11 ms·

Sourcegraph went dark

424 points by kaycebasques 2y ago

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
yablak 2y ago
Sourcegraph search is amazing. I can point to any hash in our repo and search by regex/path regex. Results are instant and in json format. I hacked together a 'cs' script in bash using the sg cli client and some git calls, as I missed Google's cs command since leaving. Works perfectly, faster than ctags/any local indexer.
- sqs 2y ago
  Awesome to hear! What sucks about Sourcegraph for you, and how can we make it better?
  - PaulCarrack 2y ago
    I use Sourcegraph for personal use with my private repos. In the past, I've found actual bugs that I reported to Justin Dorfman and worked with him to get those bugs assigned to the right engineers so they got fixed before your enterprise customers can experience them. 1. Is there still a path for reporting issues now that the repo has gone private? The Github issue tracker can no longer be accessed or searched through to report bugs or figure out if a bug is known or being worked on. 2. Do you plan to get rid of "Sourcegraph Free" for on premise personal use?
    - sqs 2y ago
      Thanks for helping us make the product better! You can post any issues at https://community.sourcegraph.com https://community.sourcegraph.com. And you can also email support@sourcegraph.com (for customers or any private issues). We will continue to have a free tier for personal use. Soon we will have a free tier of code search on Sourcegraph.com for private code.
- aterp 2y ago
  What does cs command do?
reedf1 2y ago
What happened to sourcegraph is very sad. It was a great tool, and the kind of software you wish the apache foundation was managing. I've been looking for alternatives - any recommendations?
- notpushkin 2y ago
  For code search, I've heard Hound is pretty good but I haven't personally tried it yet. The UI is a bit clunky though. I'm wondering if one can port the old Apache-licensed Sourcegraph UI? https://github.com/hound-search/hound https://github.com/hound-search/hound
  - midoBB 2y ago
    I have ran Hound in my current co for about 2 years now, it's fine but the search experience is far below the SG one. SG is a far superior option but it is prohibetively expensive. I thought about hacking on Hound to be honest to rewrite the UI at least because half of it is broken.
- mdaniel 2y ago
  > I've been looking for alternatives Just out of curiosity, is code search something you need to get bleeding edge updates? What's wrong with running the pre-rug-pull release? There even seems to be a pseudo community fork that added features: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41297879 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41297879
alin23 2y ago
Damn, I use Sourcegraph so much for my reverse engineering efforts on macOS. They index all those private framework symbols that people extract on every macOS release, and allow searching for headers and even how they are called by other developers that were ahead of me. A big part of https://lunar.fyi https://lunar.fyi exists thanks to Sourcegraph search. Even now I'm using it to find a way to enable the second monitor on M3 MacBooks without needing to close the lid [1]. I really hope this is not a sign of them taking back the ability to search in the future. [1] https://alinpanaitiu.com/blog/turn-off-macbook-display-clamshell/ https://alinpanaitiu.com/blog/turn-off-macbook-display-clams...
- welder 2y ago
  > I really hope this is not a sign of them taking back the ability to search in the future. Searching repos seems to be unchanged: https://sourcegraph.com/search https://sourcegraph.com/search
- sqs 2y ago
  Glad you use Sourcegraph! I remember that blog post and thought it was awesome. I am the Sourcegraph CEO, and we haven't changed anything about our public code search at https://sourcegraph.com/search https://sourcegraph.com/search. That's the same product tons of customers use for their internal code, and our public code search is a really important way for us to dogfood, iterate fast, etc. We just made our own internal codebase private.
  - alin23 2y ago
    Ok, so glad to hear that from you directly! Thank you for all the value you’ve put out there for free! About the codebase part, I don’t have any need for it so I’m not affected by this, but I wonder if it was possible to keep the current state of the code frozen in a public repository and only make private the future work. That’s how I did it on Lunar, that’s also how the BetterDisplay dev did, it was a good compromise so as to not steal anything that was already free. But of course we don’t have the same business model or licensing needs so I’m pretty sure I’m missing something. The way I did it is: - freeze the public code to a new branch “lunar3” - make a private repo LunarPro which works exactly like the previous Lunar repo - but on every commit the private repo syncs the code in an encrypted form to the public repo That way, permalinks remain valid, everything that was free and accessible before is still available in the future and the branch serves as a “compilable” state without any encrypted files. But again, I’m just one and you’re many, it might get hard to maintain this structure in a team. And some people might still find things to complain about. I know it was that way for me.
EMIRELADERO 2y ago
Straight-up making all dev work private is very weird and perplexing. Why would their business model (which they had since some time, mind you) require not only a proprietary/"open core" license, which I would understand, but complete secrecy around source code itself? What business goal couldn't be accomplished with licensing restrictions alone? And is that difference in potential income generated by this new secret-requiring business model so big that it justifies throwing away the entire "open nature" of the company that has been a core value for most of its existence?
- jsiepkes 2y ago
  I've seen this multiple times with companies. Another example which went fully closed in an instant is ForgeRock (OpenAM, etc.). Usually it happens when management caves in to complaints from sales. Who will complain being open makes selling the product hard. In the end they will probably find out it's just the sales people's "excuse du-jour" and even after closing the source they still don't hit their targets.
WesolyKubeczek 2y ago
Can’t wait for Steve Yegge putting out a huge article about how this is a great thing and comparing it to TV shows or something.
- mannycalavera42 2y ago
  oh, first time I'm hearing this sentiment against Yegge. Not a specific fan of him but curious: do you have memories / link to similar BS-like statements from this person?
  - WesolyKubeczek 2y ago
    Just read his blog post titled "the death of junior programmer" or something like that. Be sure to not have eaten lunch prior to that; there's so much gatekeeping of the bad kind that it's quite vomit-inducing.
    - dpritchett 2y ago
      I’d been a huge fan of his for a solid decade, but that post was probably the last one of his I’ll ever read.
    - BaculumMeumEst 2y ago
