6 ms·

Why? It’s free for open source, reasonable for enterprise and private use and I think you could build a better one starting from scratch. GitHub’s success is l

by tbrock 8y ago

Why? It’s free for open source, reasonable for enterprise and private use and I think you could build a better one starting from scratch. GitHub’s success is largely due to the network effect and it’s entrenched status as the canonical code repository. Besides libgit2, aka “the secret sauce”, is already open source. What are you waiting for?

derefr 8y ago
> libgit2, aka “the secret sauce” I would describe GitHub's real "secret sauce" as the issue-tracking, wikis, project boards, and release management parts, that don't get represented in the repo itself. Which is to say, if you wanted to commoditize GitHub (which is basically what "open-sourcing your secret sauce" means), you'd have to create some sort of library that allowed you to treat a git repo + all those other things as one structured data-object. You would be able to use said library to both operate on all those pieces of data locally; and to sync them between different Git hosting services that all share those features. Or, better yet, figure out a way to put all those features into git itself, so that every git repo automatically transports those pieces of data alongside itself.
- enturn 8y ago
  Fossil SCM has Integrated Bug Tracking, Wiki, and Technotes. It's not git but is distributed. It's used for sqlite project.
  - derefr 8y ago
    That's cool. I wonder why Git hasn't copied the implementation.
    - dcuthbertson 8y ago
      They are completely different. In fossil, commit history is sacred, where git users can rebase, and cherry pick to their hearts content
      - derefr 8y ago
        I meant the implementation of these side-features as objects sitting in the repo, with appropriate client commands for creating and editing them, etc. Git already has notes, and signed commits/signed tags, which are all those same kind of "objects that just happen to be there." So they don't need to copy Fossil's architecture; they can just copy the way that said object types interact as dependents of commits (while letting them get blown away when commits themselves do.)
- tbrock 8y ago
  I’m not sure. Almost every GitHub competitor does those things better: phabricator, gitlab, etc...
  - derefr 8y ago
    Maybe "secret sauce" is the wrong term. People ended up choosing GitHub purely because of network effects, I think. But those features are the "lock-in" preventing individual projects from easily migrating away. If Git repos just "had" wikis, issues, etc. inside them, the lock-in wouldn't be there, so people would be switching between Git hosts all the time—and there wouldn't really be much value in a "git host" at all, beyond what just having a Git dir on your own server, plus a native-GUI Git client supporting the wiki/issues/etc. features, would get you.
    - tbrock 8y ago
      Yeah good point. That’s definitely true. I think though that 99%+ repos or there have zero issues, pull requests etc.
      - benologist 8y ago
        Maybe there’s no secret sauce of any value and it’s just pointless github is closed source, like a form of DRM just being used against us cause we’re silly and let it be so even as we aspire to see open source flourish...
    - kchoudhu 8y ago
      This. Git is not a best in class solution, and the community that has coalesced around it has predictably not chosen best in class tooling. This is okay. It's just source control at the end of the day.
    - simula67 8y ago
      > If Git repos just "had" wikis, issues, etc. inside them, the lock-in wouldn't be there People clearly never cared about that, since Fossil ( https://www.fossil-scm.org/index.html/doc/trunk/www/index.wiki https://www.fossil-scm.org/index.html/doc/trunk/www/index.wi... ) has these things and it never caught on
- eberkund 8y ago
  The problem with trying to commoditize those additional features and creating a standard is that although these different services have similarities they also have subtle differences. I don't know if the companies that create these products or their users would want to standardize because the reason for the differences is because people have different preferences.
- ioquatix 8y ago
  I started working on this actually. https://github.com/ioquatix/relaxo https://github.com/ioquatix/relaxo is a document database built on top of git. I recently added support for using a specific branch, so it should be trivial to allow a web app doing the things you suggest to store/run within the same git repo.
mehrdadn 8y ago
Exactly. I wonder how people would react to if Microsoft made the GitHub source public (and available for further extension by the community) but didn't grant the license to redistribute/deploy it anywhere else. Would people be content with that, or would they be grabbing more pitchforks and protesting Microsoft's actions as some kind of toxic evil? I'm skeptical that that would make people happy, and if it doesn't, then it goes to show the ulterior motivation isn't actually to just to extend the platform and "scratch my own itch", as they put it. It's to let themselves move off GitHub.
- TAForObvReasons 8y ago
  > It's to let themselves move off GitHub. It's more than that. GitLab raised the bar here. Being able to run GitLab CE internally has de-risked the decision to test internally. For the next wave of customers in the space, familiarity with GitHub open source isn't enough.
Arnt 8y ago
Github has had stunning stability. I bet their architecture is nontrivial, that dozens of parts of their code are tied intricately to their architecture, and that opensourcing only the bits that will run on typical AMIs or on debian^Wdevuan would be little more than opensourcing helloworld.rb.
- tbrock 8y ago
  Right and I don’t want to discount that. The scale they’ve achieved and the team that delivered it are incredible but presumably the people who want it to be open source won’t need any of that. They’ll be running it on a raspberry pi, not hosting the Rails or NodeJS repo.
- daxelrod 8y ago
  You can already get GitHub in an AMI; it’s called GitHub Enterprise.
  - Arnt 8y ago
    Complete with all the features in today's github.com? Including load balancing, sharding, DDOS protection etc.?
- simula67 8y ago
  > Github has had stunning stability Has it really ? I remember many threads here on complaining about Github's up time https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5808496 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5808496 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14893441 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14893441 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10984775 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10984775
  - KaiserPro 8y ago
    compared to gitlab, its a paragon of stability
kodablah 8y ago
Your reasons against "why" read more to me like "why not" as you listed things unaffected by whether they open source or not. The benefits for "why" are the same for all open source software and are not unique to this situation. The only question is if the costs are too great.
joelhandwell 8y ago
>Why? >What are you waiting for? If Github was made with micro services architecture, it could be split into open source "Client side + Test-backend" and closed sourced "Production-backend". Backend can be composed of some interface and multiple implementation such as test impl and prod impl. “the secret sauce” could be the "Production-backend" and MS have good in-house talents who operates Azure so no need for the help from OSS community to improve backend. However for example +1 button took so long time to be implemented even though it seems like small change in client side code and some adjustments in database. That itch lead to the https://github.com/dear-github/dear-github https://github.com/dear-github/dear-github open letter and signers listed here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1oGsg02jS-PnlIMJ3OlWIOEmhtG-udTwuDz_vsQPBHKs/edit https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1oGsg02jS-PnlIMJ3OlWI... The last sentence of the open letter says: "Hopefully none of these are a surprise to you as we’ve told you them before. We’ve waited years now for progress on any of them. If GitHub were open source itself, we would be implementing these things ourselves as a community—we’re very good at that!" I think that's OSS community want, including but not only I want.
- TheHydroImpulse 8y ago
  This just isn't possible. No company in their right mind would take their monolith and rewrite a bunch of stuff just to please a couple randoms on the internet. I think you're drastically underestimating the amount of code Github is powered by and how freaking long any type of refactor/rewrite would take. We're talking about years.
  - joelhandwell 8y ago
    I did a search and found http://highscalability.com/blog/2009/11/6/product-resque-githubs-distrubuted-job-queue.html http://highscalability.com/blog/2009/11/6/product-resque-git... It's talking about a component of Github backend called Resque (Distrubuted Job Queue) As long as I see these thing the architecture is highly distributed and it's possibly composed of micro services.
    - TheHydroImpulse 8y ago

