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Lord of the Files: How GitHub Tamed Free Software (And More)
- leftnode 15y agoIs it just me or are there a lot of errors in this article? Scott Chabon? I wonder if they intentionally did that so people would fork the article and fix it.
- holman 15y agoCould be! The article itself is open source, too: https://github.com/WiredEnterprise/Lord-of-the-Files https://github.com/WiredEnterprise/Lord-of-the-Files
- peterb 15y agoI wish all technical books did this.
- RyanMcGreal 15y agoThe gold standard might be the way Mark Pilgrim wrote Dive Into HTML5.
- bootload 15y ago"... I wish all technical books did this. ..." Why limit this to technical articles? Why not any written document? The key point, non-tech editors and writers are not going to use the clumsy tools github provides. They might use an editor that hides the mechanics of github.
- bgentry 15y agoThat is amazing. 17 outstanding pull requests =)
- jurre 15y agoI think so, I'm keeping an eye on https://github.com/WiredEnterprise/Lord-of-the-Files/pulls https://github.com/WiredEnterprise/Lord-of-the-Files/pulls to see if they're getting merged. Pretty cool they hosted it there!
- jurre 15y agoYup, they're commenting on the incoming pull requests and looks like they will be accepting some. Curious to see if the original article will be updated with them!
- hkarthik 15y agoNoticed a few too. Like the fact that Scott Chacon wrote a book on Pro Git, not GitHub itself (maybe that's in the works).
- orblivion 15y agoThey have things completely backwards. Github didn't make coding more decentralized, Git did. Github made it more centralized, though in a mostly non-binding way thanks to Git.
- yabai 15y agoWow! Linus is using a Macbook Air!
- muyuu 15y agoRuns GNU/Linux on it too: https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/1/14/4 https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/1/14/4
- kzrdude 15y agoIt looks to me like he is using BIOS emulation on the mac, so he gets an IDE interface instead of using AHCI which I get on my efi-booted air.
- xxpor 15y agoWhat would be the advantage of that, other than devo/testing purposes?
- kzrdude 15y agoHe's literally complaining that apple's firmware does not init the hardware properly. If he's using the legacy BIOS boot, that's a fair assessment of that mode, but it's still not the standard way to boot the computer.
- rmc 15y agoI remember reading about his hardware set up a few years ago and yes, he was using apple hardware. It's almost certainly running linux though.
- pimeys 15y agoWell, in the picture I can clearly see a Gnome 3 desktop (with the default wallpaper).
- zdw 15y agoFor a while there he was running Linux on a PowerMac G5 tower as his primary desktop: https://lkml.org/lkml/2004/2/12/13 https://lkml.org/lkml/2004/2/12/13 Many open source OS projects have core developers on non-x86/amd64 platforms so as to find errors, x86isms, and other code quality issues reveled by fundamental differences in the underlying architectures.
- 4ad 15y agoOh my god: > GitHub.com is best thought of as Facebook for geeks Really?
- igorgue 15y agoI spend a lot of time on Github and it's very fun, I think that's what Facebook is for non-hackers.
- dchest 15y agoYes. Including countless memes in comments and pull requests.
- chimeracoder 15y agoUnfortunately, the most infamous example of that (Bumblebee's 'rm -rf /usr/' mistake) seems to have been removed: > https://github.com/MrMEEE/bumblebee/commit/a047be85247755cdbe0acce6f1dafc8beb84f2ac https://github.com/MrMEEE/bumblebee/commit/a047be85247755cdb...
- TeMPOraL 15y agoFortunately... I wrote a comment under it, and since that day my mailbox was flooded with notifications about other replies for months to come. I think about doing some analytics on them; say, plot the number of comments per day over time - I'd expect to see something like e^(1/x) - 1.
- chimeracoder 15y agoYou should do that - though I doubt it'd be an exponential decay. You're going to get a series of bumps every time a post about it pops up on HN (or similar site), and those bumps will probably be positively correlated with one another (note how top posts on HN are oftentimes top posts on related subreddits on Reddit, for example). Would be interesting to see, though - let me know if you do it.
- bonobo 15y ago
- randall 15y ago"The old regime “makes it very hard to start radical new branches because you generally need to convince the people involved in the status quo up-front about their need to support that radical branch,” Torvalds says. “In contrast, Git makes it easy to just ‘do it’ without asking for permission, and then come back later and show the end result off — telling people ‘look what I did, and I have the numbers to show that my approach is much better.’”" Substitute "business" for branch and "startup" for git. Startups are git branching for the economy.