      Really? I thought the content was interesting and it aligned with a lot of my thoughts. The end has a lot of practical advice- any junior who follows will probably be extremely successful. To that end, I think the title is a little clickbaity. I prefer the half glass full view - juniors have more access to rapidly learn and improve than they have ever had before. They can blow past the sea of mediocre seniors who don't bother to keep up.
      - conartist6 2y ago
        The problem is that it's really hard to learn from AI. You can pay it to think for you, but that way you won't learn much.
solarkraft 2y ago
That seems silly. Hope there will be an official statement (apology? lol).
sixhobbits 2y ago
I used to always point to Sourcegraph as a company that really understood dev culture and what it took to make devs happy, so this slow transition has definitely been painful to watch. Just yesterday someone asked for an example of a public roadmap for a technical product, so I spent some time looking for Sourcegraph's, only to find out that they've also made most of their docs private. The public handbook was an amazing resource before, now it's been moved to Notion, and most of the interesting bits are links to private Google documents (which they used to do only for financial documents and other stuff that obviously needed to stay private). Sad!
- iknownthing 2y ago
  I interviewed with them once, they strung me along for about 6 months then ghosted me.
  - mdaniel 2y ago
    As a counterpoint, they scheduled me within days and I left the office with an offer letter I'm cognizant that company culture is not one fixed thing, so maybe they're way different when you interacted with them versus when I did, I'm just saying I had the opposite experience so I doubt it's a trend
    - iknownthing 2y ago
      To be clear, I had many interviews with them over that 6 months (10+ I think).
    - cxr 2y ago
      In what way is that a counterpoint? Are you tacitly suggesting that the other commenter's position is that Sourcegraph doesn't hire anyone? They they string everyone along for months before ghosting? There's a distinction between ∃ and ∀.
stpn 2y ago
As much as I've have cited, loved, and recommended sourcegraph (even going so far as to help run the open source version at a previous co), I never paid a cent for the product. I'm curious about the line of thinking in leaving open source behind, but it seems somewhat unsurprising in that lens.
- sqs 2y ago
  Thanks! We appreciate you. It was really a focus thing. It added a lot of overhead, lost focus, and risk to have stuff be open source. Most customers weren't telling us it was valuable to them, and frankly we heard very little from people who were using our open-source build. (How could we have gotten your input earlier?) We still have a lot of open-source code, but ultimately we need to focus on building a great product and making money on it. Which we are doing. :-) As Sourcegraph CEO, I obviously wish we could do all the things, but we gotta stay focused on building a great code search/intelligence product.
- PaulCarrack 2y ago
  > I never paid a cent for the product I would love to contribute and pay, but, as a single personal / private onprem user, it's impossible. It's $49 per user with a 50 user minimum. Sourcegraph doesn't make it possible to contribute in that circumstance.
jsiepkes 2y ago
The software Heritage project has archived most of their repo's. Including the main one [1]. Last crawl seems to be of mid July 2024. [1] https://archive.softwareheritage.org/browse/origin/directory/?origin_url=https://github.com/sourcegraph/sourcegraph https://archive.softwareheritage.org/browse/origin/directory...
- sunaookami 2y ago
  According to the article, this is the current public snapshot: https://github.com/sourcegraph/sourcegraph-public-snapshot https://github.com/sourcegraph/sourcegraph-public-snapshot
speedgoose 2y ago
It's a bit sad. I forked ~~the last~~ an open-source version some time ago[0]. I removed the telemetry, disabled updates, removed the proprietary code, made a docker image, and implemented some lightweight oauth2/oauth2-proxy authentication. I plan to keep it running behind Oauth2-Proxy for a long time. It has been very reliable software and because it's behind a supposedly secure proxy, I don't feel bad about not updating it. [0] https://github.com/SINTEF/sourcegraph https://github.com/SINTEF/sourcegraph
- notpushkin 2y ago
  Thank you for this! I think 5.0.6 is the last open source version though. Have you considered updating? (Not sure how viable it would be – seems they've moved quite a few things around)
  - speedgoose 2y ago
    Oh, my memory failed me. I don't know when I will have time to update, but that sounds like something that could be done!
- cdchn 2y ago
  This is awesome thank you for this.
sluongng 2y ago
Kinda weird because they have already relicensed the entire repo recently. I wonder what problem they are trying to solve with a private repo.
MzHN 2y ago
They also recently(?) silently destroyed[1] their public search index at sourcegraph.com/search. Since GitHub only recently got a working search and even that is behind login, I used to search a lot using Sourcegraph. It even supported searching GitLab. Now it seems that all GitLab repos are gone from the index and a huge number of GitHub repos as well. If I can't trust the search I'll just have no choice but to fall back to GitHub. It's a shame since their index was at some point even better than GitHub's own, although GitHub seems to have caught up. [1] https://community.sourcegraph.com/t/most-public-repos-no-longer-accessible-via-code-search/641 https://community.sourcegraph.com/t/most-public-repos-no-lon...
- notpushkin 2y ago
  https://grep.app/ https://grep.app/ is another good one. Not sure how many repos they index though.
  - Alifatisk 2y ago
    It says half million git repos on the main page
- sqs 2y ago
  We still have tons of repositories searchable at https://sourcegraph.com/search https://sourcegraph.com/search, almost a million. We did cull lots of non-GitHub repositories and repositories with less star. It was very complex to keep up with millions of repositories due to GitHub rate limits and scaling. We tried to keep as many as possible while still being able to focus on making a good product for customers (our biggest customer has ~600k repositories). We're still spending millions of dollars annually to offer public code search, so our intent is certainly not to "destroy" it! If you have repositories you want us to add that are below the star threshold, please post at https://community.sourcegraph.com/t/most-public-repos-no-longer-accessible-via-code-search/641/2 https://community.sourcegraph.com/t/most-public-repos-no-lon....
  - elashri 2y ago
    Most of the academic open source projects except big names in scientific computing will not be searchable if you are relying on stars as a criteria.
AYBABTME 2y ago
