitbucket.org/2016/01/26/pull-request-guidelines-for-bitbucket-cloud http://blog.bitbucket.org/2016/01/26/pull-request-guidelines...).
- thejameskyle 11y ago
  People are split between: - GitLab - Phabricator - GitHub + Phabricator Maniphest (or alternative)
- yuhong 11y ago
  SourceForge is probably not worth it now, but it is also worth watching.
  - oneeyedpigeon 11y ago
    It's good if you're looking for malware. Everything else, less so.
    - yuhong 11y ago
      It is not good for malware either anymore.
- urda 11y ago
  GitLab and Bitbucket are equally as powerful. I've actually really enjoyed trying out GitLab for the past few days.
  - sytse 11y ago
    Glad to hear you like GitLab!
    - urda 11y ago
      Thanks! I'm really new to it and I'm using it for basic mirroring for now. But the UI is really enjoyable and I've liked the native mirror support in GitLab. I do have one issue, but I already reported it here: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/support-forum/issues/536 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/support-forum/issues/536
      - sytse 11y ago
        Glad you like it, I asked a service engineer to look into your issue.
        urda 11y ago
        Awesome! Thanks!
  - aldanor 11y ago
    BitBucket doesn't have code search. GG.
    - urda 11y ago
      GitHub code search is pretty awful in practice. It's easier to use ack or grep to find relevant information in a repo.
      - aldanor 11y ago
        Or git grep, for that matter...
icholy 11y ago
Very obnoxious. It's embarrassing to see a community I respect so much acting so childish ...
halayli 11y ago
What's the reason behind not allowing issues to be deleted?
r0muald 11y ago
And yet, look at this blog post from 2 days ago: https://github.com/blog/2110-migrate-your-code-with-the-github-importer https://github.com/blog/2110-migrate-your-code-with-the-gith... still offering to migrate your existing SVN or Mercurial repositories to GitHub, without any mention of all the other data that are typical of a software project like issues. Should I migrate my Trac or Bitbucket issues manually to GitHub?

jcoffland 11y ago

I'm not sure it puts anything on hold. Some real action might.

bovermyer 11y ago

Where would those projects move to? There's no real alternative to GitHub, at least none that combines the social side of it with the Gittiness of it. That I know of, anyway.

