15 ms·

Let's make sure GitHub doesn't become the only option

289 points by zdw 4y ago

test20201 4y ago
The writer uses macOS. If github is 'only' option so it Apple becoming these days. From iMessages (blue/green tick) social pressure across the world.
- aembleton 4y ago
  And the writer hosts the source for his blog on github https://github.com/edwardloveall/portfolio https://github.com/edwardloveall/portfolio
throwaway2056 4y ago
(I wish github does not become one but sadly gitlab is beset with constant pain) - no proper communication - unclear future plan - poor documentation See for example https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/380872 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/380872
- worldsavior 4y ago
  Slow UI, JS is a must, looks bad.
  - simse 4y ago
    the almost haiku!
- vbezhenar 4y ago
  Use gogs.
  - pahool 4y ago
    I'm currently looking at alternatives for self-hosting. Do you prefer gogs to gitea? why, if so?
    - turnsout 4y ago
      I’ve been using gitea for years and I love it. I heard about gogs after migrating to gitea, but it seems like gitea is mostly an improved gogs.
    - vbezhenar 4y ago
      I prefer projects maintained by single or few developers. Gogs seems to be that kind of project. Gitea is maintained by some kind of community. Other than that, I think they don't differ that much. Gitea is Gogs fork after all.
- burnished 4y ago
  I feel like if gitlab were worse it would be less frustrating because my expectations would be considerably lower.
- Lutger 4y ago
  I've looked at your example, but all I'm seeing is a deprecation process for a feature with an alternative workflow, and all sorts of warnings, a timeline and even a shifting timeline to allow users to update. Can you specify exactly what you find lacking? Is it the fact that there is a breaking change? I'm not familiar with this case, but from a glance I see proper communication, a clear future plan and adequate documentation. I'm not affiliated with gitlab btw.
  - throwaway2056 4y ago
    If one runs the command until last week or so it exited (with failure) but pointed out that it is deprecated and provided a link to https://docs.gitlab.com/runner/register/index.html https://docs.gitlab.com/runner/register/index.html gitlab-runner register documentation pages that once again stated the obvious. No difference at all. Then you rerun the command - same bounce out. No clue. The docs linked at the URL still say to use the --registration-token. finally (after digging into stackexchange and gitlab issue) one needs to run the command without --non-interactive No where in the documentation it (until last week) that this should be removed for registering a runner as of today (last few months).
  - mardifoufs 4y ago
    That's the thing though! They announced one of the most critical part of the runners (the token auth) to be deprecated for months before the replacement was even available for teams to switch to. Very bizarre
mothsonasloth 4y ago
I think Github have already won the cultural dev war. I hear many a developer saying Github instead of "Git". A recent example from a mid level dev: "I'm gonna branch from the github repository" - when the repository is self hosted
- FearlessNebula 4y ago
  Was it a self hosted github instance?
  - mothsonasloth 4y ago
    No, https://git-scm.com/downloads https://git-scm.com/downloads Github != Git
  - lionkor 4y ago
    You cant self host github.
    - aezart 4y ago
      That's what github enterprise is for
    - hbn 4y ago
      https://docs.github.com/en/enterprise-server@3.5/admin/overview/about-github-enterprise-server https://docs.github.com/en/enterprise-server@3.5/admin/overv...
- Zealotux 4y ago
  My current company uses GitLab; anyone mistakenly referring to it as "Github" would get swiftly corrected, even as a simple proxy word for "Git".
- lesuorac 4y ago
  I'm surprised GitHub isn't trying to avoid their trademarked becoming generic [1]. If that keeps up you can just call your alternative repo storage system GitHub 2.0 or GitHub Enterprise or something. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_trademark https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_trademark
leetharris 4y ago
I don't think things like this really need proactive measures. If GitHub becomes a problem there are dozens of alternatives for every piece of the pipeline. I get winded by all these posts that claim we need to be cautious about every step we make.
- alwaysbeconsing 4y ago
  This isn't proactive; the article listed several ways in which GitHub is now a problem.
loloquwowndueo 4y ago
launchpad!! https://launchpad.net https://launchpad.net
swozey 4y ago
Ignoring all of the great social/community features like having pages for trending repos/developers and things of that nature that I check frequently, the Github Actions marketplace is a game changer. CircleCI has Orbs but there are so, so many fewer since the community is so much smaller. I'm not sure if Gitlab has anything similar yet. With that said, I really need a CI system that has a maintenance mode button so I can do 250 failing builds fixing pipelines (I'm ops) and not spam everyone with emails from my specific branch.. edit: Well, I don't know how true it is but I asked chatgpt about maintenance mode and it definitely exists (supposedly) -- Yes, many Continuous Integration (CI) systems allow you to configure maintenance mode or similar settings to prevent notifications for certain branches or builds. This can be useful if you want to perform maintenance on a branch or temporarily disable a build without triggering unnecessary notifications. edit: It also says CircleCI has one.. so.. I will dig around, sorry to CircleCI if I was totally wrong initally. lastedit: I don't see it anywhere.. shrug.
- WirelessGigabit 4y ago
  Last time I checked there was a ticket CircleCI on their support asking to be able to built the result of a PR and not just the HEAD of the branch. That ticket was still open after 7 years. Even TeamCity had that functionality. That's when they lost my $.
  - lloydatkinson 4y ago
    > Even TeamCity had that functionality. If something as fragile and arcane as TeamCity has this then that reflects very poorly on CircleCI
  - robertlagrant 4y ago
    We did this with CircleCI by just ticking the "PR branches must be up to date" box in GitHub. It's more a Git provider thing than a CI thing.
    - strken 4y ago
      You run into problems keeping branches up to date manually with bigger teams, because every time a PR lands on main it requires everyone else with a PR up to merge main back in. If the CI handles this automatically it saves a lot of time.
say_it_as_it_is 4y ago
[flagged]
- remram 4y ago
  Why even post that comment? What could you possibly mean? That sentence is halfway down the page.
  - blueflow 4y ago
    Annoying virtue signalling. Its as pleasant as someone running around your town scraming "LOOK AT ME IM STANDING FOR THE MORAL THINGS".
    - couchand 4y ago
      Tu quoque.
      - blueflow 4y ago
        Was i shoving it into everyones face unwarranted or was i answering remram's question?
    - arp242 4y ago
      So should morals never enter any argument at all? I don't even agree with their stance on this particular topic, but this dismissive complaining about "virtue signalling" is considerably more egregious than listing reasons you don't like GitHub, which happens to include a moral argument.
      - blueflow 4y ago
        Does not using Github change anything about ICE or the contract? Pretty sure not. So what does proclaiming it even do? Its nothing but self-service. Plus its red vs blue US politics, which is also not very pleasant to know about.
janosdebugs 4y ago
Is this a good time to mention CodeBerg?
- superdisk 4y ago
  I know the name is supposed to invoke "iceberg" but my brain thinks "fatberg" every time.
- hans_castorp 4y ago
  Codeberg is mentioned in the article as one of the alternatives
- Gualdrapo 4y ago
  I currently have my portfolio/cv on it. It's simple and great.
zabzonk 4y ago
i really liked google code, particularly because it supported mercurial, and worked pretty well. typically, google closed it.
stephendause 4y ago
Is it just me, or does the PR experience with Github leave a lot to be desired? Unlike some, I don't have a problem with the concept of a PR per se, but I frequently find navigating the various conversations in my PRs more difficult than I feel it should be. If a branch is rebased, then comments on code that was changed get lost, and one has to go the Conversations tab and search for the comment there. I understand that the commit itself is gone, which is fine, but I think an easy way to navigate through the comments, even if their context is lost, would be a great improvement. I am actually more interested in the suggestion to try VCS alternatives, though. To me, it seems like we have reached a local maximum with git where in principle, better approaches exist, but no one seems to think the cost of switching would be worth it.
- foobarbecue 4y ago
  > an easy way to navigate through the comments, even if their context is lost, would be a great improvement. Sounds like you want to filter the conversation view so that you can separate the various things shown there (PR comments, code comments, reviews)? Seems like a useful feature.
  - stephendause 4y ago
    Yes, that would be a good way of doing it.
- qbasic_forever 4y ago
  Yeah and PRs don't scale well for popular repos with a small number or single maintainer. It's just an unbelievable amount of work to throw code at someone and let them figure out if it's high enough quality, worth integrating and maintaining, etc. It just leads to burn out and abandonment. IMHO there should be much more focus on the branching nature of git and highlight that code can and should live in different user branches.
- jeffbee 4y ago
  The PR experience on github is crazy bad. The commentary only works for a single round. After the first round of review, nobody can find where/why the comments were placed, or whether/how they were addressed. For me Gerrit is much better.
lolinder 4y ago
While I do worry about github, I disagree that the dominance of git is a problem. At some point every industry grows up and standardizes on something, anything, because any standard is better than no standard. Git is far from an ideal solution, but it has emerged as the standard way to manage version control in a software project, and we benefit from there being a standard. Version control is the first barrier to entry in starting on a new project, so having an industry standard for version control benefits everyone: open source projects get more contributors, companies don't have to train new hires on their system, and employees have one fewer barrier blocking them from specific jobs. Could we have standardized on a better system? Certainly. But launching a competing standard at this point isn't going to make things better, the best case scenario is that it fragments the industry.
- nequo 4y ago
  CVS used to be the standard before Git. Arguably CVS as the standard was not better than no standard if no standard let you use decentralized version control. But Git is pretty good, so it will take something vastly better to replace it.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - jiggywiggy 4y ago
    Is it though? Don't know anyone who likes merging or rebasing. Especially big merges. I don't know a solution. But I'm sure someone comes up with a significantly less painful way at some point.
    - throwawayadvsec 4y ago
      well merging two wildly different of files is going to be complicated using any tool, git is not the issue there, there isn't a million ways to handle this
      - dmoy 4y ago
azangru 4y ago