The sourcegraph folks are great. I think these days is a brutal period for startups. I can only guess how things are going. Just yesterday FT.com was publishing "Start-up failures rise 60% as founders face hangover from boom years"[1]. Like Cockroach's recent relicensing, I think we should be thankful for the good years and awesome stuff the last boom era brought, and not be too harsh on the principled founders who now find themselves having to make hard decisions. They're responsible to a lot of people at the end of the day - investors but also employees. Just crashing the whole thing to make a moral statement would be dumb. Employees also count on execs to care for them. If startups have to make hard decisions to keep things afloat, it's the right thing to do. ** I'm extrapolating a lot here from this post, for all I know things may be rosey at SourceGraph, idk! [1]: https://www.ft.com/content/2808ad4c-783f-4475-bcda-bddc0299095e https://www.ft.com/content/2808ad4c-783f-4475-bcda-bddc02990...
fire_lake 2y ago
They’re probably courting a buyer.
iddan 2y ago
I wonder from all the people commenting here how much they relied on Source Graph, and how many actually paid for it. Running an open-source company is hard, just like running any company is. Sometimes you understand there are things you just can't give out for free, and that's part of maturing as a company.
- pjmlp 2y ago
  100% this. Devs have to learn the hard way to behave like the other professionals, want nice things to stay around? Pay for the tools.
  - sunaookami 2y ago
    Paying doesn't guarantee anything. There are tons of examples of devs selling out even though their program/SaaS is paid.
    - alephnerd 2y ago
      Companies are run based on margins, not just subscriptions. That individual account you are paying for most likely does not have the RoI needed to manage it due to a mix of larger customers abusing individual accounts to get a discount or individual account users overrepresenting themselves in support tickets, asks, and feature requests. If you don't like the direction a tool you like is going, go build a competitor and manage it to your liking. For most products, the revenue skew is 80-20 so if you're not part of the 20% you aren't going to be heard.
    - pjmlp 2y ago
      Until supermarkets and landlords start taking pull requests as payment, it guarantees more often than not.
  - marcinzm 2y ago
    You mean pay for your own tools and then get fired for circumventing the corporate security policies on what tools you can use?
throwaway290 2y ago
Preparing to get bought by Microsoft?
- mdaniel 2y ago
  I dunno the underlying tone to this message, but given the absolutely staggering number of MIT licensed repos under github.com/Microsoft I don't know that such a thing would be as bad as you envision Now that GitLab is public, that's who I'd want to buy them, and there's precedent since (a) GitLab has already swallowed quite a few open source dev-tooling companies and (b) they already have a Sourcegraph integration so it would be very low drama to just fold it into the core offering and get rid of that stupid Elasticsearch dep
  - throwaway290 2y ago
    > given the absolutely staggering number of MIT licensed repos under github.com/Microsoft I don't know that such a thing would be as bad as you envision Well they keep their main stuff carefully closed. Github isn't open source for example:) And simply think would they pay Github the money they paid (or any money at all) if it was open source like Gitlab? I guess if you say it's public and autonomous I wouldn't mind if Gitlab bought Sourcegraph. If MS did it I would mind a ton
sqs 2y ago
Sourcegraph CEO here. We made our main internal codebase (for our code search product) private. We did this to focus. It added a lot of extra work and risk to have stuff be open source and public. We gotta stay focused on building a great code search/intelligence product for our customers. That's what ultimately lets us still do plenty of things for devs and the OSS community: (1) Our super popular public code search is at https://sourcegraph.com/search https://sourcegraph.com/search, which is the same product customers use internally on their own codebases. We spend millions of dollars annually on this public instance with almost 1M OSS repositories to help out everyone using OSS (and we love when they like it so much they bring it into their company :-). (2) We also have still have a ton of open-source code, like https://sourcegraph.com/github.com/sourcegraph/cody https://sourcegraph.com/github.com/sourcegraph/cody (our code AI tool). BTW, if any founders out there are wondering whether they should make their own code open-source or public, happy to chat! Email in profile. I think it could make sense for a lot of companies, but more so for infrastructure products or client tools, not so much for full server-side end-user applications.
- quantumwoke 2y ago
  Been a fan of sourcegraph since 2016 or so, it's been exciting to watch the pivots along the way. That being said, the loss of transparency here is pretty sad, speaking as a large FOSS repo owner. What were the main factors apart from risk that went into the decision?
  - sqs 2y ago
    Thanks for being a fan. And I understand it's a bummer to not have our code be public and open-source anymore. Sorry. It's a bunch of reasons that add up. I'll give some more details for anyone curious. (And I know that despite these reasons, lots of HNers probably wish it was not so. I agree! I too wish for a world where all companies could have their code be public and open source.) - We have a lot of tech around large-scale code graph, indexing, etc., stuff that is very differentiated and hard to build. We were starting to put some of this in separate private repositories and link them in at build time, but that was complex. It added a lot of code complexity, risked bugs, and slowed us down, and if a lot of the awesome stuff was private anyway, what was the point? - As we've been building Cody (https://cody.dev https://cody.dev), our code AI tool, we've seen a LOT more abuse. That's what happens when you offer any free tier of a product with LLM inference. We had to move a lot more of our internal backend abuse logic to private repositories, and it added code complexity to incorporate that private stuff in at build time. - It confused devs and customers to have 2 releases: an open-source release with less scaley/enterprisey features, and an enterprise release. It was a pain to migrate from one to the other (GitLab also felt this pain with their product) because the open-source build had a subset of the DB schema and other things. It was confusing to have a free tier on the enterprise release (lots of people got that mixed up with the open-source release), and it made our pricing and packaging complex so that lots of our time was spent helping customers understand what is paid and what isn't. - There were actually very very few companies that were going to pay but then decided to use the open-source version and not pay us. A lot of people probably assume that's why we made this move, but it's not. I think this is because people like the product and see value in it, including all the large-scale code nav/search features that are in our enterprise version. - Although very very few companies used our open-source version to avoid paying us, we did see it cause a lot of annoyance for devs who were asked by their management to try cloning our product or to research our codebase to give their procurement team ammunition to negotiate down our price. This