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As a contributor to a F/OSS project with some serious infrastructure (KDE), Github's uncontested success feels weird. It's a really anemic "solution" to the col
by ahartmetz 8y ago
As a contributor to a F/OSS project with some serious infrastructure (KDE), Github's uncontested success feels weird. It's a really anemic "solution" to the collaboration problem, especially with projects using it as their only collaboration platform. Most larger ones at least run mailing lists and a wiki or so. Some have a more sophisticated bugtracker, but most seem to stick with Github's... placeholder for one. Probably due to its integration with code review.
- machiaweliczny 8y agoI can recommend reviewable.io for github.
- bogle 8y agoDon't look now as they're having trouble with dropping offline ...
- piotrkaminski 8y agoAll fixed! (And it only affected people signing in from two different browsers at the same time, which was actually a pretty small proportion -- which is why it took so long to find and fix the issue.)
- DaiPlusPlus 8y agoGithub’s success stems from its simplicity imo. Pre-Github, projects would need to fire-up their own Bugzilla or Fogbugz instances, set-up all the project tracking criteria (areas, iterations, severity, etc). But unstructured label tags seem to work surprisingly well in practice: projects that would have otherwise demanded 20+ fields for work-item tracking now seem fine with issue labels.
- pritambaral 8y ago> Pre-Github, projects would need to fire-up their own Bugzilla or Fogbugz instances, set-up all the project tracking criteria (areas, iterations, severity, etc). So a ready-made setup at an existing service open to multiple projects would work. I guess that's what Sourceforge was.
- DaiPlusPlus 8y agoSourceforge stopped innovating after they started offering SVN as an alternative to CVS (!!), everything since then was about monetising their audience (e.g. spyware injected into binary installers) and wrecking the quality of the user-experience with aggressive advertising. Sourceforge could have been github, but when a company turns on its users while failing to deliver value it won’t last. Because git is decentralised it means all the git-hosting services become commodity, and we’ve learned that having the best UX keeps people around - even if your service is commodity, so I expect this basis will ensure GitHub (now part of Microsoft) will stay in the community’s good-graces.
- vbezhenar 8y agoIf you need to put 20+ tags it's more work, because you have to figure out what tag for what field, etc. Filling 20+ select boxes is easier.
- CodeCube 8y agoNeeding to put 20+ tags IMO is a hint that something about the process is wrong ... I'd love to hear some ideas about what could _possibly_ be enabled by having 20+ tags on a given work item. What workflow could possibly need that level of detail?
- vbezhenar 8y agoI agree, but that relates to the original complains about Bugzilla users who required 20+ fields. I encountered 3-5 fields maximum and usually they were optional and I would prefer form with 3-5 proper fields to arbitrary tag string.
- shados 8y ago> Github’s success stems from its simplicity imo. Bingo. It surprises a lot of people how little you need to be successful if everyone's on the same page. I've worked places that had thousands (yeah, thousands) of apps, dozens or hundreds of millions line of code, and had little to no issues with collaboration (oh, they thought they did, but compared to almost any other company, they really didn't), and process/tooling involved github issues, markdown files for docs and little else. Sometimes they'd toss in trello in the mix and that's about it. You definitely can do better, but as a baseline, it's more than enough.
- z3t4 8y agoAround six years ago I switched from the Microsoft platform/stack to a fully open source stack. I remember thinking about Github as something magical, I wanted to learn Git so that I could have a repo on Github, not the other way around. The funny/sad thing is that Microsoft now controls most of the stack I switched to ...
- mmillin 8y agoWell GitHub isn't open source at all, so it makes sense that you still wound up with some corporate interest controlling that part of the stack.