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It is us, developers, who convinced our management to purchase GitHub Enterprise to be our forge. We didn't pay any heed to the values of software freedom. A cl

It is us, developers, who convinced our management to purchase GitHub Enterprise to be our forge. We didn't pay any heed to the values of software freedom. A closed source, proprietary software had good features. We saw that and convinced our management to purchase it. Never mind what cost it would impose in the future when the good software gets bad owners. Never mind that there were alternatives that were inferior but were community-developed, community-maintained and libre. The writing is in the wall. First it was UX annoyances. Then it was GitHub Actions woes. Now it is paying money for running their software on your own hardware. It's only going to go downhill. Is it a good time now to learn from our mistakes and convince our teams and management to use community-maintained, libre alternatives? They may be inferior. They may lack features. But they're not going to pull user hostile tricks like this on you and me. And hey, if they are lacking features, maybe we should convince our management to let us contribute time to the community to add those features? It's a much better investment than sinking money into a software that will only grow more and more user hostile, isn't it?

foobarian 10mo ago
> alternatives that were inferior Actually there were alternatives that were far superior (seriously, no way to group projects?) but also more than 2x as expensive. If GH "fixes the glitch" then it will be plan B time.
- bigbuppo 10mo ago
  What are these superior alternatives? Never could stand GitHub and I'm suffering GitLab at the moment.
Nextgrid 10mo ago
Takes like these do not account for the value you gained by using the software in the meantime. Here are 2 scenarios: 1) company uses exclusively free software, spends more time dealing with the shortcomings of said software than developing product, product is half baked and doesn't sell well, company dies. 2) company uses proprietary but cheap/free (as in beer) software that does the job really well, focuses on developing product, product is good and sells well, company how has a ton of money they could use to replicate the proprietary product from scratch if they wanted to. A purist approach like in scenario 1 leaves everyone poor. A pragmatic approach like scenario 2 ends up earning enough money that can be used to recreate the proprietary software from scratch (and open-source it if you wanted to). In this case the problem isn't even the proprietariness of the software, it's the fact that companies are reliant on someone else hosting the software (GH being FOSS wouldn't actually change anything here - whoever is hosting it can still enforce whatever terms they want). FOSS alternatives already exist, it's just that our industry is so consumed by grifters that nobody knows how to do things anymore (because it's more profitable for every individual not to); running software on a server (what used to be table stakes for any shop and junior sysadmin) is nowadays lost knowledge. Microsoft and SaaS software providers are capitalizing on this.
- embedding-shape 10mo ago
  > A purist approach like in scenario 1 leaves everyone poor. That depends, not always. Sometimes the employees of said company manages to contribute back upstream, on the dime of the company. If the "free software" they used and contributed to have a lot of users, it's certainly not "leaves everyone poor" but rather "helps everyone, beyond monetary gain". Sure, you can make the argument that it isn't that great for the company, and you may be right. But the world is bigger than companies making money, killing a few companies along the way to make small iterative steps on making free software for absolutely everyone is probably a worthwhile sacrifice, if you zoom out a bit.
  - Nextgrid 10mo ago
    Even purely from an altruist perspective I’d argue scenario 2 makes more sense as the resulting money can be used to fund a lot more open-source contributions.
    - Retric 10mo ago
      Could in theory is very different from what actually happens. In the end the purists approach results in better more productive software across even slightly longer timescales. That ultimately produces more value and thus a richer society than the kind of short term pump and dump schemes which SV is so fond of. Who captures that value is a different story than was that value created.
      - Groxx 10mo ago
        yeah, I think ~all of open-source-funding-history stands as evidence opposed to #2, a la https://xkcd.com/2347/ https://xkcd.com/2347/
    - embedding-shape 10mo ago
      It could, but would it? For-profit companies usually don't suddenly turn around and start funding FOSS, unless that was part of their core mission from the start. If a company aims to make as much money, then that tends to be the mission they stick with, for better or worse.
skilning 10mo ago
Have any suggestions to those community-developed and maintained options?
- ukd1 10mo ago
  Gitea. Gitlab (ish?).
  - deepsun 10mo ago
    GitLab actually implemented Actions first back in the day (called CI/CD). I remember GitHub was following their lead.
    - metaphor 10mo ago
      Which is funny reading how TFA tries to feign ignorance: > When we shipped Actions in 2018, we had no idea how popular it would become.
  - justsid 10mo ago
    Gitea scales really badly with large repos in my experience. Gitlab works a lot better mostly because you can just throw more hardware at it. This is with a pretty large git repo and a lot of daily commits.
    - komali2 10mo ago
      On the other hand, gitlab is a memory hog. You need a big vm dedicated to it. We were on codeberg for a couple years and it was fine.
      - justsid 10mo ago
        Yeah Gitlab is a pig, but that’s what I meant with you can throw hardware at the problem. I’ve been meaning to check out Codeberg for personal project hosting since it seems to address the shortcomings of gitea
      - 10mo ago
prpl 10mo ago
it's just software. it changes and you move on.
duxup 10mo ago
It's not my money man. It's still fine.
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
- SturgeonsLaw 10mo ago
  That not-your-money is still going towards rewarding user-hostile decisions
  - komali2 10mo ago
    No ethical consumption under capitalism. My phone has minerals in it mined under slave-like conditions. I'm all for everyone going full Libra - we do it at my co-op - but it makes sense to me that venture funded companies would "play the game" and light investor money on fire because, first, who gives a shit, and second, the investors want you to do that anyway so they can find out as fast as possible if you're a unicorn. At my co-op, I spend hours writing future proof code and integrating FOSS solutions that I hope will serve us forever. When I'm at a startup, I'm looking for the fastest, maybe cheapest solution. YC gave us 200k in AWS credit? Guess we're on AWS. Another company in the cohort is some LLM IDE ala cursor and gave us a year free? Sure, burn tokens their investors are paying for, more agents for me. Vercel offers us a year of free hosting? Great, I hate nextjs but Claude loves it so fuck it, we deploy a nextjs app on vercel and lock ourselves deep into that ecosystem. Our product may not look like this at all in a year so I may be rewriting it in Vue or whatever when the vercel bills start coming in. Doesn't matter.