honestly was just a waste of everyone's time. - If we got a ton of contributions (we never really solicited any), then it might've changed the calculus. Sourcegraph is an end-user application that you use at work (and when fun-coding, but the primary revenue model is for us to charge companies). For various reason, end-user server-side applications just don't get nearly as many contributions. Maybe it's because you'd need to redeploy your build for a bunch of other users at your company, not just yourself. Maybe it's because they necessarily entail UX, frontend, and scaling stuff, in addition to just adding new features. - We heard from people who left GitHub that people at GitHub were frequently monitoring our repository to get wind of our upcoming features and launches. Someone from GitHub told me his "job is to clone Sourcegraph". Since then, they obviously deprioritized their code search to re-found GitHub on AI, so we're not seeing this threat anymore. But I didn't love giving Microsoft an unfair advantage, especially since GitHub products are not open source either. - Since we made our code non-open-source, we've been able to pursue a lot more big partnerships (e.g., with cloud providers and other distribution partners and resellers). This is a valuable revenue stream that helps us make a better product overall. Again, because Sourcegraph is an end-user application with a UI that devs constantly use and care about, we never really had the MongoDB/Redis/CockroachDB risk of AWS/GCP/Azure just deploying our stuff and cutting us out. We're not protecting from downside here, but we are enjoying the upside because now those kinds of distribution partnerships are viable for us. To give a specific example, within ~2 months of making our code non-open-source last year, we signed a $1M+ ARR deal through a distribution partner that would not have happened if our code was open source. This is not our biggest annual deal, but it's still really nice! We are totally focused on building the best code search/intelligence and appreciate all our customers and all the feedback here. Hope this helps explain a bit more where we're coming from!
afro88 2y ago
> All documents were public by default. Technical and product RFCs (and later PR/FAQs) were drafted, reviewed, and catalogued in a public Google Drive folder Does this still exist somewhere?
CAP_NET_ADMIN 2y ago
I'd like to point to the previous episode in this YA drama series: "Sourcegraph is no longer open source" by me, from last year https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36584656 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36584656
- PaulCarrack 2y ago
  Right when I saw this post I immediately thought of your post from last year, some great discussion there. These days on HN, anytime I see a post about Sourcegraph my knee jerk reaction is to whince because I know it's probably not a good thing. It will be a sad day for tech when they get rid of the on prem free version. I feel like that's the next logical thing to cut given the direction and momentum they are heading.
throwaway984393 2y ago
Don't start your company as open source. It will attract the wrong customers (the ones who don't give you money but sure like to complain) and detract from building your product. If you can build a successful product, open source it afterwards to give you a competitive advantage without being a drag.
- mobeigi 2y ago
  Agreed. I generally don't have an issue with companies private sourcing their work when they are the dominant contributor to it. I have a much bigger problem with companies that do it that have benefited dominantly from the contributions of others. For example, imagine if the Linux kernel went private.
- jhpdk 2y ago
  I don't think the problem is with "Starting with open source". The real challenge is maintaining the transparency and being straight-forward. The setting the expectations should be clear. It should be like "Hey if you A go to an here and if you want B go there because that has X & Y".
breadwinner 2y ago
If you're looking for a Lucene-based search index with a nice UI here's one: https://github.com/wisercoder/eureka https://github.com/wisercoder/eureka
JZL003 2y ago
I guess I wish it was still open but want to reiterate how appreciative I am for the public free search. It's so amazingly useful while doing CS research to search through all of github with regez that way
kkukshtel 2y ago
Build cultural capital on being loud about how you're open source, vibes, and a cool podcast. Pivot aggressively and crumble to realistic business challenges when the core business model (code search) gets eaten by Github (their code search), then try to act like nothing happened while pushing the new product and gaslighting existing users as you try to convince them the actually want Cody, not the code search. Which is to say, unsurprising.
corroclaro 2y ago
Another group of source snakes to add to the collaboration/purchase/business blacklist. Quinn S., Beyang L., etc. are individuals happy to ride on FOSS until they're big enough to cash out. OK. Just be upfront about it. "We did this to focus" - no, you did it to make more money. Jesus, be honest - you're talking to developers, not your investors, we can smell the BS from across the Atlantic.
zeroCalories 2y ago
Open source? More like trojan horse. Nothing is "open" unless it has a GNU licence.
- josephcsible 2y ago
  Those licenses themselves aren't even sufficient to protect against this, since copyright holders don't have to follow their own licenses. To be fully safe from this kind of rug pull, the project also needs to accept substantial external contributions without a CLA, like the Linux kernel does.
conartist6 2y ago
IMO they went dark because they were forced to pivot to AI to survive, soft-abandoning their core mission of expanding developer literacy. Their biggest business problem is that they can’t win at that mission in a way that nets the company a win, because the tools they use for basic literacy are all downstream of Github’s. Every time they improve something to gain a competitive advantage they end up giving the same advantage to their biggest competitor. Even their AI tech is downstream of their competitors’! I mean, I used to have a lot more respect for Steve Yegge, but his post about joining SG was one of the last optimistic things written about the Sourcegraph platform, and one of the last genuinely optimistic things Steve has written (that also made me optimistic). I absolutely loved watching Prime disassemble Steve’s current view of the world in the most still-grounded-in-reality way possible. Disclaimer: I am the author of a competing technology (BABLR), am banned from the Sourcegraph Discord for agitating for change, and am now CEO of the newly-born Silphium Labs: an org with the same mission as Sourcegraph but which still believes in transparency, open source, and the realistic possibility of bringing no-cost code literacy to everyone in the world
- jdorfman 2y ago
  > am banned from the Sourcegraph Discord for agitating for change Conrad, you were banned from our Discord for being extremely rude and hostile to our team. We warned you that you were breaking our CoC, but you ignored it.

