8 ms·

Change GitBucket user interface to make difference with GitHub

140 points by sandGorgon 11y ago

ocdtrekkie 11y ago
This was one of those predictable things. Generally when you start your project on the words "x clone", x is going to take issue with it. Often an application's UI is one of it's greatest assets, and copying it is generally a no-go. Changing the colors of your theme doesn't really substantially change the UI. They should strive to become something of their own, and go after improving past what GitHub offers.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
tenken 11y ago
Really Gitbucket should seek to change their UX. Not just the UI. Right now gitbucket looks like a functional clone of github, that's bad. It's possible to appear different, but retain feature-set it's just hard. And obvisously -- I think, you could bundle a legacy Github theme as an addon to gitbucket provided by the community if you really wanted to. Just not ship the product out the door as a 100% clone of github, UI and all.
- blister 11y ago
  But... GitBucket is a project that is trying to be a Scala-based clone of GitHub. That's what their project is about. They're trying to copy the look and feel of GitHub because that's exactly what they're trying to do. It (to me) would be like Microsoft asking LibreOffice to change their look and feel because it looks too similar to MS Office. LibreOffice is SUPPOSED to look like MS Office so that users can switch without much pain. Right?
popey456963 11y ago
Considering the blatant similarities between the GitBucket and Github UI, I'm really not surprised they were getting upset about it. Surely GitBucket can not be surprised either?
sytse 11y ago
I want to applaud GitHub for doing this in a peaceful manner. They have every right to ask this. I think having all project develop their own UI style will allow for more innovation to happen. At GitLab we are greatly inspired by GitHub but over time the GitLab became more distinctive. And that allowed a trickle of innovation to flow back, for example protected branches.
- joering2 11y ago
  Not really. I wish most GUIs would be the same if they are offered for pretty much the same functionality, like searching for hotels or flights. Too bad to see the smaller is giving up the good fight. Last thing I would care is someone takes my GUI -- only means I designed something extremely useful in the first place. Go ahead! Duplicate for everyone's benefit. And notice they said its a good first start. This will get similar to Apple having issues with corner's curve of Samsung devices... never enough curved to actually not remind of Apple's products. Bad move on Github part, but I'm happy with Btibucket anyways.
  - zeveb 11y ago
    > Not really. I wish most GUIs would be the same if they are offered for pretty much the same functionality, like searching for hotels or flights. Agreed. Remember when one of the complaints about Linux apps was that they used so many different toolkits (e.g. Athena, qt, gtk+ &c.)? Now we use web apps, and every single one looks different, and none of them is as usable as xterm. 'Progress'!
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
orliesaurus 11y ago
After reading the article and looking at the screenshots I can only say: No shit Sherlock!
lexicality 11y ago
Looking at the screenshot I thought "Wow, I can see why Github would be annoyed at that" before realising that was their proposed not-at-all-like-github-now-honestly new UI. Their demo looks like they just stole Github's CSS templates.
- Artemis2 11y ago
  I had exactly the same reaction. There are more screenshots of their previous look in other posts: https://gitbucket.github.io/gitbucket-news/images/gitbucket-3.12/new-github-ui.png https://gitbucket.github.io/gitbucket-news/images/gitbucket-... (there's even "GitBucket now supports current GitHub UI" in the post?!) https://gitbucket.github.io/gitbucket-news/images/gitbucket-3.11/branch-protection.png https://gitbucket.github.io/gitbucket-news/images/gitbucket-... https://gitbucket.github.io/gitbucket-news/images/gitbucket-3.6/pull_request.png https://gitbucket.github.io/gitbucket-news/images/gitbucket-...
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - sheeshkebab 11y ago
    Not defending the ui aping, but GH css is open source: http://primercss.io/layout/ http://primercss.io/layout/ They should have kept it proprietary if their lawyers are touchy about liberal open source licenses. >Open source Available for use under the MIT license and built with open source projects like SCSS, Jekyll, Grunt, and more.
    - jerf 11y ago
      Open source covers the copyright. This is more a trademark issue. The trademark issue is independent of the copyright-openness of their assets, as it is not valid to infringe their trademark either with their assets, or with fully copyright-independent assets.
      - stingraycharles 11y ago
eckza 11y ago
Round of applause for everyone involved for staying level-headed and agreeable.
- x0ra 11y ago
  legal bullying is still legal bullying, agreeable or not.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
spdustin 11y ago
Seems to me that nearly every UI component in the screenshot is stock Bootstrap.
e40 11y ago
What am I missing here?? I thought look and feel wasn't copyrightable. Didn't we learn that in the 80's?
- skimmas 11y ago