> Their goals only align with yours if your goal is to make GitHub more profitable. Er, no. Their goal is to make github more profitable. My goal is to have a convenient code repository that facilitates both devops and code collaboration within our team. Our goals still align.
- pessimizer 4y ago
  You are assuming for some reason that they won't sacrifice your convenience for their profits. Or maybe you think it's impossible to profit from limiting customer convenience?
  - azangru 4y ago
    When they do, then our goals will misalign :-)
    - xigoi 4y ago
      They already do sacrifice convenience for profit.
      - joshmanders 4y ago
        Subjective. I think GitHub is the most convenient for my use case. That's why I pay for it. Like OP if they sacrifice MY convenience then we misalign. The big thing here is that nobody else satisfies my convenience like GitHub does. Also all of these companies are for profit, so to pick on GitHub for trying to make a profit is disingenuous.
pmontra 4y ago
Of my last 4 customers, three are using Bitbucket, one is using GitHub. One is using Bitbucket's Pipelines (never head about), one Semaphore (same thing), one Travis (with GitHub), one runs tests locally and deploys from a self-hosted TeamCity instance. Almost every single external package all those four customers use has its repository on GitHub.
- emunday_bbc 4y ago
  Hey - when you say you 'Never head about' in relation to Bitbucket Pipelines, do you mean you'd never heard that Pipelines was a product that was available as part of Bitbucket? Asking as I took over as the PM for Bitbucket Pipelines around 6 months ago and have been working to make the case for us needing to do a lot more to make people aware of the capability as a lot think Bitbucket is just Git, not CI/CD as well.
  - pmontra 4y ago
    First of all, sorry for the spelling mistake (head/heard.) You are correct, I didn't know about Pipelines. However I don't use Bitbucket myself. I only use it when a customer uses it and this was the first customer of mine that uses Pipelines. I remember that I setup a pipeline for a new project and it was easy to do it. In general I'm always surprised by the amount of different products that do the same thing and I never heard about. The diversity is good, my ignorance is bad. However there is a limit on the number of things one can use.
    - emunday_bbc 4y ago
      Thanks so much for taking the time to reply, little anecdotes like this do a lot to help me make the case for us needing a better brand. Completely understand where you're coming from re: the number of different tools. Obviously I'd love it if we were one of the one's people thought of when the topic of integrated Git + CI/CD came up, but that's on us to change the level of awareness.
softwaredoug 4y ago
I think GitHub has generally been a really good thing for devs. It has added some good opinions on how we ought to work. Specifically I would say: * Pull requests as a major dev artifact. Probably the most reliable tracker of a set of decisions at a point in time * The connection of the issue tracker to the code base and not as a separate tool (ie Jira). * Expectation of a basic README with the project with the basic documentation. We take these things for granted now, but pre GitHub this was NOT the norm. I’m not sure I frankly want a competitor here. It’s one extra annoying thing for me to think about. Opinions are good for streamlining my life as a dev.
- rhizome31 4y ago
  Yes GitHub contributed to advancing the software industry but now it's been acquired by Microsoft and good alternatives have emerged so time has come to move on. Everything flows.
- toastal 4y ago
  > basic README GitHub (plus the wide adoption of the incredibly-limited Markdown) is the reason we no longer see a a README but a RENDERME. Have you tried to read most README.md files now? They’re filled with so many images and HTML that make it no longer readable without first rendering it (one example: how does an _image_ of CI status and other badges help me at all when I open the plaintext? In many cases, a definition list would be better, but Markdown doesn’t support it). The problem is then further exacerbated by ‘GitHub-flavored Markdown’, a syntax fork that now makes your Markdown incompatible with other forges; in the case of trying to shoehorn in admonition (feature lacking from Markdown) Microsoft GitHub is overloading the blockquote element via `>` ruining not just compatibility/portability but also HTML semantics as it’s still rendered inside a <blockquote> element. The READMEs of yore were usually ASCII-only docs akin to old GameFAQs guides that didn’t require a render step. They lacked accessibility that HTML can provide, but aside sick ASCII art banners, didn’t have all that cruft that should be in the project’s landing page not README.
jmclnx 4y ago
>GitHub’s job is to make Microsoft money This is my concern, if the US Gov had **lls, you would force Microsoft spin Github off into a non-profit company. Already things have been added to Github that most developers of "Open" Source do not like. Time for github to be made independent and run from a foundation like the *BSDs
- llampx 4y ago
  The US government is interested in making sure US companies get as big as possible, why would they hamstring them? Do you think they're out there shooting people in the Middle East so that Middle Eastern oil companies can make more money or so that the American ones can?
  - acyou 4y ago
    I think regulation is a little more complicated than that. There is a vast system of interests, but I don't agree that overall incentives are to make US companies get as big as possible. They lose competitiveness at some point. Middle East is not relevant. Github not being part of Microsoft could be better for the overall economy. Consider the development of the World Wide Web. If you consider Github and aspects of Github as a network and communication protocol, it would be better in the long term to decentralize control.
    - llampx 4y ago
      IMO the US government has a big interest in trying to get American companies as big as possible, and to keep them in the US. Or maybe you can point out some things that the government has done (recently) to show the opposite?
- arp242 4y ago
  Outside of the obvious fact that the US government has no power to arbitrarily take away property because "most people don't like it" (a dubious claim by the way), it's not like an independent foundation will necessarily improve things. Point in case: that horrendous GNU Savannah thing.
tomstockmail 4y ago
There's a number of places out there, some of which also support alternatives to Git itself as mentioned in the article. By no means a complete list and in no particular order: GitLab - https://about.gitlab.com/ https://about.gitlab.com/ Sourcehut - https://sourcehut.org/ https://sourcehut.org/ Codeberg - https://codeberg.org/ https://codeberg.org/ Launchpad - https://launchpad.net/ https://launchpad.net/ Debian Salsa - https://salsa.debian.org/public https://salsa.debian.org/public Pagure - https://pagure.io/pagure https://pagure.io/pagure For self hsoted options, there's these below projects, some of which power the above (and most of the above can be easily self hosted, too, it's just that this list doesn't have any hosting from the project itself): Forgejo - https://forgejo.org/ https://forgejo.org/ Gitea - https://gitea.io/en-us/ https://gitea.io/en-us/ Gogs - https://gogs.io/ https://gogs.io/
- throwaway2037 4y ago
  Not shilling here, but big upvote for Sourcehut - https://sourcehut.org/ https://sourcehut.org/ When you pay money to Drew DeVault and his crew, their work is all open source. And, that includes work outside of Sourcehut. They are also hired guns for existing open source projects.
  - kqr 4y ago
    Also upvoting for Sourcehut. I don't publish much of my code these days but Sourcehut is to me what GitHub was earlier before it got bit.
  - bogwog 4y ago
    Looks like a nice set of features, but that UX isn't going to win anyone over from Github/Gitlab/Gitea land.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - prepend 4y ago
      I haven’t used Gitea but I hate GitHub and GitLabs’ UI. I find it a giant mess of noise and basically cringe until I get to the specific project root and readme. GitLab in particular seems to move settings and functions around on the page so I’m hunting for where the history or blame is.
ilaksh 4y ago
Look into decentralized approaches like Mango and Radicle.
- mdaniel 4y ago
  https://github.com/axic/mango#get-started https://github.com/axic/mango#get-started is some uh-huh Prerequisites: an Ethereum node an IPFS node git and node.js environment Also, doesn't Ethereum require gas for any operation it does, meaning `git push` would quite literally cost money? --- https://app.radicle.xyz/seeds/seed.radicle.xyz/rad:z3trNYnLWS11cJWC6BbxDs5niGo82/tree/master/0001-heartwood.md https://app.radicle.xyz/seeds/seed.radicle.xyz/rad:z3trNYnLW... seems like a much more reasonable peer-to-peer setup, although my mental model of peer-to-peer setups is they're fine until they stop becoming popular and then it's just you on your island waiting for some obscure project's seeder to come back online
kfrzcode 4y ago
It's not the only standard. It's just a centralized, single-point-of-failure, which is in some ways anathema to git in itself - which is meant to be distributed by default. A simple bare git repository can be had on any server and it's moderately easy to manage. There's sr.ht and Gitlab and on and on!
osigurdson 4y ago
The nice thing about GitHub/git is you always have a full local copy of the repo as well. Having a dominant website seems less dangerous for this reason. SvnHub would have been very scary on the other hand.
tester756 4y ago
I can agree that git's "monopoly" is kinda ugly and it'd be nice if GitHub allowed something else under the hood. But I'd rather not have to use some half-baked / not popular or even worse - have to use a few platforms for projects hosting. GitHub is really helpful and makes life (and work) easier. It's been built on dev. experiences and needs across whole industry
storm1er 4y ago
Well I work with gitlab since ~10 years or so, and to be fair this seems wrong: > These competitors don’t offer other, major code collaboration tools [...] They looked at the dominant player and did the same. It really feels the opposite to me with gitlab: - CICD were in gitlab before github action, and is still way more complete in gitlab - gitpod was here before codespace - infrastructure and dependency management was in gitlab before github, and still needs third party to be as complete as gitlab - custom and licence compliance is still incomplete in github, still needs third party stuff ... My 2 cents: GitHub profits from heavy projects and a better marketing team than Gitlab But yes, GitLab is at it's full potential only when you pay ...
- superkuh 4y ago
  Gitlab is a worse user experience for people looking at your repo and code online. It doesn't even display a list of files without javascript. And even when it does it take 5 cores at 100% to do a directory listing of gtk3. It's really a terrible web interface no matter how nice the dev side git interface is.
- toastal 4y ago
  GitLab is also open-core and publicly-traded. For now, I appreciate what they do and how the issue tracker is mostly public, but when the investors say “it’s time to turn this into a money printing machine so I can get my ROI”, I don’t know that I have a lot of confidence in it in the long run.
ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
> This is largely because of GitHub’s popularity and in spite of git’s poor UX. That's a big deal. Git's CLI is really powerful, but it has pretty poor GUIs. I use Sourcetree[0] a lot. It is sufficient, but also pretty damn buggy, and doesn't really give me access to some of the more powerful CLI features, so I sometimes need to go into the CLI. I have tried other Git GUIs (I am deliberately not naming names), and have found them to be fairly pretty, but also worthless. A pretty UI is great, but it also needs to have some meat on its bones. [0] https://www.sourcetreeapp.com https://www.sourcetreeapp.com