scrollaway 11y ago
Gitlab is a worthy alternative. It's only missing critical mass, which gives Github the upper hand in considerations such as "all my foss contributions are on there in one place and that's what companies look at when they offer me a job". Hey, sytse - I know you're reading this. Have you guys thought about a way of including, in gitlab profiles, user info from Github in a non-intrusive way?
- zyxley 11y ago
  > It's only missing critical mass As somebody who loves Gitlab... no, what it's missing is Github's reputation of lasting uptime reliability. If they get it to the point where people trust it to always be up to the same extent as Github, the rest will follow.
  - scrollaway 11y ago
    That's one of the definitions of critical mass. Reputation is built up over time and usage. Gitlab's uptime reliability isn't particularly known or unknown, mostly because, compared to Github, it's not used enough for those issues to come up. Try talking to a dev, ask them why they use Github instead of Gitlab. Are they going to tell you "Oh I absolutely would use Gitlab but their uptime is such a problem"? Or are they going to tell you their stuff's already on Github? Their friends/coworkers are on Github? Their employers look for their Github profile? As a sidenote I would totally use MySpace instead of Facebook if not for their notable history of extended downtime...
    - dandelany 11y ago
      I partly agree, but those that have done the research or already use Gitlab know that Gitlab's uptime has been problematic compared to Github's, which is a bigger issue for most companies than the community. As sytse correctly notes below, it's a lot better than it was a few months ago - but the pessimistic/risk-averse way to say that is "as recently as two months ago they were having major uptime issues". I have high hopes for Gitlab and I think they're doing great things, it's always great to see new competition in the space. And I applaud their transparency, it's refreshing! But it'll require some more "burn in" time before I consider it a reliable Github replacement, all questions of critical mass aside.
      - sfilipov 11y ago
        On the plus side, if the manage to fix their problems at some point people will start trusting them to be up. It is not set in stone that they have worse uptime.
        dandelany 11y ago
        Absolutely, and I do think most of their problems have been fixed. So it's just a matter of time - the longer they are stable, the better their reputation will become.
    - 11y ago
- bovermyer 11y ago
  I didn't realize that GitLab had a central hosted option! I thought it was just a download-and-maintain-yourself type of thing.
  - sytse 11y ago
    We have, and both public and private repositories are free without a collaborator limit. For more information see https://about.gitlab.com/gitlab-com/ https://about.gitlab.com/gitlab-com/
    - bovermyer 11y ago
      Pretty long delay on the email verification email. Very excited to check it out, though!
      - sytse 11y ago
        Sorry to hear that. Please email support@gitlab.com if it doesn't arrive.
    - maus42 11y ago
      Interesting, checking this up.
    - st3v3r 11y ago
      Basically, it looks like you pay for support? Also, do you guys do Mercurial? Or just Git?
      - sfilipov 11y ago
        They only do Git and have mentioned that currently have no plans to support Mercurial.
      - sytse 11y ago
        If you're OK with forum support it is free (like Gmail). If you want email support you have to pay $9.99 per user per year. No plans for mercurial support.
- sytse 11y ago
  Great idea! I created an issue https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/13401 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/13401
  - tzs 11y ago
    While you are here, I have a question. As far as I can tell neither your service nor Github nor Bitbucket have a way for a user to organize their repositories other than a list. This gets annoying if one has many unrelated projects. For instance, I have some chess projects, some math projects, some Warhammer Online projects, and so on. With the linear list approach if I want some semblance of order I need to resort to a kludge like prefixing the names with chess- and math- and WAR- and so on and using sort-by-name. It would be a lot easier to deal with if I could have a chess folder and math folder and WAR folder and put the appropriate projects there. Even better would be multiple levels of folders, and allowing a project to be in more than one folder at a time. In the project information, there is a field to enter a list of tags. I tried using that, with the idea that someone who wanted to see all my chess projects, say, could look for all projects I tagged "chess". Two problems: (1) I could not figure out what these tags actually do other than show up on the project settings page, and (2) I could not find any help on them in the Gitlab documentation because searching for "tags" brings up a bazillion things about Git tags. Maybe these should be called "labels" instead of "tags"? I see that there is a Groups feature, and I have not yet had a chance to delve into that to see if it can substitute for folders.
    - BWStearns 11y ago
      Definitely agree. I have a project that has iOS, server, and android reopos and it'd be nice to have there be some notion that they're related, maybe even have issues sharable? Though I guess that could get really messy.
    - kannonboy 11y ago
      Just a small clarification, both Bitbucket Cloud and Server have Projects[1] that allow you to organize related repositories together. [1]: https://confluence.atlassian.com/bitbucket/projects-792497956.html https://confluence.atlassian.com/bitbucket/projects-79249795...