  I'm far from having any real legal knowledge on the matter, but I suppose copying the look and feel is different from looking so much the same that people might miss that they are two different projects. There are probably also some difuse border between look and feel and branding.
- deckar01 11y ago
  It is a violation of GitHub's ToS. GitBucket is hosted on GitHub.
  - justinsb 11y ago
    Which would likely be a violation of anti-trust law, as we learned in the 90s. I hope GitBucket posts the email from Github.
    - biot 11y ago
      Are you suggesting that GitHub is a monopoly and subject to the Sherman Act?
    - dmschulman 11y ago
      Please explain
    - msbarnett 11y ago
      > Which would likely be a violation of anti-trust law, as we learned in the 90s Whatever it is that you think you learned in the 90s that would somehow make that an antitrust violation is quite mistaken.
    - zanny 11y ago
      Github is not a trust, in no sense. The closest part of it is the developer mindshare and hostility to a competitive hosting ecosystem for some incredibly irrational reason a lot of devs have. But even then, gitlab is a direct and successful competitor in the exact same space.
pfarnsworth 11y ago
GitHub was not wrong to do this. Gitbucket's UI is confusingly similar to GitHub's so I have no qualms with the actions taken. The good thing is that they took a reasonable approach to this.
- lovelearning 11y ago
  I'm not sure I understand how someone can get confused between a reputed SaaS like GitHub and something called GitBucket. Don't software engineers look at URLs and page titles nowadays?
  - icebraining 11y ago
    What makes you think only software engineers use Github?
  - PhasmaFelis 11y ago
    Most humans do not pause to consciously inspect the URL and header of every single one of the hundreds or thousands of pages they look at every day, no.
- y4mi 11y ago
  gitbucket is selfhosted... there was really no realistic way to mix them up
dfc 11y ago
> "It was saying GitHub does not allow to clone..." One of the things they did not clone from GitHub is well written prose. GitHub's blog posts are always well written and enjoyable to read.
- bratfro 11y ago
  Quite an unsporting comment mate
- brandur 11y ago
  It's true, but you might want to give them a pass on this one. The post isn't attributed to any particular author, but it looks like the top five contributors are all Japanese: https://github.com/gitbucket/gitbucket/graphs/contributors https://github.com/gitbucket/gitbucket/graphs/contributors
- budu3 11y ago
  To be fair to them they are not native English speakers. I would have an equally hard time (of not impossible) writing well written Japanese prose.
  - dfc 11y ago
    It would be impossible for me to write at all in Japanese. Romans would laugh hysterically if they read the blog I wrote in Latin. Which is why any corporate communications to my Roman customers would not come from my stylus. I can't imagine building a brand and or loyal customer base any other way.
smaili 11y ago
I think it's kind of funny they start out by saying: At first, we have never copied any materials from GitHub so this is not problem. But later when you scroll to their footer it says: GitBucket is a GitHub clone powered by Scala.
- levemi 11y ago
  Clone when used in this sense doesn't mean copying. Copying pretty much means re-using the exact same source, like literally copy and pasted. A clone is just something that does the same thing as something else. I'm not saying GitBucket didn't copy or take code, I'm just saying that calling something a clone doesn't usually convey that they took code, it's just that they're very similar in what they do as another thing. You could say Gitlab is a GitHub clone but it doesn't look anything like GitHub (although it did at one time).
- rexf 11y ago
  Even the name GitBucket is very confusing. At first, I thought it was referring to BitBucket. But it's not GitHub or BitBucket.
  - ljk 11y ago
    It's till comment that I realized it's not talking about Bitbucket
    - mason240 11y ago
      You're not the only one.
- JoshTriplett 11y ago
  GNU started out as a UNIX clone, but that doesn't mean it copied code from UNIX. There's nothing wrong with building a compatible clone of a proprietary program or platform; that's a valuable contribution.
- pbarnes_1 11y ago
  ... and?
smoyer 11y ago
I've been using GitBucket since about version 0.5.0 and I honestly liked the GitBucket UI better before the push to look just like GitHub. Feature-wise, it's behind both GitHub and GitLab, but for company internal repositories, it also doesn't me to risk the security of my server by running RoR. I lost a server to hackers (temporarily) due to an RoR vulnerability that was exposed through Redmine, so perhaps I'm a bit sensitive.
- icebraining 11y ago
  If it's just for internal use, why not close off external access or put an authentication layer "over" the application? I have my personal services protected with Basic Auth¹, it's just a matter of running a command to create the passwords file and adding two lines to your Nginx config. ¹ With HTTPS, of course, but that should be used anyway, to protect the app's own authentication.
- tomschlick 11y ago