424 points by kaycebasques 2y ago

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

Sourcegraph search is amazing. I can point to any hash in our repo and search by regex/path regex. Results are instant and in json format. I hacked together a 'cs' script in bash using the sg cli client and some git calls, as I missed Google's cs command since leaving. Works perfectly, faster than ctags/any local indexer.

sqs 2y ago
Awesome to hear! What sucks about Sourcegraph for you, and how can we make it better?
- PaulCarrack 2y ago
  I use Sourcegraph for personal use with my private repos. In the past, I've found actual bugs that I reported to Justin Dorfman and worked with him to get those bugs assigned to the right engineers so they got fixed before your enterprise customers can experience them. 1. Is there still a path for reporting issues now that the repo has gone private? The Github issue tracker can no longer be accessed or searched through to report bugs or figure out if a bug is known or being worked on. 2. Do you plan to get rid of "Sourcegraph Free" for on premise personal use?
  - sqs 2y ago
    Thanks for helping us make the product better! You can post any issues at https://community.sourcegraph.com https://community.sourcegraph.com. And you can also email support@sourcegraph.com (for customers or any private issues). We will continue to have a free tier for personal use. Soon we will have a free tier of code search on Sourcegraph.com for private code.
aterp 2y ago
What does cs command do?

reedf1 2y ago

What happened to sourcegraph is very sad. It was a great tool, and the kind of software you wish the apache foundation was managing. I've been looking for alternatives - any recommendations?

notpushkin 2y ago
For code search, I've heard Hound is pretty good but I haven't personally tried it yet. The UI is a bit clunky though. I'm wondering if one can port the old Apache-licensed Sourcegraph UI? https://github.com/hound-search/hound https://github.com/hound-search/hound
- midoBB 2y ago
  I have ran Hound in my current co for about 2 years now, it's fine but the search experience is far below the SG one. SG is a far superior option but it is prohibetively expensive. I thought about hacking on Hound to be honest to rewrite the UI at least because half of it is broken.
mdaniel 2y ago
> I've been looking for alternatives Just out of curiosity, is code search something you need to get bleeding edge updates? What's wrong with running the pre-rug-pull release? There even seems to be a pseudo community fork that added features: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41297879 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41297879

alin23 2y ago

Damn, I use Sourcegraph so much for my reverse engineering efforts on macOS. They index all those private framework symbols that people extract on every macOS release, and allow searching for headers and even how they are called by other developers that were ahead of me. A big part of https://lunar.fyi https://lunar.fyi exists thanks to Sourcegraph search. Even now I'm using it to find a way to enable the second monitor on M3 MacBooks without needing to close the lid [1]. I really hope this is not a sign of them taking back the ability to search in the future. [1] https://alinpanaitiu.com/blog/turn-off-macbook-display-clamshell/ https://alinpanaitiu.com/blog/turn-off-macbook-display-clams...

welder 2y ago
> I really hope this is not a sign of them taking back the ability to search in the future. Searching repos seems to be unchanged: https://sourcegraph.com/search https://sourcegraph.com/search
sqs 2y ago
Glad you use Sourcegraph! I remember that blog post and thought it was awesome. I am the Sourcegraph CEO, and we haven't changed anything about our public code search at https://sourcegraph.com/search https://sourcegraph.com/search. That's the same product tons of customers use for their internal code, and our public code search is a really important way for us to dogfood, iterate fast, etc. We just made our own internal codebase private.
- alin23 2y ago
  Ok, so glad to hear that from you directly! Thank you for all the value you’ve put out there for free! About the codebase part, I don’t have any need for it so I’m not affected by this, but I wonder if it was possible to keep the current state of the code frozen in a public repository and only make private the future work. That’s how I did it on Lunar, that’s also how the BetterDisplay dev did, it was a good compromise so as to not steal anything that was already free. But of course we don’t have the same business model or licensing needs so I’m pretty sure I’m missing something. The way I did it is: - freeze the public code to a new branch “lunar3” - make a private repo LunarPro which works exactly like the previous Lunar repo - but on every commit the private repo syncs the code in an encrypted form to the public repo That way, permalinks remain valid, everything that was free and accessible before is still available in the future and the branch serves as a “compilable” state without any encrypted files. But again, I’m just one and you’re many, it might get hard to maintain this structure in a team. And some people might still find things to complain about. I know it was that way for me.

EMIRELADERO 2y ago

Straight-up making all dev work private is very weird and perplexing. Why would their business model (which they had since some time, mind you) require not only a proprietary/"open core" license, which I would understand, but complete secrecy around source code itself? What business goal couldn't be accomplished with licensing restrictions alone? And is that difference in potential income generated by this new secret-requiring business model so big that it justifies throwing away the entire "open nature" of the company that has been a core value for most of its existence?

jsiepkes 2y ago
I've seen this multiple times with companies. Another example which went fully closed in an instant is ForgeRock (OpenAM, etc.). Usually it happens when management caves in to complaints from sales. Who will complain being open makes selling the product hard. In the end they will probably find out it's just the sales people's "excuse du-jour" and even after closing the source they still don't hit their targets.