- dijit 10mo ago
  “not my money” thinking will always indirectly lead to bad things for you on a long enough timeline. Edit: this got flagged, but if you end up in an unprofitable position because you chose Oracle as a vendor and they squeezed your company so hard they need to choose between paying you (either via a raise or via actually employing you) or staying with a vendor thats squeezing them; they will choose the latter, as its short term cheaper.
gheltllck 10mo ago
Not to defend this behaviour, but a lot of clouds SaaS do require you to pay for both ”management” and for the actual resources. And if you’re using vms in their cloud, you pay twice. For example, Azure has had a script runner service for ages that you can hook up to your ”own” vm, by installing an agent. But then you pay double, the fee (per second) for the service as long as the script is running, and the fee (per second) for the vm in azure as long as it exists. So, as with GitHub actions, it’s cheaper to run it on their provided crap instances. To get rid of the double costs I guess you could install your own CI server and agents, that polls the GitHub repo, but then you don’t get the integration in their web gui. That was what you did before gh actions came around, a local Jenkins for example.
Schnitz 10mo ago
GitHub isn’t even good, it’s just the mediocre default everybody uses. PRs were fantastic and the best thing ever - 15 years ago!
- bikelang 10mo ago
  Just curious - what do you think the current best git platforms are?
  - aetherspawn 10mo ago
    Azure DevOps is the gold standard for Pipelines.
    - noahbp 10mo ago
      That's not saying much, since it's still dependent upon the untyped mess that is YAML.
      - 0xbadcafebee 10mo ago
        YAML is just a data format. Make your own "thing" that takes input in any format you desire, then dump it to YAML. (also, YAML is dynamically typed, and supports explicit typing, but the parser can choose to ignore it)
      - lucyjojo 10mo ago
        these days we generate yaml out of cue i don't know why it's not more popular.
    - vrighter 10mo ago
      if only they supported ed25519 ssh keys
    - ghqqwwee 10mo ago
      AD is just sourcesafe/tfs/vsts with rebranding, each time trying to get rid of the bad reputation in developer circles.
0xbadcafebee 10mo ago
> learn from our mistakes and convince our teams and management to use community-maintained, libre alternatives Every company I've been at that tried to self-host something like GitLab, later moved to GitHub. Nobody in business cares if it's open source/free software. They care about managed hosting, centralized services, invoicing, etc. DIY is great for hobbyists and the cash-strapped.
- debarshri 10mo ago
  This is the irony of software engineering. This is how a lot of bad software gets written too.
- sofixa 10mo ago
  > Every company I've been at that tried to self-host something like GitLab, later moved to GitHub Interesting, my experience has been the opposite. 99% of companies I've seen self host their VCS, it has been Gitlab (with some rare sel-hosted GitHub Enterprise everyone seems to hate, and the very rare Bitbucket). To be fair most of them started with it when Gitlab was really really ahead, features wise. The gap has somewhat closed, but Gitlab is still a superior product IMO. Just the fact that you can have an actual organisational structure, and move it around, and share variables/configs between groupings, beats anything GitHub have to offer which is slightly nicer than GitLab.
  - shykes 10mo ago
    Are you based in Europe? Gitlab has a much stronger presence there. In the US Gitlab adoption is much weaker in my experience.
    - sofixa 10mo ago
      Yep, but I interact with companies all over the world, and while American ones tend to not self-host (in general, but VCS in particular), out of those that do, Gitlab still seems more popular.
  - nacozarina 10mo ago
scott_w 10mo ago
Whatever your issues with the price, this comment is truly wild. When you’re using commercial PyCharm, you’re paying JetBrains to “run their software on your hardware.”
- dijit 10mo ago
  paying for the time the debugger is active would feel bad though.
- ceuk 10mo ago
  A one-off software license (or even a subscription) is completely different. The issue is metered billing for something you are paying for already which costs the company nothing. The equivalent is not only paying a flat monthly fee to Adobe for access to Photoshop, but also an additional charge for how long you have it open on your machine every month.
  - scott_w 10mo ago
    I’d like to introduce you to Oracle and many software companies pre-SaaS that were charging per core. If I recall correctly, Atlassian’s CI product also charged you for parallel jobs back in the day. And businesses were paying it because they felt it gave them value for money.
Madmallard 10mo ago
I don't understand how once these companies go down the user hostile hell-hole... like why do we allow them to keep operating? How is there not a collective decision to dissolve them?
- Lapsa 10mo ago
  haven't logged into GitHub since they added mandatory 2FA
  - uniq7 10mo ago
    Same here, my commit history chart makes people think I suddenly died on October 21, 2023, going from all green to all white. Bitbucket also implemented 2FA, but it's 100% optional, so I'm sticking with that for the moment.
- pferde 10mo ago
  I deleted my account the day Microsoft acquisition was confirmed. If more people did that, maybe we wouldn't be here.
physicsguy 10mo ago
There's always been this lesson with CI/CD - don't couple yourself to a specific product. If you do, you're gonna get screwed eventually. It happened with TravisCI, CircleCI, now it's happening with GitHub. The business model only makes sense if you can charge for it, those charges are only ever going to go up.
raxxorraxor 10mo ago
I use Gitea and think it is superior to GitHub. Can be quite well integrated in the usual Microsoft corporate environment easily as well, so you don't even need to create users. Perhaps setup two or three groups and you are done. Can be up and running in a few little hours if you start with nothing aside your domain controller. It also doesn't randomly fail and if it would, you can probably fix it yourself. I don't think actions on a git repository host is a good way to fix poor deployment strategies if it goes beyond pushing a package to npm and co. Just to poke at the wound again. But Gitea has interfaces here as well, didn't try them though.
ericzundel 10mo ago
> Now it is paying money for running their software on your own hardware. (facepalm)
brightball 10mo ago
I honestly don't have any issue paying the self-hosted runner fee. Paying it and counting it against our total allocated minutes when we bought the machine is going too far though.