  > I lost a server to hackers (temporarily) due to an RoR vulnerability that was exposed through Redmine, so perhaps I'm a bit sensitive. That's more of a redmine vuln than a ruby one. Someone can write bad/vulnerable code in any language... I know, I write PHP daily :)
dimgl 11y ago
That's their refresh? It looks exactly like GitHub...
- robotnoises 11y ago
  No no... as you can clearly see, the buttons on Gitbucket have a border-radius of 6px while Github is 5.
kowdermeister 11y ago
Guys should be bought by Rocket Internet.
frade33 11y ago
>GitBucket is a GitHub clone powered by Scala. site footer
foxly 11y ago
Er... it does look an awful lot like GitHub. Like down to the pixel. Props to both parties for dealing with this like adults versus suing each other, which is how most of these situations usually end.
apetresc 11y ago
What I find odd is that, even though they appear to be publicly released, they still develop their own project in GitHub! Anyone know what's holding them back from self-hosting?
- jtmarmon 11y ago
  i was thinking the same thing...how weird
- slig 11y ago
  Well, I believe it's easier to get contributors on GH than to force newcomers to create an account on a new service just to submit a patch.
- molecule 11y ago
  What slig said, and also all of the infrastructure that GitHub provides for free.
Mizza 11y ago
It kind of looks like this is a cultural difference. It's an Asian project, and it seems like they simply don't care about IP as much over there. We don't really care about it here either, but we'll at least try to hide it by changing the UI so it doesn't look like a clone, even if it blatantly is. There, the _point_ is to be a clone. It's sort of a mark of respect. It's just a very different mentality around this stuff, I hope it can be resolved amicably.
grandalf 11y ago
Interestingly, Github seems to be in a similar product vs infrastructure quagmire to Twitter. If Github were an infrastructure company, we'd all want our git repos mirrored there and we'd all want to use the collaboration and reputation APIs. But viewed through the product lens, Github is a user interface for git which ought to be considered proprietary. When Github first launched issues, I was hoping that it would be pulled into .git itself, so that we might all manage issues locally using a cli and then sync changes with peer copies of the repo. Then, when Github launched jobs, I thought the idea was that hiring managers would get a very good sense of a candidate's skills by seeing information surfaced by github about a coder's habits and social network. This would in effect be a big data approach to evaluating a coder as a function of commits, and a meritocratic leader board for the industry. Then, when Github announced Atom, I was expecting a bunch of Github branded open source tooling, yet the approach seems hesitant and focused on beginners. All along, Github charges a premium for private repos, which has allowed its competitors to grow. Now Github has an incentive to become proprietary, because it no longer has a free network effect. With a $100M investment, one needs pretty big numbers to move the needle. I think a turning point was when Github decided to stop being a rubygems repo. It is exactly that kind of deep integration of hosting, reputation system, and build system that Github offers a unique competitive advantage. Github's search was also broken for years. This allowed NPM to spring up, but lacking the ability to innovate deeply in the area of reputation the way Github could have. So now Github has to decide if it can be a trusted platform or if it's going to fight petty battles over producty things like Twitter has done.
Flimm 11y ago
Note that this is blog post is not from "BitBucket" but "GitBucket", it took my brain longer than it should have to realise this.
- savanaly 11y ago
  I didn't realize it until I read your comment and can attest I was extremely confused. "Wait, bitbucket is hosted on github? Wait they redesigned to look like github? Why is the blog post for this major cloud provider written in broken english?" (to be clear I didn't have a problem understanding the blog post and don't mind that the english isn't perfect, I just thought it was curious).
BogusIKnow 11y ago
As always, if you're HNs darling, it's fine to send the lawyers.
selamtux 11y ago
I don't understant why people think gitbucket should look different then github. Ofcourse logo, icons, css, js files must be rewrited by project contributors but looks can be same as github. We love github, we use github, we promote github to companies, friends and community, we help them grow and being great with open letters, whishes, advises, even we publish our codes under gpl or other free/open source projects on github They change and show how we can interact with other developers. Github have a great experiences with coding community, resources to explore more ways to do things with rigth way with our help. Github must be proud them self and its good. But as a community driven projects doesnt have this experiences and/or knowlage. Copying ui and ux it's not be issue for those projects if they dont go to commertial way. Its shows what github doing rigth. In this community we have great hackers, they can offer help to gitbucket, but we don't have great ux hackers as code hackers. Until we have ux developers (in general speaking) copying experiences from somewhere and given them to people sould not be issue.

