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This falls under very specific genre of Hacker News comment that has always struck me as profoundly uninteresting. Github built something that inarguably made

by tyre 7y ago

This falls under very specific genre of Hacker News comment that has always struck me as profoundly uninteresting. Github built something that inarguably made development better. - They host some huge number (tens of thousands? hundreds of thousands? millions?) of repositories for free. - They built Github Pages for people to ship websites and host those for free. - They built an intuitive flow for managing issues and pull requests, which is included with every repository for free. - They integrate freely and openly with all sorts of third-party services, some of which compete directly with them. That's quite uncommon for a for-profit software platform of their size. - They have given back immeasurably to the programming community, to the open source community, and to developers including sponsoring conferences, donating office space for events, etc. - Their developers widely share their (i.e. done at/for Github) work and contribute upstream. There is some argument that all of the above are self-serving for Github, which is proven false if you talk to a single developer at Github. Do they adhere to every idealistic principle of FLOSS? No. But, honestly, who gives a crap? So, to answer your question of WTF is going on: real, positive progress.

emilsedgh 7y ago
* This falls under very specific genre of Hacker News comment that has always struck me as profoundly uninteresting. * Not sure why you had to lead with an irrelevant comment like that as the rest of your comment has interesting counter arguments. I think Github did make development easier, but the fact that it's close source and now owned by Microsoft gives me an uneasy feeling. With that being said, the only thing that does make it ok is the fact that Git is decentralized. If Github was an svn host I definitely wouldn't have been ok with it or hosted anything FOSS on it.
- evv 7y ago
  > Git is decentralized. If Github was an svn host I definitely wouldn't have been ok with it or hosted anything FOSS on it. The most sticky part of Github is the social network that lives in issues, pull requests, and repository permissions. This is all entirely centralized, and it is scary how heavily the community relies on it. So in practice, results in just as closed of a system as SVN. And it doesn't matter if you're "ok with it". GH is where all the people and projects are. If you want to participate, you have no choice.
cyphar 7y ago
Except GP wasn't making any of the points you hand-waved away with "who gives a crap" (hint: all the people who complain about those things "give a crap"). They were saying that the fact we even care the GitHub went down at all is a problem with how much we've built our workflows around GitHub when Git was specifically designed to avoid this problem. Linux kernel development doesn't shut down if kernel.org is down (heck, when kernel.org was completely pwned it only delayed the kernel release by a week or two). People still send each other emails and even if a maintainer is AWOL, other maintainers will pick patches and route them through their own trees. The only problem with the kernel development system is that it isn't easy to on-board people. But if we had a better UX for this system it would be far superior in every respect. There was a recent post by a kernel dev on how this might be improved by building on top of Secure Scuttlebutt and having a nice implementation on top[1]. [1]: https://people.kernel.org/monsieuricon/patches-carved-into-developer-sigchains https://people.kernel.org/monsieuricon/patches-carved-into-d...

by tyre 7y ago

emilsedgh 7y ago

* This falls under very specific genre of Hacker News comment that has always struck me as profoundly uninteresting. * Not sure why you had to lead with an irrelevant comment like that as the rest of your comment has interesting counter arguments. I think Github did make development easier, but the fact that it's close source and now owned by Microsoft gives me an uneasy feeling. With that being said, the only thing that does make it ok is the fact that Git is decentralized. If Github was an svn host I definitely wouldn't have been ok with it or hosted anything FOSS on it.

evv 7y ago
> Git is decentralized. If Github was an svn host I definitely wouldn't have been ok with it or hosted anything FOSS on it. The most sticky part of Github is the social network that lives in issues, pull requests, and repository permissions. This is all entirely centralized, and it is scary how heavily the community relies on it. So in practice, results in just as closed of a system as SVN. And it doesn't matter if you're "ok with it". GH is where all the people and projects are. If you want to participate, you have no choice.

cyphar 7y ago

Except GP wasn't making any of the points you hand-waved away with "who gives a crap" (hint: all the people who complain about those things "give a crap"). They were saying that the fact we even care the GitHub went down at all is a problem with how much we've built our workflows around GitHub when Git was specifically designed to avoid this problem. Linux kernel development doesn't shut down if kernel.org is down (heck, when kernel.org was completely pwned it only delayed the kernel release by a week or two). People still send each other emails and even if a maintainer is AWOL, other maintainers will pick patches and route them through their own trees. The only problem with the kernel development system is that it isn't easy to on-board people. But if we had a better UX for this system it would be far superior in every respect. There was a recent post by a kernel dev on how this might be improved by building on top of Secure Scuttlebutt and having a nice implementation on top[1]. [1]: https://people.kernel.org/monsieuricon/patches-carved-into-developer-sigchains https://people.kernel.org/monsieuricon/patches-carved-into-d...