foobarian 10mo ago

> alternatives that were inferior Actually there were alternatives that were far superior (seriously, no way to group projects?) but also more than 2x as expensive. If GH "fixes the glitch" then it will be plan B time.

bigbuppo 10mo ago
What are these superior alternatives? Never could stand GitHub and I'm suffering GitLab at the moment.

Nextgrid 10mo ago

Takes like these do not account for the value you gained by using the software in the meantime. Here are 2 scenarios: 1) company uses exclusively free software, spends more time dealing with the shortcomings of said software than developing product, product is half baked and doesn't sell well, company dies. 2) company uses proprietary but cheap/free (as in beer) software that does the job really well, focuses on developing product, product is good and sells well, company how has a ton of money they could use to replicate the proprietary product from scratch if they wanted to. A purist approach like in scenario 1 leaves everyone poor. A pragmatic approach like scenario 2 ends up earning enough money that can be used to recreate the proprietary software from scratch (and open-source it if you wanted to). In this case the problem isn't even the proprietariness of the software, it's the fact that companies are reliant on someone else hosting the software (GH being FOSS wouldn't actually change anything here - whoever is hosting it can still enforce whatever terms they want). FOSS alternatives already exist, it's just that our industry is so consumed by grifters that nobody knows how to do things anymore (because it's more profitable for every individual not to); running software on a server (what used to be table stakes for any shop and junior sysadmin) is nowadays lost knowledge. Microsoft and SaaS software providers are capitalizing on this.