140 points by sandGorgon 11y ago

This was one of those predictable things. Generally when you start your project on the words "x clone", x is going to take issue with it. Often an application's UI is one of it's greatest assets, and copying it is generally a no-go. Changing the colors of your theme doesn't really substantially change the UI. They should strive to become something of their own, and go after improving past what GitHub offers.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

tenken 11y ago

Really Gitbucket should seek to change their UX. Not just the UI. Right now gitbucket looks like a functional clone of github, that's bad. It's possible to appear different, but retain feature-set it's just hard. And obvisously -- I think, you could bundle a legacy Github theme as an addon to gitbucket provided by the community if you really wanted to. Just not ship the product out the door as a 100% clone of github, UI and all.

blister 11y ago
But... GitBucket is a project that is trying to be a Scala-based clone of GitHub. That's what their project is about. They're trying to copy the look and feel of GitHub because that's exactly what they're trying to do. It (to me) would be like Microsoft asking LibreOffice to change their look and feel because it looks too similar to MS Office. LibreOffice is SUPPOSED to look like MS Office so that users can switch without much pain. Right?

popey456963 11y ago

Considering the blatant similarities between the GitBucket and Github UI, I'm really not surprised they were getting upset about it. Surely GitBucket can not be surprised either?

sytse 11y ago

I want to applaud GitHub for doing this in a peaceful manner. They have every right to ask this. I think having all project develop their own UI style will allow for more innovation to happen. At GitLab we are greatly inspired by GitHub but over time the GitLab became more distinctive. And that allowed a trickle of innovation to flow back, for example protected branches.