- madeofpalk 4y ago
  The Github Desktop is criminally underrated in my opinion https://desktop.github.com/ https://desktop.github.com/ Yes, it's pretty underfeatured and lacks all the advanced features, but I consider that a plus. It's great at checking out and syncing branches, and doing (partial) commits. It does the basics really well IMHO. I think the hard part with GUI git apps is that all the advanced functionality is... advanced and is difficult to translate into a gUI.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
    > advanced and is difficult to translate into a gUI. This is true, so it may be difficult to find a free GUI that will do it. However, the paid ones are worse than the free one.
- toastal 4y ago
  lazygit (sadly on GitHub: https://github.com/jesseduffield/lazygit https://github.com/jesseduffield/lazygit) offers a wonderful TUI for Git that has helped me on a number of occasions visualize Git when needed. The bonus of the TUI is that it works well with upterm/tmate for pair programming.
cmrdporcupine 4y ago
"The Pull Request workflow is so dominant now that it’s considered the default path for code to permanently enter into a repository." Arguably this model has less to do with GitHub becoming dominant but with the fact that all of the large BigCorp/FAANG type companies now use a strict code review policy, and this has spread downwards (along with a bunch of other cargo cult-ed practices) into much smaller organizations. The first 10-15 years of my career I never encountered a code review tool once, and it was just commit privileges granted or not granted and judicious use of branching and tagging. Then everybody seemingly started to switch from "I'll just go off and do my work on a branch and then we'll integrate" to "I don't trust anything anybody else has written and we'll review every single line". I worked at Google for 10 years and when I emerged from there everyone had switched to code review, even small startups. FWIW I see advantages and disadvantages to both approaches. But I don't think GitHub is to blame? Google clearly has an intrinsic interest in making sure things don't blow up $$ production, and are willing to sacrifice velocity all over the place to make sure of that. Same with projects like the Linux kernel, or GCC or LLVM or whatever. But... (If anything, Git makes working on longer running feature branches a lot easier, and the whole code/pull review process made more sense with centralized systems like Perforce, etc. or systems like CVS or SVN that had terrible merge-on-merge support)
- jeffbee 4y ago
  Based on my own experience I am quite sure that code review doesn't sacrifice velocity, it enables it. Unreviewed development has no way to ensure everyone is pulling in the same direction.
  - cmrdporcupine 4y ago
    It really, really, depends.
  - marco_patino 4y ago
    Totally agree! Code reviews are not only for 'making sure things don't blow up $$ in production.' If your team doesn't use pair programming, code reviews are the best opportunity to share knowledge and align vision and values across the team. If you feel like code review conversations are taking too long and affecting your cycle time, then you can use the tool I created: https://pullpo.io https://pullpo.io to have these conversations on ephemeral bidirectional GitHub-Slack channels.
whoisjuan 4y ago
“ You can see similar features in GitHub’s smaller competition Codeberg, GitLab, BitBucket, and Gitea. These competitors don’t offer other, major code collaboration tools, and their Pull Request-like features aren’t just there to help users come from GitHub.“ That's where I stopped reading. GitLab’s Merge Requests are on par or even more robust than GitHub’s Pull Requests. This person clearly hasn't used GitLab; otherwise, they wouldn’t say this. Blank statements like this one undermine their core argument.
- the_jeremy 4y ago
  Having used GitLab, GitHub, and BitBucket in enterprise, I actually prefer gitlab-ci to github actions. GitLab feels buggier overall (so many lines in my .github-ci.yml were prefaced with a link to the GitLab issue requiring me to do some hack instead of what the docs suggested), but the PR tooling was good enough on all of them for everything I was doing.
colesantiago 4y ago
I wish GitHub someday will support Pijul. https://pijul.org/ https://pijul.org/
- toastal 4y ago
  You should wish it could be self-hostable and _not_ require a proprietary account like Microsoft GitHub.
rvz 4y ago
Don't like GitHub? Just self-host. Even projects like ReactOS, RedoxOS, wireguard are doing it for years. Unless you want to contact the CEO of GitHub when your project goes down again or the CI stops working like it did weeks ago.
jmartrican 4y ago
Just want to say I love this website's animated logo.
- aembleton 4y ago
  Fortunately he's posted the source on github https://github.com/edwardloveall/portfolio/blob/main/app/views/application/_logo.html.erb https://github.com/edwardloveall/portfolio/blob/main/app/vie...
charlie0 4y ago
Thinking of alternatives to Git reminds me the different ways to install Python packages, all the different JS frameworks. God, please don't let there be 4-7 semi popular different ways of source control. There's already so much to learn.
talkingtab 4y ago
absolutely agree. Github has this nice thing. They keep trying to protect you. An unintended side effect these protections make it easier and easier for you to do things with other Microsoft products. Well of course, why would anyone have a problem with that? And at some point if you decide github is not for you - the price is too high, your account is frozen or whatever - you will find that getting out of github is extremely difficult. If you believe there are plenty of good alternatives why not use one now? Nothing on the internet is free. You may think you are getting something for free, but you have to ask yourself how the company giving you that freebee makes its money? Qui bono && quid bonum? Lock-in anyone?
nologic01 4y ago
Raise your hand if you want your open source project to show up when somebody is searching. Or if you maintain a github mirror so that your project doesn't languish in obscurity. There is one thing that is truly essential for alternative platforms: easy discovery of projects. I think for alternative platforms to have a chance you need to somehow have a global, platform independent index of software projects that live on different repositories. You can then show them to people on equal footing irrespective of where they are hosted.
- jrmg 4y ago
  I think you’re very right about this. To me: - It’s important that my repos show up in GitHub search (self promotion, essentially). - In the ‘other direction’, Github search feels fairly comprehensive. I don’t feel the need to search for things elsewhere. This is obviously rather self-reinforcing. For an independent index to be successful it needs to be _better than GitHub search_ ad searching GitHub, which seems challenging. It doesn’t help that if I see results that seem to be indexing GitHub in a Google search nowadays, I assume they’re SEO spam. Two other things I find important: - It’s easy to fork repositories. - It’s easy to contribute back to repositories I’ve forked. Gitea really should be focusing on making it a first class UI concept to fork got repos from elsewhere. I know they’re also working on ‘federated’ pull requests - though making them _to Github repos_ seems like a more challenging idea, and is probably just as important.
account-5 4y ago
I'm not an experienced Dev if you could even class me as one but for my personal projects I use fossil. I'm not a power user of fossil and I'm not using it for anything distributed but I like it.
eimrine 4y ago
I want some spare git web interface with ability to store my helloworlds somewhere online. Github was perfect before MS and now it became slightly annoying. Sourcehat requires me to pay, and I am not ready to learn any other VCS yet. Any alternatives for me?
zdgeier 4y ago
Check out https://jamsync.dev https://jamsync.dev if you're interested a non-git alternative
Decabytes 4y ago
I love that the Crystal Programming language build system (Shards) supports not just all the git-based solutions, but also Fossil and Mercurial. Giving programmers the flexibility to choose other solutions if they want to is great, even if they aren't exercised regularly.
horeszko 4y ago
I agree that allowing a company, especially Microsoft which is a cunning corporation, to corner the software development and open source community through its GitHub/VS Code one-two punch is not good for the industry/community. Add using GitHub data for training AIs on top and now a single corporation has immense market power and influence on the direction of technology. Considering what GitHub offers, MS derives far more value then devs get, and devs risk getting stuck within their system, providing value for MS but getting far less in return. Why give a corporation so much for free at such a large cost to the industry/community?
50 4y ago
devault had a similar post like this a little over a year ago[1]. if only we were all floss practitioners - seemingly, maybe naively, the most ethical ground in software been meaning to set up a stagit instance but it's really not my domain - i should try reading the man page for starters 1: https://drewdevault.com/2022/03/29/free-software-free-infrastructure.html https://drewdevault.com/2022/03/29/free-software-free-infras...
- toastal 4y ago
  I really appreciate his mentioning of FOSS communications as well. It’s unacceptable how many projects are locked solely into Discord or Slack.
chunk_waffle 4y ago
I really really like SourceHut but it's lack of Pull Requests (and to some degree Organizations) are the only blockers I have for using it for both personal and work purposes.
hammyhavoc 4y ago
Gitea is great. The recent update that made email notifications like GitHub's by allowing you to reply to Issues comments is beautiful.
bastardoperator 4y ago
If you look at the git project commit history, you'll notice quite a few of the top contributors are GitHub staff. Personally, I've played with the other options, they're mostly just half-baked clones of GitHub so why bother.
0xbadcafebee 4y ago