embedding-shape 10mo ago
> A purist approach like in scenario 1 leaves everyone poor. That depends, not always. Sometimes the employees of said company manages to contribute back upstream, on the dime of the company. If the "free software" they used and contributed to have a lot of users, it's certainly not "leaves everyone poor" but rather "helps everyone, beyond monetary gain". Sure, you can make the argument that it isn't that great for the company, and you may be right. But the world is bigger than companies making money, killing a few companies along the way to make small iterative steps on making free software for absolutely everyone is probably a worthwhile sacrifice, if you zoom out a bit.
- Nextgrid 10mo ago
  Even purely from an altruist perspective I’d argue scenario 2 makes more sense as the resulting money can be used to fund a lot more open-source contributions.
  - Retric 10mo ago
    Could in theory is very different from what actually happens. In the end the purists approach results in better more productive software across even slightly longer timescales. That ultimately produces more value and thus a richer society than the kind of short term pump and dump schemes which SV is so fond of. Who captures that value is a different story than was that value created.
    - Groxx 10mo ago
      yeah, I think ~all of open-source-funding-history stands as evidence opposed to #2, a la https://xkcd.com/2347/ https://xkcd.com/2347/
  - embedding-shape 10mo ago
    It could, but would it? For-profit companies usually don't suddenly turn around and start funding FOSS, unless that was part of their core mission from the start. If a company aims to make as much money, then that tends to be the mission they stick with, for better or worse.

skilning 10mo ago

Have any suggestions to those community-developed and maintained options?

ukd1 10mo ago
Gitea. Gitlab (ish?).
- deepsun 10mo ago
  GitLab actually implemented Actions first back in the day (called CI/CD). I remember GitHub was following their lead.
  - metaphor 10mo ago
    Which is funny reading how TFA tries to feign ignorance: > When we shipped Actions in 2018, we had no idea how popular it would become.
- justsid 10mo ago
  Gitea scales really badly with large repos in my experience. Gitlab works a lot better mostly because you can just throw more hardware at it. This is with a pretty large git repo and a lot of daily commits.
  - komali2 10mo ago
    On the other hand, gitlab is a memory hog. You need a big vm dedicated to it. We were on codeberg for a couple years and it was fine.
    - justsid 10mo ago
      Yeah Gitlab is a pig, but that’s what I meant with you can throw hardware at the problem. I’ve been meaning to check out Codeberg for personal project hosting since it seems to address the shortcomings of gitea
    - 10mo ago

prpl 10mo ago

it's just software. it changes and you move on.

duxup 10mo ago

It's not my money man. It's still fine.

deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]
SturgeonsLaw 10mo ago
That not-your-money is still going towards rewarding user-hostile decisions
- komali2 10mo ago
  No ethical consumption under capitalism. My phone has minerals in it mined under slave-like conditions. I'm all for everyone going full Libra - we do it at my co-op - but it makes sense to me that venture funded companies would "play the game" and light investor money on fire because, first, who gives a shit, and second, the investors want you to do that anyway so they can find out as fast as possible if you're a unicorn. At my co-op, I spend hours writing future proof code and integrating FOSS solutions that I hope will serve us forever. When I'm at a startup, I'm looking for the fastest, maybe cheapest solution. YC gave us 200k in AWS credit? Guess we're on AWS. Another company in the cohort is some LLM IDE ala cursor and gave us a year free? Sure, burn tokens their investors are paying for, more agents for me. Vercel offers us a year of free hosting? Great, I hate nextjs but Claude loves it so fuck it, we deploy a nextjs app on vercel and lock ourselves deep into that ecosystem. Our product may not look like this at all in a year so I may be rewriting it in Vue or whatever when the vercel bills start coming in. Doesn't matter.
dijit 10mo ago
“not my money” thinking will always indirectly lead to bad things for you on a long enough timeline. Edit: this got flagged, but if you end up in an unprofitable position because you chose Oracle as a vendor and they squeezed your company so hard they need to choose between paying you (either via a raise or via actually employing you) or staying with a vendor thats squeezing them; they will choose the latter, as its short term cheaper.

gheltllck 10mo ago

Not to defend this behaviour, but a lot of clouds SaaS do require you to pay for both ”management” and for the actual resources. And if you’re using vms in their cloud, you pay twice. For example, Azure has had a script runner service for ages that you can hook up to your ”own” vm, by installing an agent. But then you pay double, the fee (per second) for the service as long as the script is running, and the fee (per second) for the vm in azure as long as it exists. So, as with GitHub actions, it’s cheaper to run it on their provided crap instances. To get rid of the double costs I guess you could install your own CI server and agents, that polls the GitHub repo, but then you don’t get the integration in their web gui. That was what you did before gh actions came around, a local Jenkins for example.