joering2 11y ago
Not really. I wish most GUIs would be the same if they are offered for pretty much the same functionality, like searching for hotels or flights. Too bad to see the smaller is giving up the good fight. Last thing I would care is someone takes my GUI -- only means I designed something extremely useful in the first place. Go ahead! Duplicate for everyone's benefit. And notice they said its a good first start. This will get similar to Apple having issues with corner's curve of Samsung devices... never enough curved to actually not remind of Apple's products. Bad move on Github part, but I'm happy with Btibucket anyways.
- zeveb 11y ago
  > Not really. I wish most GUIs would be the same if they are offered for pretty much the same functionality, like searching for hotels or flights. Agreed. Remember when one of the complaints about Linux apps was that they used so many different toolkits (e.g. Athena, qt, gtk+ &c.)? Now we use web apps, and every single one looks different, and none of them is as usable as xterm. 'Progress'!
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]

orliesaurus 11y ago

After reading the article and looking at the screenshots I can only say: No shit Sherlock!

lexicality 11y ago

Looking at the screenshot I thought "Wow, I can see why Github would be annoyed at that" before realising that was their proposed not-at-all-like-github-now-honestly new UI. Their demo looks like they just stole Github's CSS templates.

Artemis2 11y ago
I had exactly the same reaction. There are more screenshots of their previous look in other posts: https://gitbucket.github.io/gitbucket-news/images/gitbucket-3.12/new-github-ui.png https://gitbucket.github.io/gitbucket-news/images/gitbucket-... (there's even "GitBucket now supports current GitHub UI" in the post?!) https://gitbucket.github.io/gitbucket-news/images/gitbucket-3.11/branch-protection.png https://gitbucket.github.io/gitbucket-news/images/gitbucket-... https://gitbucket.github.io/gitbucket-news/images/gitbucket-3.6/pull_request.png https://gitbucket.github.io/gitbucket-news/images/gitbucket-...
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- sheeshkebab 11y ago
  Not defending the ui aping, but GH css is open source: http://primercss.io/layout/ http://primercss.io/layout/ They should have kept it proprietary if their lawyers are touchy about liberal open source licenses. >Open source Available for use under the MIT license and built with open source projects like SCSS, Jekyll, Grunt, and more.
  - jerf 11y ago
    Open source covers the copyright. This is more a trademark issue. The trademark issue is independent of the copyright-openness of their assets, as it is not valid to infringe their trademark either with their assets, or with fully copyright-independent assets.
    - stingraycharles 11y ago

eckza 11y ago

Round of applause for everyone involved for staying level-headed and agreeable.

x0ra 11y ago
legal bullying is still legal bullying, agreeable or not.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

spdustin 11y ago

Seems to me that nearly every UI component in the screenshot is stock Bootstrap.

e40 11y ago

What am I missing here?? I thought look and feel wasn't copyrightable. Didn't we learn that in the 80's?

skimmas 11y ago
I'm far from having any real legal knowledge on the matter, but I suppose copying the look and feel is different from looking so much the same that people might miss that they are two different projects. There are probably also some difuse border between look and feel and branding.
deckar01 11y ago
It is a violation of GitHub's ToS. GitBucket is hosted on GitHub.
- justinsb 11y ago
  Which would likely be a violation of anti-trust law, as we learned in the 90s. I hope GitBucket posts the email from Github.
  - biot 11y ago
    Are you suggesting that GitHub is a monopoly and subject to the Sherman Act?
  - dmschulman 11y ago
    Please explain
  - msbarnett 11y ago
    > Which would likely be a violation of anti-trust law, as we learned in the 90s Whatever it is that you think you learned in the 90s that would somehow make that an antitrust violation is quite mistaken.
  - zanny 11y ago
    Github is not a trust, in no sense. The closest part of it is the developer mindshare and hostility to a competitive hosting ecosystem for some incredibly irrational reason a lot of devs have. But even then, gitlab is a direct and successful competitor in the exact same space.

pfarnsworth 11y ago

GitHub was not wrong to do this. Gitbucket's UI is confusingly similar to GitHub's so I have no qualms with the actions taken. The good thing is that they took a reasonable approach to this.