WesolyKubeczek 2y ago

Can’t wait for Steve Yegge putting out a huge article about how this is a great thing and comparing it to TV shows or something.

mannycalavera42 2y ago
oh, first time I'm hearing this sentiment against Yegge. Not a specific fan of him but curious: do you have memories / link to similar BS-like statements from this person?
- WesolyKubeczek 2y ago
  Just read his blog post titled "the death of junior programmer" or something like that. Be sure to not have eaten lunch prior to that; there's so much gatekeeping of the bad kind that it's quite vomit-inducing.
  - dpritchett 2y ago
    I’d been a huge fan of his for a solid decade, but that post was probably the last one of his I’ll ever read.
  - BaculumMeumEst 2y ago
    Really? I thought the content was interesting and it aligned with a lot of my thoughts. The end has a lot of practical advice- any junior who follows will probably be extremely successful. To that end, I think the title is a little clickbaity. I prefer the half glass full view - juniors have more access to rapidly learn and improve than they have ever had before. They can blow past the sea of mediocre seniors who don't bother to keep up.
    - conartist6 2y ago
      The problem is that it's really hard to learn from AI. You can pay it to think for you, but that way you won't learn much.

solarkraft 2y ago

That seems silly. Hope there will be an official statement (apology? lol).

sixhobbits 2y ago

I used to always point to Sourcegraph as a company that really understood dev culture and what it took to make devs happy, so this slow transition has definitely been painful to watch. Just yesterday someone asked for an example of a public roadmap for a technical product, so I spent some time looking for Sourcegraph's, only to find out that they've also made most of their docs private. The public handbook was an amazing resource before, now it's been moved to Notion, and most of the interesting bits are links to private Google documents (which they used to do only for financial documents and other stuff that obviously needed to stay private). Sad!

iknownthing 2y ago
I interviewed with them once, they strung me along for about 6 months then ghosted me.
- mdaniel 2y ago
  As a counterpoint, they scheduled me within days and I left the office with an offer letter I'm cognizant that company culture is not one fixed thing, so maybe they're way different when you interacted with them versus when I did, I'm just saying I had the opposite experience so I doubt it's a trend
  - iknownthing 2y ago
    To be clear, I had many interviews with them over that 6 months (10+ I think).
  - cxr 2y ago
    In what way is that a counterpoint? Are you tacitly suggesting that the other commenter's position is that Sourcegraph doesn't hire anyone? They they string everyone along for months before ghosting? There's a distinction between ∃ and ∀.

stpn 2y ago

As much as I've have cited, loved, and recommended sourcegraph (even going so far as to help run the open source version at a previous co), I never paid a cent for the product. I'm curious about the line of thinking in leaving open source behind, but it seems somewhat unsurprising in that lens.

sqs 2y ago
Thanks! We appreciate you. It was really a focus thing. It added a lot of overhead, lost focus, and risk to have stuff be open source. Most customers weren't telling us it was valuable to them, and frankly we heard very little from people who were using our open-source build. (How could we have gotten your input earlier?) We still have a lot of open-source code, but ultimately we need to focus on building a great product and making money on it. Which we are doing. :-) As Sourcegraph CEO, I obviously wish we could do all the things, but we gotta stay focused on building a great code search/intelligence product.
PaulCarrack 2y ago
> I never paid a cent for the product I would love to contribute and pay, but, as a single personal / private onprem user, it's impossible. It's $49 per user with a 50 user minimum. Sourcegraph doesn't make it possible to contribute in that circumstance.

jsiepkes 2y ago

The software Heritage project has archived most of their repo's. Including the main one [1]. Last crawl seems to be of mid July 2024. [1] https://archive.softwareheritage.org/browse/origin/directory/?origin_url=https://github.com/sourcegraph/sourcegraph https://archive.softwareheritage.org/browse/origin/directory...

sunaookami 2y ago
According to the article, this is the current public snapshot: https://github.com/sourcegraph/sourcegraph-public-snapshot https://github.com/sourcegraph/sourcegraph-public-snapshot

speedgoose 2y ago

It's a bit sad. I forked ~~the last~~ an open-source version some time ago[0]. I removed the telemetry, disabled updates, removed the proprietary code, made a docker image, and implemented some lightweight oauth2/oauth2-proxy authentication. I plan to keep it running behind Oauth2-Proxy for a long time. It has been very reliable software and because it's behind a supposedly secure proxy, I don't feel bad about not updating it. [0] https://github.com/SINTEF/sourcegraph https://github.com/SINTEF/sourcegraph

notpushkin 2y ago
Thank you for this! I think 5.0.6 is the last open source version though. Have you considered updating? (Not sure how viable it would be – seems they've moved quite a few things around)
- speedgoose 2y ago
  Oh, my memory failed me. I don't know when I will have time to update, but that sounds like something that could be done!
cdchn 2y ago
This is awesome thank you for this.

sluongng 2y ago

Kinda weird because they have already relicensed the entire repo recently. I wonder what problem they are trying to solve with a private repo.

MzHN 2y ago

They also recently(?) silently destroyed[1] their public search index at sourcegraph.com/search. Since GitHub only recently got a working search and even that is behind login, I used to search a lot using Sourcegraph. It even supported searching GitLab. Now it seems that all GitLab repos are gone from the index and a huge number of GitHub repos as well. If I can't trust the search I'll just have no choice but to fall back to GitHub. It's a shame since their index was at some point even better than GitHub's own, although GitHub seems to have caught up. [1] https://community.sourcegraph.com/t/most-public-repos-no-longer-accessible-via-code-search/641 https://community.sourcegraph.com/t/most-public-repos-no-lon...

notpushkin 2y ago
https://grep.app/ https://grep.app/ is another good one. Not sure how many repos they index though.
- Alifatisk 2y ago
  It says half million git repos on the main page
sqs 2y ago
We still have tons of repositories searchable at https://sourcegraph.com/search https://sourcegraph.com/search, almost a million. We did cull lots of non-GitHub repositories and repositories with less star. It was very complex to keep up with millions of repositories due to GitHub rate limits and scaling. We tried to keep as many as possible while still being able to focus on making a good product for customers (our biggest customer has ~600k repositories). We're still spending millions of dollars annually to offer public code search, so our intent is certainly not to "destroy" it! If you have repositories you want us to add that are below the star threshold, please post at https://community.sourcegraph.com/t/most-public-repos-no-longer-accessible-via-code-search/641/2 https://community.sourcegraph.com/t/most-public-repos-no-lon....
- elashri 2y ago
  Most of the academic open source projects except big names in scientific computing will not be searchable if you are relying on stars as a criteria.