by tbrock 8y ago

derefr 8y ago

> libgit2, aka “the secret sauce” I would describe GitHub's real "secret sauce" as the issue-tracking, wikis, project boards, and release management parts, that don't get represented in the repo itself. Which is to say, if you wanted to commoditize GitHub (which is basically what "open-sourcing your secret sauce" means), you'd have to create some sort of library that allowed you to treat a git repo + all those other things as one structured data-object. You would be able to use said library to both operate on all those pieces of data locally; and to sync them between different Git hosting services that all share those features. Or, better yet, figure out a way to put all those features into git itself, so that every git repo automatically transports those pieces of data alongside itself.

enturn 8y ago
Fossil SCM has Integrated Bug Tracking, Wiki, and Technotes. It's not git but is distributed. It's used for sqlite project.
- derefr 8y ago
  That's cool. I wonder why Git hasn't copied the implementation.
  - dcuthbertson 8y ago
    They are completely different. In fossil, commit history is sacred, where git users can rebase, and cherry pick to their hearts content
    - derefr 8y ago
      I meant the implementation of these side-features as objects sitting in the repo, with appropriate client commands for creating and editing them, etc. Git already has notes, and signed commits/signed tags, which are all those same kind of "objects that just happen to be there." So they don't need to copy Fossil's architecture; they can just copy the way that said object types interact as dependents of commits (while letting them get blown away when commits themselves do.)
tbrock 8y ago
I’m not sure. Almost every GitHub competitor does those things better: phabricator, gitlab, etc...
- derefr 8y ago
  Maybe "secret sauce" is the wrong term. People ended up choosing GitHub purely because of network effects, I think. But those features are the "lock-in" preventing individual projects from easily migrating away. If Git repos just "had" wikis, issues, etc. inside them, the lock-in wouldn't be there, so people would be switching between Git hosts all the time—and there wouldn't really be much value in a "git host" at all, beyond what just having a Git dir on your own server, plus a native-GUI Git client supporting the wiki/issues/etc. features, would get you.
  - tbrock 8y ago
    Yeah good point. That’s definitely true. I think though that 99%+ repos or there have zero issues, pull requests etc.
    - benologist 8y ago
      Maybe there’s no secret sauce of any value and it’s just pointless github is closed source, like a form of DRM just being used against us cause we’re silly and let it be so even as we aspire to see open source flourish...
  - kchoudhu 8y ago
    This. Git is not a best in class solution, and the community that has coalesced around it has predictably not chosen best in class tooling. This is okay. It's just source control at the end of the day.
  - simula67 8y ago
    > If Git repos just "had" wikis, issues, etc. inside them, the lock-in wouldn't be there People clearly never cared about that, since Fossil ( https://www.fossil-scm.org/index.html/doc/trunk/www/index.wiki https://www.fossil-scm.org/index.html/doc/trunk/www/index.wi... ) has these things and it never caught on
eberkund 8y ago
The problem with trying to commoditize those additional features and creating a standard is that although these different services have similarities they also have subtle differences. I don't know if the companies that create these products or their users would want to standardize because the reason for the differences is because people have different preferences.
ioquatix 8y ago
I started working on this actually. https://github.com/ioquatix/relaxo https://github.com/ioquatix/relaxo is a document database built on top of git. I recently added support for using a specific branch, so it should be trivial to allow a web app doing the things you suggest to store/run within the same git repo.