lovelearning 11y ago
I'm not sure I understand how someone can get confused between a reputed SaaS like GitHub and something called GitBucket. Don't software engineers look at URLs and page titles nowadays?
- icebraining 11y ago
  What makes you think only software engineers use Github?
- PhasmaFelis 11y ago
  Most humans do not pause to consciously inspect the URL and header of every single one of the hundreds or thousands of pages they look at every day, no.
y4mi 11y ago
gitbucket is selfhosted... there was really no realistic way to mix them up

dfc 11y ago

> "It was saying GitHub does not allow to clone..." One of the things they did not clone from GitHub is well written prose. GitHub's blog posts are always well written and enjoyable to read.

bratfro 11y ago
Quite an unsporting comment mate
brandur 11y ago
It's true, but you might want to give them a pass on this one. The post isn't attributed to any particular author, but it looks like the top five contributors are all Japanese: https://github.com/gitbucket/gitbucket/graphs/contributors https://github.com/gitbucket/gitbucket/graphs/contributors
budu3 11y ago
To be fair to them they are not native English speakers. I would have an equally hard time (of not impossible) writing well written Japanese prose.
- dfc 11y ago
  It would be impossible for me to write at all in Japanese. Romans would laugh hysterically if they read the blog I wrote in Latin. Which is why any corporate communications to my Roman customers would not come from my stylus. I can't imagine building a brand and or loyal customer base any other way.

smaili 11y ago

I think it's kind of funny they start out by saying: At first, we have never copied any materials from GitHub so this is not problem. But later when you scroll to their footer it says: GitBucket is a GitHub clone powered by Scala.

levemi 11y ago
Clone when used in this sense doesn't mean copying. Copying pretty much means re-using the exact same source, like literally copy and pasted. A clone is just something that does the same thing as something else. I'm not saying GitBucket didn't copy or take code, I'm just saying that calling something a clone doesn't usually convey that they took code, it's just that they're very similar in what they do as another thing. You could say Gitlab is a GitHub clone but it doesn't look anything like GitHub (although it did at one time).
rexf 11y ago
Even the name GitBucket is very confusing. At first, I thought it was referring to BitBucket. But it's not GitHub or BitBucket.
- ljk 11y ago
  It's till comment that I realized it's not talking about Bitbucket
  - mason240 11y ago
    You're not the only one.
JoshTriplett 11y ago
GNU started out as a UNIX clone, but that doesn't mean it copied code from UNIX. There's nothing wrong with building a compatible clone of a proprietary program or platform; that's a valuable contribution.
pbarnes_1 11y ago
... and?

smoyer 11y ago

I've been using GitBucket since about version 0.5.0 and I honestly liked the GitBucket UI better before the push to look just like GitHub. Feature-wise, it's behind both GitHub and GitLab, but for company internal repositories, it also doesn't me to risk the security of my server by running RoR. I lost a server to hackers (temporarily) due to an RoR vulnerability that was exposed through Redmine, so perhaps I'm a bit sensitive.

icebraining 11y ago
If it's just for internal use, why not close off external access or put an authentication layer "over" the application? I have my personal services protected with Basic Auth¹, it's just a matter of running a command to create the passwords file and adding two lines to your Nginx config. ¹ With HTTPS, of course, but that should be used anyway, to protect the app's own authentication.
tomschlick 11y ago
> I lost a server to hackers (temporarily) due to an RoR vulnerability that was exposed through Redmine, so perhaps I'm a bit sensitive. That's more of a redmine vuln than a ruby one. Someone can write bad/vulnerable code in any language... I know, I write PHP daily :)

dimgl 11y ago

That's their refresh? It looks exactly like GitHub...

robotnoises 11y ago
No no... as you can clearly see, the buttons on Gitbucket have a border-radius of 6px while Github is 5.

kowdermeister 11y ago

Guys should be bought by Rocket Internet.