AYBABTME 2y ago

The sourcegraph folks are great. I think these days is a brutal period for startups. I can only guess how things are going. Just yesterday FT.com was publishing "Start-up failures rise 60% as founders face hangover from boom years"[1]. Like Cockroach's recent relicensing, I think we should be thankful for the good years and awesome stuff the last boom era brought, and not be too harsh on the principled founders who now find themselves having to make hard decisions. They're responsible to a lot of people at the end of the day - investors but also employees. Just crashing the whole thing to make a moral statement would be dumb. Employees also count on execs to care for them. If startups have to make hard decisions to keep things afloat, it's the right thing to do. ** I'm extrapolating a lot here from this post, for all I know things may be rosey at SourceGraph, idk! [1]: https://www.ft.com/content/2808ad4c-783f-4475-bcda-bddc0299095e https://www.ft.com/content/2808ad4c-783f-4475-bcda-bddc02990...

fire_lake 2y ago

They’re probably courting a buyer.

iddan 2y ago

I wonder from all the people commenting here how much they relied on Source Graph, and how many actually paid for it. Running an open-source company is hard, just like running any company is. Sometimes you understand there are things you just can't give out for free, and that's part of maturing as a company.

pjmlp 2y ago
100% this. Devs have to learn the hard way to behave like the other professionals, want nice things to stay around? Pay for the tools.
- sunaookami 2y ago
  Paying doesn't guarantee anything. There are tons of examples of devs selling out even though their program/SaaS is paid.
  - alephnerd 2y ago
    Companies are run based on margins, not just subscriptions. That individual account you are paying for most likely does not have the RoI needed to manage it due to a mix of larger customers abusing individual accounts to get a discount or individual account users overrepresenting themselves in support tickets, asks, and feature requests. If you don't like the direction a tool you like is going, go build a competitor and manage it to your liking. For most products, the revenue skew is 80-20 so if you're not part of the 20% you aren't going to be heard.
  - pjmlp 2y ago
    Until supermarkets and landlords start taking pull requests as payment, it guarantees more often than not.
- marcinzm 2y ago
  You mean pay for your own tools and then get fired for circumventing the corporate security policies on what tools you can use?

throwaway290 2y ago

Preparing to get bought by Microsoft?

mdaniel 2y ago
I dunno the underlying tone to this message, but given the absolutely staggering number of MIT licensed repos under github.com/Microsoft I don't know that such a thing would be as bad as you envision Now that GitLab is public, that's who I'd want to buy them, and there's precedent since (a) GitLab has already swallowed quite a few open source dev-tooling companies and (b) they already have a Sourcegraph integration so it would be very low drama to just fold it into the core offering and get rid of that stupid Elasticsearch dep
- throwaway290 2y ago
  > given the absolutely staggering number of MIT licensed repos under github.com/Microsoft I don't know that such a thing would be as bad as you envision Well they keep their main stuff carefully closed. Github isn't open source for example:) And simply think would they pay Github the money they paid (or any money at all) if it was open source like Gitlab? I guess if you say it's public and autonomous I wouldn't mind if Gitlab bought Sourcegraph. If MS did it I would mind a ton

sqs 2y ago

Sourcegraph CEO here. We made our main internal codebase (for our code search product) private. We did this to focus. It added a lot of extra work and risk to have stuff be open source and public. We gotta stay focused on building a great code search/intelligence product for our customers. That's what ultimately lets us still do plenty of things for devs and the OSS community: (1) Our super popular public code search is at https://sourcegraph.com/search https://sourcegraph.com/search, which is the same product customers use internally on their own codebases. We spend millions of dollars annually on this public instance with almost 1M OSS repositories to help out everyone using OSS (and we love when they like it so much they bring it into their company :-). (2) We also have still have a ton of open-source code, like https://sourcegraph.com/github.com/sourcegraph/cody https://sourcegraph.com/github.com/sourcegraph/cody (our code AI tool). BTW, if any founders out there are wondering whether they should make their own code open-source or public, happy to chat! Email in profile. I think it could make sense for a lot of companies, but more so for infrastructure products or client tools, not so much for full server-side end-user applications.

quantumwoke 2y ago
Been a fan of sourcegraph since 2016 or so, it's been exciting to watch the pivots along the way. That being said, the loss of transparency here is pretty sad, speaking as a large FOSS repo owner. What were the main factors apart from risk that went into the decision?
- sqs 2y ago
  Thanks for being a fan. And I understand it's a bummer to not have our code be public and open-source anymore. Sorry. It's a bunch of reasons that add up. I'll give some more details for anyone curious. (And I know that despite these reasons, lots of HNers probably wish it was not so. I agree! I too wish for a world where all companies could have their code be public and open source.) - We have a lot of tech around large-scale code graph, indexing, etc., stuff that is very differentiated and hard to build. We were starting to put some of this in separate private repositories and link them in at build time, but that was complex. It added a lot of code complexity, risked bugs, and slowed us down, and if a lot of the awesome stuff was private anyway, what was the point? - As we've been building Cody (https://cody.dev https://cody.dev), our code AI tool, we've seen a LOT more abuse. That's what happens when you offer any free tier of a product with LLM inference. We had to move a lot more of our internal backend abuse logic to private repositories, and it added code complexity to incorporate that private stuff in at build time. - It confused devs and customers to have 2 releases: an open-source release with less scaley/enterprisey features, and an enterprise release. It was a pain to migrate from one to the other (GitLab also felt this pain with their product) because the open-source build had a subset of the DB schema and other things. It was confusing to have a free tier on the enterprise release (lots of people got that mixed up with the open-source release), and it made our pricing and packaging complex so that lots of our time was spent helping customers understand what is paid and what isn't. - There were actually very very few companies that were going to pay but then decided to use the open-source version and not pay us. A lot of people probably assume that's why we made this move, but it's not. I think this is because people like the product and see value in it, including all the large-scale code nav/search features that are in our enterprise version. - Although very very few companies used our open-source version to avoid paying us, we did see it cause a lot of annoyance for devs who were asked by their management to try cloning our product or to research our codebase to give their procurement team ammunition to negotiate down our price. This honestly was just a waste of everyone's time. - If we got a ton of contributions (we never really solicited any), then it might've changed the calculus. Sourcegraph is an end-user application that you use at work (and when fun-coding, but the primary revenue model is for us to charge companies). For various reason, end-user server-side applications just don't get nearly as many contributions. Maybe it's because you'd need to redeploy your build for a bunch of other users at your company, not just yourself. Maybe it's because they necessarily entail UX, frontend, and scaling stuff, in addition to just adding new features. - We heard from people who left GitHub that people at GitHub were frequently monitoring our repository to get wind of our upcoming features and launches. Someone from GitHub told me his "job is to clone Sourcegraph". Since then, they obviously deprioritized their code search to re-found GitHub on AI, so we're not seeing this threat anymore. But I didn't love giving Microsoft an unfair advantage, especially since GitHub products are not open source either. - Since we made our code non-open-source, we've been able to pursue a lot more big partnerships (e.g., with cloud providers and other distribution partners and resellers). This is a valuable revenue stream that helps us make a better product overall. Again, because Sourcegraph is an end-user application with a UI that devs constantly use and care about, we never really had the MongoDB/Redis/CockroachDB risk of AWS/GCP/Azure just deploying our stuff and cutting us out. We're not protecting from downside here, but we are enjoying the upside because now those kinds of distribution partnerships are viable for us. To give a specific example, within ~2 months of making our code non-open-source last year, we signed a $1M+ ARR deal through a distribution partner that would not have happened if our code was open source. This is not our biggest annual deal, but it's still really nice! We are totally focused on building the best code search/intelligence and appreciate all our customers and all the feedback here. Hope this helps explain a bit more where we're coming from!