"We risk leaving brilliant developers behind who don’t work well with GitHub’s paradigms. We risk being stuck with our old, technical mistakes because the underlying technology never changes. We risk losing control over our tools because they’re not actually our tools." That ship sailed 15 years ago. Our tech has already ossified around shitty backwards designs. Every piece of technology today now relies on 1990s-era World Wide Web tech. You can't do anything over the internet that doesn't pass through an HTTPS connection on port 443 of the tcp protocol, increasingly using QUIC, a userland-only application-specific tcp/ip-stack replacing the operating system's, because everyone is too lazy to move "web standards" into the operating system. "It works for my app" is now good enough for the industry, and all is justified by the cries of "oh but middleboxes". Apparently change is impossible because it would require effort. The tech world is now political. "The more you use and rely on GitHub, the more difficult it becomes to find and use alternatives" No, it's easy to find alternatives, there are 20 or more. It's easy to switch. "This PR-centric way of working can also create a bazaar-style culture of low-trust. Low-trust can be an important part of the software development process. Open-source contributions from unknown developers come to mind, or perhaps a legal team needs to sign off on a change. But low-trust is the opposite of what I believe most smaller teams want; even teams in big organizations. In those environments you want to encourage autonomy which requires high-trust." Most organizations and teams are really shitty at organizing their work, communicating, and working across teams/BUs. The "high-trust" model is actively detrimental to both the individual team and larger efforts. The bazaar model is superior. Yes, people want to live in silos, but it's actively detrimental and should be abandoned. "The Pull Request workflow is so dominant now that it’s considered the default path for code to permanently enter into a repository." Pull Requests are not mandatory, you don't have to use them. Just because your team uses them doesn't mean they have to. But they have become a cultural trope, and culture is the hardest thing in the universe to change. You could throw the baby out with the bathwater, or you could lead by example, and show people a different way to work. Getting rid of GitHub won't stop other cultural problems from cropping up. "GitHub is what most people use because it makes the complexities of git easier. git remains dominant despite it being complex because it’s not in the interest of GitHub and most of GitHub’s competitors to support anything else." Yeah, again, culture problem, not technology problem. Want something better? Make it. The alternatives that exist clearly aren't advantageous enough for people to switch. "We should instead be supporting platforms that seek to do no harm." Again, there are alternatives to GitHub, go and use them. But for what it's worth, all of this concern trolling doesn't amount to much. Want to switch? Switch. Don't want to? Don't. This isn't something to spend more than 5 minutes thinking about. When you have a problem, deal with it; until you have a problem, stop worrying.
jillesvangurp 4y ago
Wannabe Github competitors have two major problems: 1) it's free and it's hard to make a profit competing with free. Never mind that it isn't really free. It's free enough that making a profit doing the same thing just is not a great plan. 2) it quite literally has close to 100% of all oss projects in existence on their platform. There are no alternative platforms that have anywhere near close to the same network of developers, companies, etc. Being part of that network provides discoverability, easy access to other developers, etc. People care about Github stars. Nobody cares about whatever the Gitlab equivalent is to that. Feature wise, Github is a commodity. Hosting projects doesn't cost a whole lot if you think about it. Most git projects aren't very big. They don't get a lot of traffic. Etc. So the real cost of hosting a project is pretty low to begin with. There are of course some bigger projects that would generate a bit of traffic. But on average, it's not much. Gitlab and others have proved long ago that it's not that hard to replicate what Github did. And that in turn prompted Github to offer it for free because they recognized it was a race to the bottom. Making private projects free entrenched them as the #1 company in this space. And of course they are not for free if you are running big enterprise organizations on them. Sponsoring a lot of tiny OSS projects, libraries, struggling startups, etc. with that revenue isn't that expensive. And it makes sales to companies really easy. Because they and anyone they hire are likely already on Github anyway. It's of course not that hard to roll your own clone that does more or less the same. Lots of companies have actually done that and some of them have a quite nice business offering that as a SAAS service to companies not interested in using Github for various reasons. So, the added value of doing that some more only diminishes its value. To the point that it's a fairly pointless thing to do. Even if you do it well, it's basically just yet another Github clone without a network. People that argue the social network doesn't matter are missing the point: it's the thing that matters most. Software development is a social process. And a social network without any members is just not that interesting. And not getting that you are developing and competing with a social network is not a great premise for coming up with something better. Hypothetically, if somebody were interested in such a thing, imitating what Mastodon is doing to Twitter wouldn't be a bad idea. Git is decentralized by design. But Github isn't, which is in a way the biggest problem people seem to have with it. So fix that problem. The fix is not replacing it with another centralized social network. That would be moving the problem, not solving it. Of course the trick is finding a business model to fund that.
mattcantstop 4y ago
> git remains dominant despite it being complex because it’s not in the interest of GitHub and most of GitHub’s competitors to support anything else. It seems like if there was a competitive advantage to be found in another VCS it would be a large opportunity for a competitor to support and promote that alternative. Git certainly has many downsides but I am not sure a different system is an overall better proposition than git at this point. If it was, I would think we would see more investment there.
wtcactus 4y ago
Maybe it's just my bubble, but from the projects I've been working on there last 5 years, most gitops is migrating to GitLab. I do keep using GitHub for small personal projects though. The interface to create something very simple, it's just more straightforward on GitHub. But, for everything else - specially at work- it's GitLab.
jacooper 4y ago
> While the letter of the law here is still uncertain, I believe that Copilot is violating the spirit of these Copyleft licenses. This is deeply disrespectful code laundering at scale. The inability to control the use of your source code is hardly in keeping with the place “where open source communities live” You think openAI isnt going to scan every line of code on the internet no matter what? Where ever you host your good, be it gitlab or codeberg or bitbucket, openAI is for sure going to be training on that. What's going to stop them is regulations, and nothing else.
- toastal 4y ago
  Microsoft GitHub gets the ability retain your entire Git history too for training, including the bits you may have force pushed away. Scanning other code forges wouldn’t give access to the ‘complete’ history of a project.
  - jacooper 4y ago
    They can do the same by cloning the repo
    - toastal 4y ago
      Not if you have rewritten this history. It's possible they have an old copy, but cloning isn't going to have deleted or unrewritten commits. What do you think folks do when say an API key is published in the repository? Delete the whole repo to get a clean history? However, there's nothing that stops Microsoft GitHub from just _holding onto_ that data even if you delete it because you gave that data to them.
      - jacooper 4y ago
        I mean why do you rewrite history? Its either because of a typo or editing commits. I doubt its very important for ai training.
        4y ago
throwghaway 4y ago
Cool. Here's how to do it: 1. Migrate off of GitHub. That's it, that's the whole process.
lionkor 4y ago
I love git. I've used it for my personal projects, used it for work, used it for projects ive lead. Small teams, larger teams, single person. Occasional contributors, fulltime contributors, so on, all included. I have never felt the urge to try anything else - so I'm as biased as I can be. I think GitHub went down hill so much that I get a little angry every time I have to use it. It used to be snappy - links you click used to actually load. Now, somehow, they managed to make it a single page app that stays on one view even when it has already loaded another -- its very strange. I go to issues, click new issue, the URL changes, the loading bar finishes -- and nothing. Just still the issues view. A few seconds later it changes. I cant push to git@github.com:lionkor/my-new-repo to create a repo (GitLab allows this, and it makes working a lot smoother). The PR view is horrendous. GitHub actions are nice, but not great. I prefer GitLab here, too. Then again - nobody is forcing me to use GitHub, so I dont have an issue with it. If it becomes more shit, people will migrate, and it will slowly die. Tools which assume github as the primary git repo host are faulty by design, though.
- toastal 4y ago
  > If it becomes more shit, people will migrate, and it will slowly die. You might be surprised how vendor lock-in can prevent many projects from migrating in the future. If you’ve not yet migrated, it would be wise to stay away from Microsoft-GitHub-only features.
hgs3 4y ago
GitHub is popular enough that I suspect it won't be a competitor that dethrones them, but rather they will implode from within. The copilot controversy is already steering things that way.
Pbhaskal 4y ago
Long time back I used sourceforge, it seems very few people use it nowadays.
- toastal 4y ago
  Android custom ROM community still uses it. I bet it’s the ISO size that makes it preferable.
stolsvik 4y ago
Use Gerrit! It is much better. But it requires that you host it yourself, AFAIK. It is pretty straightforward, and just sits there once you get it running.
standardly 4y ago
What does Github use for version control? Github? Is there a github github?
friend_and_foe 4y ago
I don't publish at github anymore. I won't do it. I still use my account for bug reports and stuff for projects that host there, that's all. I'm not one of the old guys, I genuinely do not like email based collaborative workflows, I prefer the web repo paradigm that comes with github and gitea/forgejo, gitlab and the like. It's not ideal but I prefer it. But github is at this point a no go for me due to the fact that they make you agree to terms which essentially allow them carte blanc with your products, including giving them the right to violate your license. Something ideal for me would be Fossil with RSS feeds for every type of action.
pentagrama 4y ago
> I’d like to see what other tools people can offer. Perhaps a tool that promotes ensemble working to share the problem solving and context with a larger group. > ...what if a tool could helps teams design software before code is written? Right now all guidance and critique happens after, which requires developers to context switch and redo work. I remember trying to do some visual design work for GNOME to improve the UX, share some prototypes, ideas, and iterate, but I have a hard time to understand how to work on the platform (I think it was GitLab), and people on the project also expect that I should submit code, finally I give up, maybe I was in the wrong, but that was my short experience with that.
emrah 4y ago
The "call to arms" is great but doesn't really offer any ideas. There are alternatives already and if they are not getting enough use, there must be reasons. What are they? I don't enjoy this in PRs either. Someone says "this is not good" or "let's not do X". Great, what do you propose instead? The proposal here is to "let's not not do something" but that's not strong enough, especially if the author is not a strong figure. It also makes me question, did git happen because people in general hated svn? There were lots of haters of svn and cvs and the others but it didn't happen until Linus had a clear vision of what was missing and what would replace the existing tools I believe that's how change happens.. not because people preach we should not not do something but they at least suggest something concrete and/or create something to fill the void as best as they can
arkan-uddin 4y ago
Really glad to see I am not the only one who is gravely concerned, especially in the new-world of "cancel culture". Even being willfully blind to the danger our dependency on github portends, Microsoft's purchase of github should be enough reason for the development community to diversify. This is very very well written.