mehrdadn 8y ago

Exactly. I wonder how people would react to if Microsoft made the GitHub source public (and available for further extension by the community) but didn't grant the license to redistribute/deploy it anywhere else. Would people be content with that, or would they be grabbing more pitchforks and protesting Microsoft's actions as some kind of toxic evil? I'm skeptical that that would make people happy, and if it doesn't, then it goes to show the ulterior motivation isn't actually to just to extend the platform and "scratch my own itch", as they put it. It's to let themselves move off GitHub.

TAForObvReasons 8y ago
> It's to let themselves move off GitHub. It's more than that. GitLab raised the bar here. Being able to run GitLab CE internally has de-risked the decision to test internally. For the next wave of customers in the space, familiarity with GitHub open source isn't enough.

Arnt 8y ago

Github has had stunning stability. I bet their architecture is nontrivial, that dozens of parts of their code are tied intricately to their architecture, and that opensourcing only the bits that will run on typical AMIs or on debian^Wdevuan would be little more than opensourcing helloworld.rb.

tbrock 8y ago
Right and I don’t want to discount that. The scale they’ve achieved and the team that delivered it are incredible but presumably the people who want it to be open source won’t need any of that. They’ll be running it on a raspberry pi, not hosting the Rails or NodeJS repo.
daxelrod 8y ago
You can already get GitHub in an AMI; it’s called GitHub Enterprise.
- Arnt 8y ago
  Complete with all the features in today's github.com? Including load balancing, sharding, DDOS protection etc.?
simula67 8y ago
> Github has had stunning stability Has it really ? I remember many threads here on complaining about Github's up time https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5808496 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5808496 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14893441 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14893441 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10984775 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10984775
- KaiserPro 8y ago
  compared to gitlab, its a paragon of stability

kodablah 8y ago

Your reasons against "why" read more to me like "why not" as you listed things unaffected by whether they open source or not. The benefits for "why" are the same for all open source software and are not unique to this situation. The only question is if the costs are too great.

joelhandwell 8y ago

>Why? >What are you waiting for? If Github was made with micro services architecture, it could be split into open source "Client side + Test-backend" and closed sourced "Production-backend". Backend can be composed of some interface and multiple implementation such as test impl and prod impl. “the secret sauce” could be the "Production-backend" and MS have good in-house talents who operates Azure so no need for the help from OSS community to improve backend. However for example +1 button took so long time to be implemented even though it seems like small change in client side code and some adjustments in database. That itch lead to the https://github.com/dear-github/dear-github https://github.com/dear-github/dear-github open letter and signers listed here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1oGsg02jS-PnlIMJ3OlWIOEmhtG-udTwuDz_vsQPBHKs/edit https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1oGsg02jS-PnlIMJ3OlWI... The last sentence of the open letter says: "Hopefully none of these are a surprise to you as we’ve told you them before. We’ve waited years now for progress on any of them. If GitHub were open source itself, we would be implementing these things ourselves as a community—we’re very good at that!" I think that's OSS community want, including but not only I want.

TheHydroImpulse 8y ago
This just isn't possible. No company in their right mind would take their monolith and rewrite a bunch of stuff just to please a couple randoms on the internet. I think you're drastically underestimating the amount of code Github is powered by and how freaking long any type of refactor/rewrite would take. We're talking about years.
- joelhandwell 8y ago
  I did a search and found http://highscalability.com/blog/2009/11/6/product-resque-githubs-distrubuted-job-queue.html http://highscalability.com/blog/2009/11/6/product-resque-git... It's talking about a component of Github backend called Resque (Distrubuted Job Queue) As long as I see these thing the architecture is highly distributed and it's possibly composed of micro services.
  - TheHydroImpulse 8y ago