frade33 11y ago

>GitBucket is a GitHub clone powered by Scala. site footer

foxly 11y ago

Er... it does look an awful lot like GitHub. Like down to the pixel. Props to both parties for dealing with this like adults versus suing each other, which is how most of these situations usually end.

apetresc 11y ago

What I find odd is that, even though they appear to be publicly released, they still develop their own project in GitHub! Anyone know what's holding them back from self-hosting?

jtmarmon 11y ago
i was thinking the same thing...how weird
slig 11y ago
Well, I believe it's easier to get contributors on GH than to force newcomers to create an account on a new service just to submit a patch.
molecule 11y ago
What slig said, and also all of the infrastructure that GitHub provides for free.

Mizza 11y ago

It kind of looks like this is a cultural difference. It's an Asian project, and it seems like they simply don't care about IP as much over there. We don't really care about it here either, but we'll at least try to hide it by changing the UI so it doesn't look like a clone, even if it blatantly is. There, the _point_ is to be a clone. It's sort of a mark of respect. It's just a very different mentality around this stuff, I hope it can be resolved amicably.

grandalf 11y ago

Interestingly, Github seems to be in a similar product vs infrastructure quagmire to Twitter. If Github were an infrastructure company, we'd all want our git repos mirrored there and we'd all want to use the collaboration and reputation APIs. But viewed through the product lens, Github is a user interface for git which ought to be considered proprietary. When Github first launched issues, I was hoping that it would be pulled into .git itself, so that we might all manage issues locally using a cli and then sync changes with peer copies of the repo. Then, when Github launched jobs, I thought the idea was that hiring managers would get a very good sense of a candidate's skills by seeing information surfaced by github about a coder's habits and social network. This would in effect be a big data approach to evaluating a coder as a function of commits, and a meritocratic leader board for the industry. Then, when Github announced Atom, I was expecting a bunch of Github branded open source tooling, yet the approach seems hesitant and focused on beginners. All along, Github charges a premium for private repos, which has allowed its competitors to grow. Now Github has an incentive to become proprietary, because it no longer has a free network effect. With a $100M investment, one needs pretty big numbers to move the needle. I think a turning point was when Github decided to stop being a rubygems repo. It is exactly that kind of deep integration of hosting, reputation system, and build system that Github offers a unique competitive advantage. Github's search was also broken for years. This allowed NPM to spring up, but lacking the ability to innovate deeply in the area of reputation the way Github could have. So now Github has to decide if it can be a trusted platform or if it's going to fight petty battles over producty things like Twitter has done.

Flimm 11y ago

Note that this is blog post is not from "BitBucket" but "GitBucket", it took my brain longer than it should have to realise this.

savanaly 11y ago
I didn't realize it until I read your comment and can attest I was extremely confused. "Wait, bitbucket is hosted on github? Wait they redesigned to look like github? Why is the blog post for this major cloud provider written in broken english?" (to be clear I didn't have a problem understanding the blog post and don't mind that the english isn't perfect, I just thought it was curious).

BogusIKnow 11y ago

As always, if you're HNs darling, it's fine to send the lawyers.

selamtux 11y ago

I don't understant why people think gitbucket should look different then github. Ofcourse logo, icons, css, js files must be rewrited by project contributors but looks can be same as github. We love github, we use github, we promote github to companies, friends and community, we help them grow and being great with open letters, whishes, advises, even we publish our codes under gpl or other free/open source projects on github They change and show how we can interact with other developers. Github have a great experiences with coding community, resources to explore more ways to do things with rigth way with our help. Github must be proud them self and its good. But as a community driven projects doesnt have this experiences and/or knowlage. Copying ui and ux it's not be issue for those projects if they dont go to commertial way. Its shows what github doing rigth. In this community we have great hackers, they can offer help to gitbucket, but we don't have great ux hackers as code hackers. Until we have ux developers (in general speaking) copying experiences from somewhere and given them to people sould not be issue.