289 points by zdw 4y ago

test20201 4y ago

The writer uses macOS. If github is 'only' option so it Apple becoming these days. From iMessages (blue/green tick) social pressure across the world.

aembleton 4y ago
And the writer hosts the source for his blog on github https://github.com/edwardloveall/portfolio https://github.com/edwardloveall/portfolio

throwaway2056 4y ago

(I wish github does not become one but sadly gitlab is beset with constant pain) - no proper communication - unclear future plan - poor documentation See for example https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/380872 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/380872

worldsavior 4y ago
Slow UI, JS is a must, looks bad.
- simse 4y ago
  the almost haiku!
vbezhenar 4y ago
Use gogs.
- pahool 4y ago
  I'm currently looking at alternatives for self-hosting. Do you prefer gogs to gitea? why, if so?
  - turnsout 4y ago
    I’ve been using gitea for years and I love it. I heard about gogs after migrating to gitea, but it seems like gitea is mostly an improved gogs.
  - vbezhenar 4y ago
    I prefer projects maintained by single or few developers. Gogs seems to be that kind of project. Gitea is maintained by some kind of community. Other than that, I think they don't differ that much. Gitea is Gogs fork after all.
burnished 4y ago
I feel like if gitlab were worse it would be less frustrating because my expectations would be considerably lower.
Lutger 4y ago
I've looked at your example, but all I'm seeing is a deprecation process for a feature with an alternative workflow, and all sorts of warnings, a timeline and even a shifting timeline to allow users to update. Can you specify exactly what you find lacking? Is it the fact that there is a breaking change? I'm not familiar with this case, but from a glance I see proper communication, a clear future plan and adequate documentation. I'm not affiliated with gitlab btw.
- throwaway2056 4y ago
  If one runs the command until last week or so it exited (with failure) but pointed out that it is deprecated and provided a link to https://docs.gitlab.com/runner/register/index.html https://docs.gitlab.com/runner/register/index.html gitlab-runner register documentation pages that once again stated the obvious. No difference at all. Then you rerun the command - same bounce out. No clue. The docs linked at the URL still say to use the --registration-token. finally (after digging into stackexchange and gitlab issue) one needs to run the command without --non-interactive No where in the documentation it (until last week) that this should be removed for registering a runner as of today (last few months).
- mardifoufs 4y ago
  That's the thing though! They announced one of the most critical part of the runners (the token auth) to be deprecated for months before the replacement was even available for teams to switch to. Very bizarre

mothsonasloth 4y ago

I think Github have already won the cultural dev war. I hear many a developer saying Github instead of "Git". A recent example from a mid level dev: "I'm gonna branch from the github repository" - when the repository is self hosted

FearlessNebula 4y ago
Was it a self hosted github instance?
- mothsonasloth 4y ago
  No, https://git-scm.com/downloads https://git-scm.com/downloads Github != Git
- lionkor 4y ago
  You cant self host github.
  - aezart 4y ago
    That's what github enterprise is for
  - hbn 4y ago
    https://docs.github.com/en/enterprise-server@3.5/admin/overview/about-github-enterprise-server https://docs.github.com/en/enterprise-server@3.5/admin/overv...
Zealotux 4y ago
My current company uses GitLab; anyone mistakenly referring to it as "Github" would get swiftly corrected, even as a simple proxy word for "Git".
lesuorac 4y ago
I'm surprised GitHub isn't trying to avoid their trademarked becoming generic [1]. If that keeps up you can just call your alternative repo storage system GitHub 2.0 or GitHub Enterprise or something. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_trademark https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_trademark

leetharris 4y ago

I don't think things like this really need proactive measures. If GitHub becomes a problem there are dozens of alternatives for every piece of the pipeline. I get winded by all these posts that claim we need to be cautious about every step we make.

alwaysbeconsing 4y ago
This isn't proactive; the article listed several ways in which GitHub is now a problem.

loloquwowndueo 4y ago

launchpad!! https://launchpad.net https://launchpad.net

swozey 4y ago

Ignoring all of the great social/community features like having pages for trending repos/developers and things of that nature that I check frequently, the Github Actions marketplace is a game changer. CircleCI has Orbs but there are so, so many fewer since the community is so much smaller. I'm not sure if Gitlab has anything similar yet. With that said, I really need a CI system that has a maintenance mode button so I can do 250 failing builds fixing pipelines (I'm ops) and not spam everyone with emails from my specific branch.. edit: Well, I don't know how true it is but I asked chatgpt about maintenance mode and it definitely exists (supposedly) -- Yes, many Continuous Integration (CI) systems allow you to configure maintenance mode or similar settings to prevent notifications for certain branches or builds. This can be useful if you want to perform maintenance on a branch or temporarily disable a build without triggering unnecessary notifications. edit: It also says CircleCI has one.. so.. I will dig around, sorry to CircleCI if I was totally wrong initally. lastedit: I don't see it anywhere.. shrug.

WirelessGigabit 4y ago
Last time I checked there was a ticket CircleCI on their support asking to be able to built the result of a PR and not just the HEAD of the branch. That ticket was still open after 7 years. Even TeamCity had that functionality. That's when they lost my $.
- lloydatkinson 4y ago
  > Even TeamCity had that functionality. If something as fragile and arcane as TeamCity has this then that reflects very poorly on CircleCI
- robertlagrant 4y ago
  We did this with CircleCI by just ticking the "PR branches must be up to date" box in GitHub. It's more a Git provider thing than a CI thing.
  - strken 4y ago
    You run into problems keeping branches up to date manually with bigger teams, because every time a PR lands on main it requires everyone else with a PR up to merge main back in. If the CI handles this automatically it saves a lot of time.

say_it_as_it_is 4y ago

[flagged]

remram 4y ago
Why even post that comment? What could you possibly mean? That sentence is halfway down the page.
- blueflow 4y ago
  Annoying virtue signalling. Its as pleasant as someone running around your town scraming "LOOK AT ME IM STANDING FOR THE MORAL THINGS".
  - couchand 4y ago
    Tu quoque.
    - blueflow 4y ago
      Was i shoving it into everyones face unwarranted or was i answering remram's question?
  - arp242 4y ago
    So should morals never enter any argument at all? I don't even agree with their stance on this particular topic, but this dismissive complaining about "virtue signalling" is considerably more egregious than listing reasons you don't like GitHub, which happens to include a moral argument.
    - blueflow 4y ago
      Does not using Github change anything about ICE or the contract? Pretty sure not. So what does proclaiming it even do? Its nothing but self-service. Plus its red vs blue US politics, which is also not very pleasant to know about.

janosdebugs 4y ago

Is this a good time to mention CodeBerg?

superdisk 4y ago
I know the name is supposed to invoke "iceberg" but my brain thinks "fatberg" every time.
hans_castorp 4y ago
Codeberg is mentioned in the article as one of the alternatives
Gualdrapo 4y ago
I currently have my portfolio/cv on it. It's simple and great.

zabzonk 4y ago

i really liked google code, particularly because it supported mercurial, and worked pretty well. typically, google closed it.

stephendause 4y ago

Is it just me, or does the PR experience with Github leave a lot to be desired? Unlike some, I don't have a problem with the concept of a PR per se, but I frequently find navigating the various conversations in my PRs more difficult than I feel it should be. If a branch is rebased, then comments on code that was changed get lost, and one has to go the Conversations tab and search for the comment there. I understand that the commit itself is gone, which is fine, but I think an easy way to navigate through the comments, even if their context is lost, would be a great improvement. I am actually more interested in the suggestion to try VCS alternatives, though. To me, it seems like we have reached a local maximum with git where in principle, better approaches exist, but no one seems to think the cost of switching would be worth it.

foobarbecue 4y ago
> an easy way to navigate through the comments, even if their context is lost, would be a great improvement. Sounds like you want to filter the conversation view so that you can separate the various things shown there (PR comments, code comments, reviews)? Seems like a useful feature.
- stephendause 4y ago
  Yes, that would be a good way of doing it.
qbasic_forever 4y ago
Yeah and PRs don't scale well for popular repos with a small number or single maintainer. It's just an unbelievable amount of work to throw code at someone and let them figure out if it's high enough quality, worth integrating and maintaining, etc. It just leads to burn out and abandonment. IMHO there should be much more focus on the branching nature of git and highlight that code can and should live in different user branches.
jeffbee 4y ago
The PR experience on github is crazy bad. The commentary only works for a single round. After the first round of review, nobody can find where/why the comments were placed, or whether/how they were addressed. For me Gerrit is much better.

lolinder 4y ago

While I do worry about github, I disagree that the dominance of git is a problem. At some point every industry grows up and standardizes on something, anything, because any standard is better than no standard. Git is far from an ideal solution, but it has emerged as the standard way to manage version control in a software project, and we benefit from there being a standard. Version control is the first barrier to entry in starting on a new project, so having an industry standard for version control benefits everyone: open source projects get more contributors, companies don't have to train new hires on their system, and employees have one fewer barrier blocking them from specific jobs. Could we have standardized on a better system? Certainly. But launching a competing standard at this point isn't going to make things better, the best case scenario is that it fragments the industry.

nequo 4y ago
CVS used to be the standard before Git. Arguably CVS as the standard was not better than no standard if no standard let you use decentralized version control. But Git is pretty good, so it will take something vastly better to replace it.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- jiggywiggy 4y ago
  Is it though? Don't know anyone who likes merging or rebasing. Especially big merges. I don't know a solution. But I'm sure someone comes up with a significantly less painful way at some point.
  - throwawayadvsec 4y ago
    well merging two wildly different of files is going to be complicated using any tool, git is not the issue there, there isn't a million ways to handle this
    - dmoy 4y ago

azangru 4y ago

> Their goals only align with yours if your goal is to make GitHub more profitable. Er, no. Their goal is to make github more profitable. My goal is to have a convenient code repository that facilitates both devops and code collaboration within our team. Our goals still align.