- psquid 15y agoGah, why would they use a bar chart for the "Getting Into Github" diagram and then not stick to anything resembling a consistent x-axis - at first it looked like it might be exponential, but it's not even that. The bar sizes are nearly meaningless, because different segments of them are to wildly different scales. All it actually conveys is "this one is more than this one".
- brown9-2 15y agoQuadrupling the number of employees in a year is damn impressive.
- MattJ100 15y agoFrom 14, yes. From 1 it wouldn't be - so it's not just 'quadrupling' itself that's impressive here :)
- bostonvaulter2 15y agoI beg to differ. It is easy to quadruple the number of employees in a year, but hard to do that without sacrificing company culture.
- hkarthik 15y agoInteresting hearing about how they want to tackle the Microsoft ecosystem. As someone who spent years in that ecosystem and recently left it for OSS, I'll be curious to see what kind of success they see and who they are targeting.
- SideburnsOfDoom 15y agoPhil Haack is one of the people who recently joined Github from MS developer tools division, with the aim to make the github experience better for those same devs. He blogs, maybe you'll find more info on the subject there: http://haacked.com/archive/2011/12/07/hello-github.aspx http://haacked.com/archive/2011/12/07/hello-github.aspx I wonder who the other person who joined Github from Microsoft was?
- hkarthik 15y agoYeah, I knew about Phil Haack but he's been pretty silent on what he's working on. Hoping to hear more soon.
- icey 15y agoI'm pretty sure the other person is Paul Betts. They are working on Github for Windows (i.e. a Windows version of what they've done with Github for Mac).
- SideburnsOfDoom 15y agoA quick google suggests that you're right. Thanks for that.
- SideburnsOfDoom 15y agoRelated, I never really got the point of "Github for mac". Do we need a fat-client app when we already have a first-rate web app? What does it do/enable/make easy that github the website doesn't? A Mac or PC isn't a tiny phone screen with no keyboard, where native apps are more usable than websites. I use TortoiseGit as well for the rest of the github experience, since I'm not a git master and I can pretend it's SVN with pull requests.
- newman314 15y agoRyan Blair, a technologist with the New York State Senate, thinks it could even give citizens a way to fork the law — proposing their own amendments to elected officials. A tool like GitHub could also make it easier for constituents to track and even voice their opinions on changes to complex legal code. “When you really think about it, a bill is a branch of the law,” he says. “I’m just in love with the idea of a constituent being able to send their state senator a pull request.” ------- I find this quote fascinating. This would be fantastic if it actually gained traction. It would democratize the process of actually writing a bill. People could actually vote for/against sections for inclusion.
- agumonkey 15y agoFunny we were just discussing law texts analysis with a friend, I even replicated a bit of French Civilian Code revisions on github for further analysis. I wonder how much will technology close the gap between society and its actual constituents.
- ubervero 15y agoDocracy (basically GitHub for legal documents) is going to do exactly that at the next legal hackathon http://legalhackathon.blipclinic.org/ http://legalhackathon.blipclinic.org/
- newman314 15y agoThe question is how do we incentivize politicians to start using this. This will not gain any traction if meetings and discussions are held in secret (like ACTA). Maybe as a start, we can just track what has changed throughout the different revisions of ACTA. Maybe this is something you could do as part of your hackathon. I'm picking ACTA as it's something that is relatively current and at the forefront of people's minds right now.
- bostonvaulter2 15y agoOne way is to push it through something like Code For America who could then bring it to interested city governments. http://codeforamerica.org/ http://codeforamerica.org/
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- jacques_chester 15y agoI was really quite surprised at the way this article was pitched. I'd expect to read this airy, hand-wavy level of detail in a news magazine, not Wired.
- medinism 15y agoI actually find it entertaining and fun - specially the bits about history, how they found common vision etc. It was an interesting human take to subject that could be inherently jargon-laden and boring
- ComputerGuru 15y agoI did a double-take at the title and am left wondering whether or not the one-letter difference between this and William Golding's Nobel Prize-winning "Lord of the Flies" is purposeful or not.
- azylman 15y agoUh, yes.