- macawfish 11y ago
  gitlab doesn't have the same appeal to me for browsing projects... at least not on the surface. the amazing thing about github is that you can go to github.com without signing up and search a multitude of projects and their forks. that's awesome. it's a level playing field.
  - wldcordeiro 11y ago
    Is this not available to view signed out? https://gitlab.com/explore https://gitlab.com/explore if not I think that's something Gitlab should make visible to anyone. But the problem here isn't that Gitlab lacks this it's that no one is using it to make the explore page interesting.
    - sytse 11y ago
      https://gitlab.com/explore https://gitlab.com/explore should be viewable when you're signed out. There are not many projects there yet, but when I just looked I saw that iterm2 moved their issues to GitLab.com https://gitlab.com/gnachman/iterm2 https://gitlab.com/gnachman/iterm2 Projects fully on GitLab.com include F-droid and Mailman.
      - wldcordeiro 11y ago
        Tested it in private browsing mode and can confirm. The problem then is just the number of high profile projects on Github vs Gitlab.
        r0muald 11y ago
        The "problem" would be the number of high profile projects on GitHub.com vs GitLab.com - a subtle but important difference, I think.
    - x0 11y ago
      Yeah, I can see it and I don't have a Gitlab account.
- at-fates-hands 11y ago
  It's also backed by Y Combinator.
  - mcguire 11y ago
    Is that an advantage or a disadvantage? :-)
- munificent 11y ago
  Critical mass is hugely important, but it can also be surprisingly fickle. I remember when MySpace hit the tipping point and it seemed like Friendster became a ghost town overnight. A few years later when Facebook opened up outside of colleges, MySpace turned into a dead zone. It's possible for the same thing to happen with GitHub, though Facebook's continued entrenchment is also a signal that it may not.
  - girvo 11y ago
    Facebook is entrenched still, because they deliberately tried to avoid the mistakes that MySpace and Friendster (et al) made. They grew and expanded, changed their feature set to ensure that Facebook had everything your average person needed. GitHub haven't been doing that so much, but hopefully this response is the beginning of a change in that direction
blktiger 11y ago
I'm curious, what about bitbucket prevents it from being a real alternative to github?
- markeroon 11y ago
  They often have issues, in my experience. Not bad, but shouldn't be the backbone of every package manager out there.
- kitwalker12 11y ago
  IMHO it's the code search (which they've been planning for months now)
  - jschumacher 11y ago
    We haven't been planning it for months, we've been working on it for months. It's a big project to implement search at the scale of Bitbucket.
- BloodOfSokar 11y ago
  Their pricing model is different, which I think keeps the base feature-set neutered. They try to up-sell you to JIRA and Confluence, which disincentives them from improving the base tools, IMO.
  - jschumacher 11y ago
    Yes, the pricing model is different with the goal of making Bitbucket affordable for individual developers and small teams, no matter whether they work on public or private projects. Do we want people to use JIRA? If they require more than simple issue tracking, absolutely. But that doesn't mean that we aren't improving the base tools. For example, Bitbucket already provides the ability to vote for issues and recently added rendering of the CONTRIBUTING.md file for pull requests (http://blog.bitbucket.org/2016/01/26/pull-request-guidelines-for-bitbucket-cloud http://blog.bitbucket.org/2016/01/26/pull-request-guidelines...).
thejameskyle 11y ago
People are split between: - GitLab - Phabricator - GitHub + Phabricator Maniphest (or alternative)
yuhong 11y ago
SourceForge is probably not worth it now, but it is also worth watching.
- oneeyedpigeon 11y ago
  It's good if you're looking for malware. Everything else, less so.
  - yuhong 11y ago
    It is not good for malware either anymore.
urda 11y ago
GitLab and Bitbucket are equally as powerful. I've actually really enjoyed trying out GitLab for the past few days.
- sytse 11y ago
  Glad to hear you like GitLab!
  - urda 11y ago
    Thanks! I'm really new to it and I'm using it for basic mirroring for now. But the UI is really enjoyable and I've liked the native mirror support in GitLab. I do have one issue, but I already reported it here: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/support-forum/issues/536 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/support-forum/issues/536
    - sytse 11y ago
      Glad you like it, I asked a service engineer to look into your issue.
      - urda 11y ago
        Awesome! Thanks!
- aldanor 11y ago
  BitBucket doesn't have code search. GG.
  - urda 11y ago
    GitHub code search is pretty awful in practice. It's easier to use ack or grep to find relevant information in a repo.
    - aldanor 11y ago
      Or git grep, for that matter...

icholy 11y ago

Very obnoxious. It's embarrassing to see a community I respect so much acting so childish ...

halayli 11y ago

What's the reason behind not allowing issues to be deleted?

r0muald 11y ago

And yet, look at this blog post from 2 days ago: https://github.com/blog/2110-migrate-your-code-with-the-github-importer https://github.com/blog/2110-migrate-your-code-with-the-gith... still offering to migrate your existing SVN or Mercurial repositories to GitHub, without any mention of all the other data that are typical of a software project like issues. Should I migrate my Trac or Bitbucket issues manually to GitHub?