pessimizer 4y ago
You are assuming for some reason that they won't sacrifice your convenience for their profits. Or maybe you think it's impossible to profit from limiting customer convenience?
- azangru 4y ago
  When they do, then our goals will misalign :-)
  - xigoi 4y ago
    They already do sacrifice convenience for profit.
    - joshmanders 4y ago
      Subjective. I think GitHub is the most convenient for my use case. That's why I pay for it. Like OP if they sacrifice MY convenience then we misalign. The big thing here is that nobody else satisfies my convenience like GitHub does. Also all of these companies are for profit, so to pick on GitHub for trying to make a profit is disingenuous.

pmontra 4y ago

Of my last 4 customers, three are using Bitbucket, one is using GitHub. One is using Bitbucket's Pipelines (never head about), one Semaphore (same thing), one Travis (with GitHub), one runs tests locally and deploys from a self-hosted TeamCity instance. Almost every single external package all those four customers use has its repository on GitHub.

emunday_bbc 4y ago
Hey - when you say you 'Never head about' in relation to Bitbucket Pipelines, do you mean you'd never heard that Pipelines was a product that was available as part of Bitbucket? Asking as I took over as the PM for Bitbucket Pipelines around 6 months ago and have been working to make the case for us needing to do a lot more to make people aware of the capability as a lot think Bitbucket is just Git, not CI/CD as well.
- pmontra 4y ago
  First of all, sorry for the spelling mistake (head/heard.) You are correct, I didn't know about Pipelines. However I don't use Bitbucket myself. I only use it when a customer uses it and this was the first customer of mine that uses Pipelines. I remember that I setup a pipeline for a new project and it was easy to do it. In general I'm always surprised by the amount of different products that do the same thing and I never heard about. The diversity is good, my ignorance is bad. However there is a limit on the number of things one can use.
  - emunday_bbc 4y ago
    Thanks so much for taking the time to reply, little anecdotes like this do a lot to help me make the case for us needing a better brand. Completely understand where you're coming from re: the number of different tools. Obviously I'd love it if we were one of the one's people thought of when the topic of integrated Git + CI/CD came up, but that's on us to change the level of awareness.

softwaredoug 4y ago

I think GitHub has generally been a really good thing for devs. It has added some good opinions on how we ought to work. Specifically I would say: * Pull requests as a major dev artifact. Probably the most reliable tracker of a set of decisions at a point in time * The connection of the issue tracker to the code base and not as a separate tool (ie Jira). * Expectation of a basic README with the project with the basic documentation. We take these things for granted now, but pre GitHub this was NOT the norm. I’m not sure I frankly want a competitor here. It’s one extra annoying thing for me to think about. Opinions are good for streamlining my life as a dev.

rhizome31 4y ago
Yes GitHub contributed to advancing the software industry but now it's been acquired by Microsoft and good alternatives have emerged so time has come to move on. Everything flows.
toastal 4y ago
> basic README GitHub (plus the wide adoption of the incredibly-limited Markdown) is the reason we no longer see a a README but a RENDERME. Have you tried to read most README.md files now? They’re filled with so many images and HTML that make it no longer readable without first rendering it (one example: how does an _image_ of CI status and other badges help me at all when I open the plaintext? In many cases, a definition list would be better, but Markdown doesn’t support it). The problem is then further exacerbated by ‘GitHub-flavored Markdown’, a syntax fork that now makes your Markdown incompatible with other forges; in the case of trying to shoehorn in admonition (feature lacking from Markdown) Microsoft GitHub is overloading the blockquote element via `>` ruining not just compatibility/portability but also HTML semantics as it’s still rendered inside a <blockquote> element. The READMEs of yore were usually ASCII-only docs akin to old GameFAQs guides that didn’t require a render step. They lacked accessibility that HTML can provide, but aside sick ASCII art banners, didn’t have all that cruft that should be in the project’s landing page not README.

jmclnx 4y ago

>GitHub’s job is to make Microsoft money This is my concern, if the US Gov had **lls, you would force Microsoft spin Github off into a non-profit company. Already things have been added to Github that most developers of "Open" Source do not like. Time for github to be made independent and run from a foundation like the *BSDs

llampx 4y ago
The US government is interested in making sure US companies get as big as possible, why would they hamstring them? Do you think they're out there shooting people in the Middle East so that Middle Eastern oil companies can make more money or so that the American ones can?
- acyou 4y ago
  I think regulation is a little more complicated than that. There is a vast system of interests, but I don't agree that overall incentives are to make US companies get as big as possible. They lose competitiveness at some point. Middle East is not relevant. Github not being part of Microsoft could be better for the overall economy. Consider the development of the World Wide Web. If you consider Github and aspects of Github as a network and communication protocol, it would be better in the long term to decentralize control.
  - llampx 4y ago
    IMO the US government has a big interest in trying to get American companies as big as possible, and to keep them in the US. Or maybe you can point out some things that the government has done (recently) to show the opposite?
arp242 4y ago
Outside of the obvious fact that the US government has no power to arbitrarily take away property because "most people don't like it" (a dubious claim by the way), it's not like an independent foundation will necessarily improve things. Point in case: that horrendous GNU Savannah thing.

tomstockmail 4y ago

There's a number of places out there, some of which also support alternatives to Git itself as mentioned in the article. By no means a complete list and in no particular order: GitLab - https://about.gitlab.com/ https://about.gitlab.com/ Sourcehut - https://sourcehut.org/ https://sourcehut.org/ Codeberg - https://codeberg.org/ https://codeberg.org/ Launchpad - https://launchpad.net/ https://launchpad.net/ Debian Salsa - https://salsa.debian.org/public https://salsa.debian.org/public Pagure - https://pagure.io/pagure https://pagure.io/pagure For self hsoted options, there's these below projects, some of which power the above (and most of the above can be easily self hosted, too, it's just that this list doesn't have any hosting from the project itself): Forgejo - https://forgejo.org/ https://forgejo.org/ Gitea - https://gitea.io/en-us/ https://gitea.io/en-us/ Gogs - https://gogs.io/ https://gogs.io/

throwaway2037 4y ago
Not shilling here, but big upvote for Sourcehut - https://sourcehut.org/ https://sourcehut.org/ When you pay money to Drew DeVault and his crew, their work is all open source. And, that includes work outside of Sourcehut. They are also hired guns for existing open source projects.
- kqr 4y ago
  Also upvoting for Sourcehut. I don't publish much of my code these days but Sourcehut is to me what GitHub was earlier before it got bit.
- bogwog 4y ago
  Looks like a nice set of features, but that UX isn't going to win anyone over from Github/Gitlab/Gitea land.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - prepend 4y ago
    I haven’t used Gitea but I hate GitHub and GitLabs’ UI. I find it a giant mess of noise and basically cringe until I get to the specific project root and readme. GitLab in particular seems to move settings and functions around on the page so I’m hunting for where the history or blame is.

ilaksh 4y ago

Look into decentralized approaches like Mango and Radicle.

mdaniel 4y ago
https://github.com/axic/mango#get-started https://github.com/axic/mango#get-started is some uh-huh Prerequisites: an Ethereum node an IPFS node git and node.js environment Also, doesn't Ethereum require gas for any operation it does, meaning `git push` would quite literally cost money? --- https://app.radicle.xyz/seeds/seed.radicle.xyz/rad:z3trNYnLWS11cJWC6BbxDs5niGo82/tree/master/0001-heartwood.md https://app.radicle.xyz/seeds/seed.radicle.xyz/rad:z3trNYnLW... seems like a much more reasonable peer-to-peer setup, although my mental model of peer-to-peer setups is they're fine until they stop becoming popular and then it's just you on your island waiting for some obscure project's seeder to come back online

kfrzcode 4y ago

It's not the only standard. It's just a centralized, single-point-of-failure, which is in some ways anathema to git in itself - which is meant to be distributed by default. A simple bare git repository can be had on any server and it's moderately easy to manage. There's sr.ht and Gitlab and on and on!

osigurdson 4y ago

The nice thing about GitHub/git is you always have a full local copy of the repo as well. Having a dominant website seems less dangerous for this reason. SvnHub would have been very scary on the other hand.

tester756 4y ago

I can agree that git's "monopoly" is kinda ugly and it'd be nice if GitHub allowed something else under the hood. But I'd rather not have to use some half-baked / not popular or even worse - have to use a few platforms for projects hosting. GitHub is really helpful and makes life (and work) easier. It's been built on dev. experiences and needs across whole industry

storm1er 4y ago

Well I work with gitlab since ~10 years or so, and to be fair this seems wrong: > These competitors don’t offer other, major code collaboration tools [...] They looked at the dominant player and did the same. It really feels the opposite to me with gitlab: - CICD were in gitlab before github action, and is still way more complete in gitlab - gitpod was here before codespace - infrastructure and dependency management was in gitlab before github, and still needs third party to be as complete as gitlab - custom and licence compliance is still incomplete in github, still needs third party stuff ... My 2 cents: GitHub profits from heavy projects and a better marketing team than Gitlab But yes, GitLab is at it's full potential only when you pay ...

superkuh 4y ago
Gitlab is a worse user experience for people looking at your repo and code online. It doesn't even display a list of files without javascript. And even when it does it take 5 cores at 100% to do a directory listing of gtk3. It's really a terrible web interface no matter how nice the dev side git interface is.
toastal 4y ago
GitLab is also open-core and publicly-traded. For now, I appreciate what they do and how the issue tracker is mostly public, but when the investors say “it’s time to turn this into a money printing machine so I can get my ROI”, I don’t know that I have a lot of confidence in it in the long run.

ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago

> This is largely because of GitHub’s popularity and in spite of git’s poor UX. That's a big deal. Git's CLI is really powerful, but it has pretty poor GUIs. I use Sourcetree[0] a lot. It is sufficient, but also pretty damn buggy, and doesn't really give me access to some of the more powerful CLI features, so I sometimes need to go into the CLI. I have tried other Git GUIs (I am deliberately not naming names), and have found them to be fairly pretty, but also worthless. A pretty UI is great, but it also needs to have some meat on its bones. [0] https://www.sourcetreeapp.com https://www.sourcetreeapp.com

madeofpalk 4y ago
The Github Desktop is criminally underrated in my opinion https://desktop.github.com/ https://desktop.github.com/ Yes, it's pretty underfeatured and lacks all the advanced features, but I consider that a plus. It's great at checking out and syncing branches, and doing (partial) commits. It does the basics really well IMHO. I think the hard part with GUI git apps is that all the advanced functionality is... advanced and is difficult to translate into a gUI.
- ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
  > advanced and is difficult to translate into a gUI. This is true, so it may be difficult to find a free GUI that will do it. However, the paid ones are worse than the free one.
toastal 4y ago
lazygit (sadly on GitHub: https://github.com/jesseduffield/lazygit https://github.com/jesseduffield/lazygit) offers a wonderful TUI for Git that has helped me on a number of occasions visualize Git when needed. The bonus of the TUI is that it works well with upterm/tmate for pair programming.

cmrdporcupine 4y ago

"The Pull Request workflow is so dominant now that it’s considered the default path for code to permanently enter into a repository." Arguably this model has less to do with GitHub becoming dominant but with the fact that all of the large BigCorp/FAANG type companies now use a strict code review policy, and this has spread downwards (along with a bunch of other cargo cult-ed practices) into much smaller organizations. The first 10-15 years of my career I never encountered a code review tool once, and it was just commit privileges granted or not granted and judicious use of branching and tagging. Then everybody seemingly started to switch from "I'll just go off and do my work on a branch and then we'll integrate" to "I don't trust anything anybody else has written and we'll review every single line". I worked at Google for 10 years and when I emerged from there everyone had switched to code review, even small startups. FWIW I see advantages and disadvantages to both approaches. But I don't think GitHub is to blame? Google clearly has an intrinsic interest in making sure things don't blow up $$ production, and are willing to sacrifice velocity all over the place to make sure of that. Same with projects like the Linux kernel, or GCC or LLVM or whatever. But... (If anything, Git makes working on longer running feature branches a lot easier, and the whole code/pull review process made more sense with centralized systems like Perforce, etc. or systems like CVS or SVN that had terrible merge-on-merge support)

jeffbee 4y ago
Based on my own experience I am quite sure that code review doesn't sacrifice velocity, it enables it. Unreviewed development has no way to ensure everyone is pulling in the same direction.
- cmrdporcupine 4y ago
  It really, really, depends.
- marco_patino 4y ago
  Totally agree! Code reviews are not only for 'making sure things don't blow up $$ in production.' If your team doesn't use pair programming, code reviews are the best opportunity to share knowledge and align vision and values across the team. If you feel like code review conversations are taking too long and affecting your cycle time, then you can use the tool I created: https://pullpo.io https://pullpo.io to have these conversations on ephemeral bidirectional GitHub-Slack channels.

whoisjuan 4y ago

“ You can see similar features in GitHub’s smaller competition Codeberg, GitLab, BitBucket, and Gitea. These competitors don’t offer other, major code collaboration tools, and their Pull Request-like features aren’t just there to help users come from GitHub.“ That's where I stopped reading. GitLab’s Merge Requests are on par or even more robust than GitHub’s Pull Requests. This person clearly hasn't used GitLab; otherwise, they wouldn’t say this. Blank statements like this one undermine their core argument.

the_jeremy 4y ago
Having used GitLab, GitHub, and BitBucket in enterprise, I actually prefer gitlab-ci to github actions. GitLab feels buggier overall (so many lines in my .github-ci.yml were prefaced with a link to the GitLab issue requiring me to do some hack instead of what the docs suggested), but the PR tooling was good enough on all of them for everything I was doing.

colesantiago 4y ago

I wish GitHub someday will support Pijul. https://pijul.org/ https://pijul.org/

toastal 4y ago
You should wish it could be self-hostable and _not_ require a proprietary account like Microsoft GitHub.

rvz 4y ago

Don't like GitHub? Just self-host. Even projects like ReactOS, RedoxOS, wireguard are doing it for years. Unless you want to contact the CEO of GitHub when your project goes down again or the CI stops working like it did weeks ago.

jmartrican 4y ago

Just want to say I love this website's animated logo.

aembleton 4y ago
Fortunately he's posted the source on github https://github.com/edwardloveall/portfolio/blob/main/app/views/application/_logo.html.erb https://github.com/edwardloveall/portfolio/blob/main/app/vie...

charlie0 4y ago

Thinking of alternatives to Git reminds me the different ways to install Python packages, all the different JS frameworks. God, please don't let there be 4-7 semi popular different ways of source control. There's already so much to learn.

talkingtab 4y ago

absolutely agree. Github has this nice thing. They keep trying to protect you. An unintended side effect these protections make it easier and easier for you to do things with other Microsoft products. Well of course, why would anyone have a problem with that? And at some point if you decide github is not for you - the price is too high, your account is frozen or whatever - you will find that getting out of github is extremely difficult. If you believe there are plenty of good alternatives why not use one now? Nothing on the internet is free. You may think you are getting something for free, but you have to ask yourself how the company giving you that freebee makes its money? Qui bono && quid bonum? Lock-in anyone?

nologic01 4y ago

Raise your hand if you want your open source project to show up when somebody is searching. Or if you maintain a github mirror so that your project doesn't languish in obscurity. There is one thing that is truly essential for alternative platforms: easy discovery of projects. I think for alternative platforms to have a chance you need to somehow have a global, platform independent index of software projects that live on different repositories. You can then show them to people on equal footing irrespective of where they are hosted.

jrmg 4y ago
I think you’re very right about this. To me: - It’s important that my repos show up in GitHub search (self promotion, essentially). - In the ‘other direction’, Github search feels fairly comprehensive. I don’t feel the need to search for things elsewhere. This is obviously rather self-reinforcing. For an independent index to be successful it needs to be _better than GitHub search_ ad searching GitHub, which seems challenging. It doesn’t help that if I see results that seem to be indexing GitHub in a Google search nowadays, I assume they’re SEO spam. Two other things I find important: - It’s easy to fork repositories. - It’s easy to contribute back to repositories I’ve forked. Gitea really should be focusing on making it a first class UI concept to fork got repos from elsewhere. I know they’re also working on ‘federated’ pull requests - though making them _to Github repos_ seems like a more challenging idea, and is probably just as important.

account-5 4y ago

I'm not an experienced Dev if you could even class me as one but for my personal projects I use fossil. I'm not a power user of fossil and I'm not using it for anything distributed but I like it.

eimrine 4y ago

I want some spare git web interface with ability to store my helloworlds somewhere online. Github was perfect before MS and now it became slightly annoying. Sourcehat requires me to pay, and I am not ready to learn any other VCS yet. Any alternatives for me?

zdgeier 4y ago

Check out https://jamsync.dev https://jamsync.dev if you're interested a non-git alternative

Decabytes 4y ago

I love that the Crystal Programming language build system (Shards) supports not just all the git-based solutions, but also Fossil and Mercurial. Giving programmers the flexibility to choose other solutions if they want to is great, even if they aren't exercised regularly.

horeszko 4y ago

I agree that allowing a company, especially Microsoft which is a cunning corporation, to corner the software development and open source community through its GitHub/VS Code one-two punch is not good for the industry/community. Add using GitHub data for training AIs on top and now a single corporation has immense market power and influence on the direction of technology. Considering what GitHub offers, MS derives far more value then devs get, and devs risk getting stuck within their system, providing value for MS but getting far less in return. Why give a corporation so much for free at such a large cost to the industry/community?

50 4y ago

devault had a similar post like this a little over a year ago[1]. if only we were all floss practitioners - seemingly, maybe naively, the most ethical ground in software been meaning to set up a stagit instance but it's really not my domain - i should try reading the man page for starters 1: https://drewdevault.com/2022/03/29/free-software-free-infrastructure.html https://drewdevault.com/2022/03/29/free-software-free-infras...

toastal 4y ago
I really appreciate his mentioning of FOSS communications as well. It’s unacceptable how many projects are locked solely into Discord or Slack.

chunk_waffle 4y ago

I really really like SourceHut but it's lack of Pull Requests (and to some degree Organizations) are the only blockers I have for using it for both personal and work purposes.

hammyhavoc 4y ago

Gitea is great. The recent update that made email notifications like GitHub's by allowing you to reply to Issues comments is beautiful.

bastardoperator 4y ago

If you look at the git project commit history, you'll notice quite a few of the top contributors are GitHub staff. Personally, I've played with the other options, they're mostly just half-baked clones of GitHub so why bother.

