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I'll be forever grateful for what GitHub has done for the OSS community. People today don't remember what they replaced, namely Sourceforge and various home-gro
by KarlKemp 6y ago
I'll be forever grateful for what GitHub has done for the OSS community. People today don't remember what they replaced, namely Sourceforge and various home-grown tools of various levels of dysfunction.
Would anyone doubt that open source contributions, and individual contributers even more so, have grown by an order of magnitude or more in the last decade or so? And that GitHub's process improvements and standardisation were the major factor in this?
It used to be, you had to mail patches to some mailing list, with each projects having their own set of arcane rules, sometimes written and sometimes informal, but always enforced with that very special enthusiasm stale organisations devote to policing arbitrary norms because that's the sole remaining source of the old timer's power differential.
Or at least that's how it seemed to me, for I never felt courageous enough to try.
These days, I fire off smaller contributions several times a week, and contribute some medium-sized feature once or twice a year.
Meanwhile, the most impressive thing about GitLab keeps being this strange quirk of them, that among all the companies I know, they are closest to being a total clone of an existing product. Or at least they were in the beginning, when their CSS still had ".gh-wide-3" class names.
Yet despite this, or maybe because of it, they are also the only company that repeatedly lorded it over their competitor when they came late to implementing some minor feature. Seriously: I noticed it the first time because it's a level of pettiness not usually seen. And since then, there have been three or four more instances.
- astrobe_ 6y ago> [...] always enforced with that very special enthusiasm stale organisations devote to policing arbitrary norms because that's the sole remaining source of the old timer's power differential. Or at least that's how it seemed to me, for I never felt courageous enough to try. Why the same people that seem afraid of email, can however gratuitously accuse others of being on an ego trip on a public forum, I wonder.
- ptx 6y agoGitHub wasn't the only service responsible for replacing Sourceforge. Lots of open source projects used to be hosted on Bitbucket before Git gained total domination among the version control systems.