afro88 2y ago

> All documents were public by default. Technical and product RFCs (and later PR/FAQs) were drafted, reviewed, and catalogued in a public Google Drive folder Does this still exist somewhere?

CAP_NET_ADMIN 2y ago

I'd like to point to the previous episode in this YA drama series: "Sourcegraph is no longer open source" by me, from last year https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36584656 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36584656

PaulCarrack 2y ago
Right when I saw this post I immediately thought of your post from last year, some great discussion there. These days on HN, anytime I see a post about Sourcegraph my knee jerk reaction is to whince because I know it's probably not a good thing. It will be a sad day for tech when they get rid of the on prem free version. I feel like that's the next logical thing to cut given the direction and momentum they are heading.

throwaway984393 2y ago

Don't start your company as open source. It will attract the wrong customers (the ones who don't give you money but sure like to complain) and detract from building your product. If you can build a successful product, open source it afterwards to give you a competitive advantage without being a drag.

mobeigi 2y ago
Agreed. I generally don't have an issue with companies private sourcing their work when they are the dominant contributor to it. I have a much bigger problem with companies that do it that have benefited dominantly from the contributions of others. For example, imagine if the Linux kernel went private.
jhpdk 2y ago
I don't think the problem is with "Starting with open source". The real challenge is maintaining the transparency and being straight-forward. The setting the expectations should be clear. It should be like "Hey if you A go to an here and if you want B go there because that has X & Y".

breadwinner 2y ago

If you're looking for a Lucene-based search index with a nice UI here's one: https://github.com/wisercoder/eureka https://github.com/wisercoder/eureka

JZL003 2y ago

I guess I wish it was still open but want to reiterate how appreciative I am for the public free search. It's so amazingly useful while doing CS research to search through all of github with regez that way

kkukshtel 2y ago

Build cultural capital on being loud about how you're open source, vibes, and a cool podcast. Pivot aggressively and crumble to realistic business challenges when the core business model (code search) gets eaten by Github (their code search), then try to act like nothing happened while pushing the new product and gaslighting existing users as you try to convince them the actually want Cody, not the code search. Which is to say, unsurprising.

corroclaro 2y ago

Another group of source snakes to add to the collaboration/purchase/business blacklist. Quinn S., Beyang L., etc. are individuals happy to ride on FOSS until they're big enough to cash out. OK. Just be upfront about it. "We did this to focus" - no, you did it to make more money. Jesus, be honest - you're talking to developers, not your investors, we can smell the BS from across the Atlantic.

zeroCalories 2y ago

Open source? More like trojan horse. Nothing is "open" unless it has a GNU licence.

josephcsible 2y ago
Those licenses themselves aren't even sufficient to protect against this, since copyright holders don't have to follow their own licenses. To be fully safe from this kind of rug pull, the project also needs to accept substantial external contributions without a CLA, like the Linux kernel does.

conartist6 2y ago

IMO they went dark because they were forced to pivot to AI to survive, soft-abandoning their core mission of expanding developer literacy. Their biggest business problem is that they can’t win at that mission in a way that nets the company a win, because the tools they use for basic literacy are all downstream of Github’s. Every time they improve something to gain a competitive advantage they end up giving the same advantage to their biggest competitor. Even their AI tech is downstream of their competitors’! I mean, I used to have a lot more respect for Steve Yegge, but his post about joining SG was one of the last optimistic things written about the Sourcegraph platform, and one of the last genuinely optimistic things Steve has written (that also made me optimistic). I absolutely loved watching Prime disassemble Steve’s current view of the world in the most still-grounded-in-reality way possible. Disclaimer: I am the author of a competing technology (BABLR), am banned from the Sourcegraph Discord for agitating for change, and am now CEO of the newly-born Silphium Labs: an org with the same mission as Sourcegraph but which still believes in transparency, open source, and the realistic possibility of bringing no-cost code literacy to everyone in the world

jdorfman 2y ago
> am banned from the Sourcegraph Discord for agitating for change Conrad, you were banned from our Discord for being extremely rude and hostile to our team. We warned you that you were breaking our CoC, but you ignored it.