0xbadcafebee 4y ago

"We risk leaving brilliant developers behind who don’t work well with GitHub’s paradigms. We risk being stuck with our old, technical mistakes because the underlying technology never changes. We risk losing control over our tools because they’re not actually our tools." That ship sailed 15 years ago. Our tech has already ossified around shitty backwards designs. Every piece of technology today now relies on 1990s-era World Wide Web tech. You can't do anything over the internet that doesn't pass through an HTTPS connection on port 443 of the tcp protocol, increasingly using QUIC, a userland-only application-specific tcp/ip-stack replacing the operating system's, because everyone is too lazy to move "web standards" into the operating system. "It works for my app" is now good enough for the industry, and all is justified by the cries of "oh but middleboxes". Apparently change is impossible because it would require effort. The tech world is now political. "The more you use and rely on GitHub, the more difficult it becomes to find and use alternatives" No, it's easy to find alternatives, there are 20 or more. It's easy to switch. "This PR-centric way of working can also create a bazaar-style culture of low-trust. Low-trust can be an important part of the software development process. Open-source contributions from unknown developers come to mind, or perhaps a legal team needs to sign off on a change. But low-trust is the opposite of what I believe most smaller teams want; even teams in big organizations. In those environments you want to encourage autonomy which requires high-trust." Most organizations and teams are really shitty at organizing their work, communicating, and working across teams/BUs. The "high-trust" model is actively detrimental to both the individual team and larger efforts. The bazaar model is superior. Yes, people want to live in silos, but it's actively detrimental and should be abandoned. "The Pull Request workflow is so dominant now that it’s considered the default path for code to permanently enter into a repository." Pull Requests are not mandatory, you don't have to use them. Just because your team uses them doesn't mean they have to. But they have become a cultural trope, and culture is the hardest thing in the universe to change. You could throw the baby out with the bathwater, or you could lead by example, and show people a different way to work. Getting rid of GitHub won't stop other cultural problems from cropping up. "GitHub is what most people use because it makes the complexities of git easier. git remains dominant despite it being complex because it’s not in the interest of GitHub and most of GitHub’s competitors to support anything else." Yeah, again, culture problem, not technology problem. Want something better? Make it. The alternatives that exist clearly aren't advantageous enough for people to switch. "We should instead be supporting platforms that seek to do no harm." Again, there are alternatives to GitHub, go and use them. But for what it's worth, all of this concern trolling doesn't amount to much. Want to switch? Switch. Don't want to? Don't. This isn't something to spend more than 5 minutes thinking about. When you have a problem, deal with it; until you have a problem, stop worrying.

jillesvangurp 4y ago

Wannabe Github competitors have two major problems: 1) it's free and it's hard to make a profit competing with free. Never mind that it isn't really free. It's free enough that making a profit doing the same thing just is not a great plan. 2) it quite literally has close to 100% of all oss projects in existence on their platform. There are no alternative platforms that have anywhere near close to the same network of developers, companies, etc. Being part of that network provides discoverability, easy access to other developers, etc. People care about Github stars. Nobody cares about whatever the Gitlab equivalent is to that. Feature wise, Github is a commodity. Hosting projects doesn't cost a whole lot if you think about it. Most git projects aren't very big. They don't get a lot of traffic. Etc. So the real cost of hosting a project is pretty low to begin with. There are of course some bigger projects that would generate a bit of traffic. But on average, it's not much. Gitlab and others have proved long ago that it's not that hard to replicate what Github did. And that in turn prompted Github to offer it for free because they recognized it was a race to the bottom. Making private projects free entrenched them as the #1 company in this space. And of course they are not for free if you are running big enterprise organizations on them. Sponsoring a lot of tiny OSS projects, libraries, struggling startups, etc. with that revenue isn't that expensive. And it makes sales to companies really easy. Because they and anyone they hire are likely already on Github anyway. It's of course not that hard to roll your own clone that does more or less the same. Lots of companies have actually done that and some of them have a quite nice business offering that as a SAAS service to companies not interested in using Github for various reasons. So, the added value of doing that some more only diminishes its value. To the point that it's a fairly pointless thing to do. Even if you do it well, it's basically just yet another Github clone without a network. People that argue the social network doesn't matter are missing the point: it's the thing that matters most. Software development is a social process. And a social network without any members is just not that interesting. And not getting that you are developing and competing with a social network is not a great premise for coming up with something better. Hypothetically, if somebody were interested in such a thing, imitating what Mastodon is doing to Twitter wouldn't be a bad idea. Git is decentralized by design. But Github isn't, which is in a way the biggest problem people seem to have with it. So fix that problem. The fix is not replacing it with another centralized social network. That would be moving the problem, not solving it. Of course the trick is finding a business model to fund that.

mattcantstop 4y ago

> git remains dominant despite it being complex because it’s not in the interest of GitHub and most of GitHub’s competitors to support anything else. It seems like if there was a competitive advantage to be found in another VCS it would be a large opportunity for a competitor to support and promote that alternative. Git certainly has many downsides but I am not sure a different system is an overall better proposition than git at this point. If it was, I would think we would see more investment there.

wtcactus 4y ago

Maybe it's just my bubble, but from the projects I've been working on there last 5 years, most gitops is migrating to GitLab. I do keep using GitHub for small personal projects though. The interface to create something very simple, it's just more straightforward on GitHub. But, for everything else - specially at work- it's GitLab.

jacooper 4y ago

> While the letter of the law here is still uncertain, I believe that Copilot is violating the spirit of these Copyleft licenses. This is deeply disrespectful code laundering at scale. The inability to control the use of your source code is hardly in keeping with the place “where open source communities live” You think openAI isnt going to scan every line of code on the internet no matter what? Where ever you host your good, be it gitlab or codeberg or bitbucket, openAI is for sure going to be training on that. What's going to stop them is regulations, and nothing else.

toastal 4y ago
Microsoft GitHub gets the ability retain your entire Git history too for training, including the bits you may have force pushed away. Scanning other code forges wouldn’t give access to the ‘complete’ history of a project.
- jacooper 4y ago
  They can do the same by cloning the repo
  - toastal 4y ago
    Not if you have rewritten this history. It's possible they have an old copy, but cloning isn't going to have deleted or unrewritten commits. What do you think folks do when say an API key is published in the repository? Delete the whole repo to get a clean history? However, there's nothing that stops Microsoft GitHub from just _holding onto_ that data even if you delete it because you gave that data to them.
    - jacooper 4y ago
      I mean why do you rewrite history? Its either because of a typo or editing commits. I doubt its very important for ai training.
      - 4y ago

throwghaway 4y ago

Cool. Here's how to do it: 1. Migrate off of GitHub. That's it, that's the whole process.

lionkor 4y ago

I love git. I've used it for my personal projects, used it for work, used it for projects ive lead. Small teams, larger teams, single person. Occasional contributors, fulltime contributors, so on, all included. I have never felt the urge to try anything else - so I'm as biased as I can be. I think GitHub went down hill so much that I get a little angry every time I have to use it. It used to be snappy - links you click used to actually load. Now, somehow, they managed to make it a single page app that stays on one view even when it has already loaded another -- its very strange. I go to issues, click new issue, the URL changes, the loading bar finishes -- and nothing. Just still the issues view. A few seconds later it changes. I cant push to git@github.com:lionkor/my-new-repo to create a repo (GitLab allows this, and it makes working a lot smoother). The PR view is horrendous. GitHub actions are nice, but not great. I prefer GitLab here, too. Then again - nobody is forcing me to use GitHub, so I dont have an issue with it. If it becomes more shit, people will migrate, and it will slowly die. Tools which assume github as the primary git repo host are faulty by design, though.

toastal 4y ago
> If it becomes more shit, people will migrate, and it will slowly die. You might be surprised how vendor lock-in can prevent many projects from migrating in the future. If you’ve not yet migrated, it would be wise to stay away from Microsoft-GitHub-only features.

hgs3 4y ago

GitHub is popular enough that I suspect it won't be a competitor that dethrones them, but rather they will implode from within. The copilot controversy is already steering things that way.

Pbhaskal 4y ago

Long time back I used sourceforge, it seems very few people use it nowadays.

toastal 4y ago
Android custom ROM community still uses it. I bet it’s the ISO size that makes it preferable.

stolsvik 4y ago

Use Gerrit! It is much better. But it requires that you host it yourself, AFAIK. It is pretty straightforward, and just sits there once you get it running.

standardly 4y ago

What does Github use for version control? Github? Is there a github github?

friend_and_foe 4y ago

I don't publish at github anymore. I won't do it. I still use my account for bug reports and stuff for projects that host there, that's all. I'm not one of the old guys, I genuinely do not like email based collaborative workflows, I prefer the web repo paradigm that comes with github and gitea/forgejo, gitlab and the like. It's not ideal but I prefer it. But github is at this point a no go for me due to the fact that they make you agree to terms which essentially allow them carte blanc with your products, including giving them the right to violate your license. Something ideal for me would be Fossil with RSS feeds for every type of action.

pentagrama 4y ago

> I’d like to see what other tools people can offer. Perhaps a tool that promotes ensemble working to share the problem solving and context with a larger group. > ...what if a tool could helps teams design software before code is written? Right now all guidance and critique happens after, which requires developers to context switch and redo work. I remember trying to do some visual design work for GNOME to improve the UX, share some prototypes, ideas, and iterate, but I have a hard time to understand how to work on the platform (I think it was GitLab), and people on the project also expect that I should submit code, finally I give up, maybe I was in the wrong, but that was my short experience with that.

emrah 4y ago

The "call to arms" is great but doesn't really offer any ideas. There are alternatives already and if they are not getting enough use, there must be reasons. What are they? I don't enjoy this in PRs either. Someone says "this is not good" or "let's not do X". Great, what do you propose instead? The proposal here is to "let's not not do something" but that's not strong enough, especially if the author is not a strong figure. It also makes me question, did git happen because people in general hated svn? There were lots of haters of svn and cvs and the others but it didn't happen until Linus had a clear vision of what was missing and what would replace the existing tools I believe that's how change happens.. not because people preach we should not not do something but they at least suggest something concrete and/or create something to fill the void as best as they can

arkan-uddin 4y ago

Really glad to see I am not the only one who is gravely concerned, especially in the new-world of "cancel culture". Even being willfully blind to the danger our dependency on github portends, Microsoft's purchase of github should be enough reason for the development community to diversify. This is very very well written.