Schnitz 10mo ago

GitHub isn’t even good, it’s just the mediocre default everybody uses. PRs were fantastic and the best thing ever - 15 years ago!

bikelang 10mo ago
Just curious - what do you think the current best git platforms are?
- aetherspawn 10mo ago
  Azure DevOps is the gold standard for Pipelines.
  - noahbp 10mo ago
    That's not saying much, since it's still dependent upon the untyped mess that is YAML.
    - 0xbadcafebee 10mo ago
      YAML is just a data format. Make your own "thing" that takes input in any format you desire, then dump it to YAML. (also, YAML is dynamically typed, and supports explicit typing, but the parser can choose to ignore it)
    - lucyjojo 10mo ago
      these days we generate yaml out of cue i don't know why it's not more popular.
  - vrighter 10mo ago
    if only they supported ed25519 ssh keys
  - ghqqwwee 10mo ago
    AD is just sourcesafe/tfs/vsts with rebranding, each time trying to get rid of the bad reputation in developer circles.

0xbadcafebee 10mo ago

> learn from our mistakes and convince our teams and management to use community-maintained, libre alternatives Every company I've been at that tried to self-host something like GitLab, later moved to GitHub. Nobody in business cares if it's open source/free software. They care about managed hosting, centralized services, invoicing, etc. DIY is great for hobbyists and the cash-strapped.

debarshri 10mo ago
This is the irony of software engineering. This is how a lot of bad software gets written too.
sofixa 10mo ago
> Every company I've been at that tried to self-host something like GitLab, later moved to GitHub Interesting, my experience has been the opposite. 99% of companies I've seen self host their VCS, it has been Gitlab (with some rare sel-hosted GitHub Enterprise everyone seems to hate, and the very rare Bitbucket). To be fair most of them started with it when Gitlab was really really ahead, features wise. The gap has somewhat closed, but Gitlab is still a superior product IMO. Just the fact that you can have an actual organisational structure, and move it around, and share variables/configs between groupings, beats anything GitHub have to offer which is slightly nicer than GitLab.
- shykes 10mo ago
  Are you based in Europe? Gitlab has a much stronger presence there. In the US Gitlab adoption is much weaker in my experience.
  - sofixa 10mo ago
    Yep, but I interact with companies all over the world, and while American ones tend to not self-host (in general, but VCS in particular), out of those that do, Gitlab still seems more popular.
- nacozarina 10mo ago

scott_w 10mo ago

Whatever your issues with the price, this comment is truly wild. When you’re using commercial PyCharm, you’re paying JetBrains to “run their software on your hardware.”

dijit 10mo ago
paying for the time the debugger is active would feel bad though.
ceuk 10mo ago
A one-off software license (or even a subscription) is completely different. The issue is metered billing for something you are paying for already which costs the company nothing. The equivalent is not only paying a flat monthly fee to Adobe for access to Photoshop, but also an additional charge for how long you have it open on your machine every month.
- scott_w 10mo ago
  I’d like to introduce you to Oracle and many software companies pre-SaaS that were charging per core. If I recall correctly, Atlassian’s CI product also charged you for parallel jobs back in the day. And businesses were paying it because they felt it gave them value for money.

Madmallard 10mo ago

I don't understand how once these companies go down the user hostile hell-hole... like why do we allow them to keep operating? How is there not a collective decision to dissolve them?

Lapsa 10mo ago
haven't logged into GitHub since they added mandatory 2FA
- uniq7 10mo ago
  Same here, my commit history chart makes people think I suddenly died on October 21, 2023, going from all green to all white. Bitbucket also implemented 2FA, but it's 100% optional, so I'm sticking with that for the moment.
pferde 10mo ago
I deleted my account the day Microsoft acquisition was confirmed. If more people did that, maybe we wouldn't be here.

physicsguy 10mo ago

There's always been this lesson with CI/CD - don't couple yourself to a specific product. If you do, you're gonna get screwed eventually. It happened with TravisCI, CircleCI, now it's happening with GitHub. The business model only makes sense if you can charge for it, those charges are only ever going to go up.

raxxorraxor 10mo ago

I use Gitea and think it is superior to GitHub. Can be quite well integrated in the usual Microsoft corporate environment easily as well, so you don't even need to create users. Perhaps setup two or three groups and you are done. Can be up and running in a few little hours if you start with nothing aside your domain controller. It also doesn't randomly fail and if it would, you can probably fix it yourself. I don't think actions on a git repository host is a good way to fix poor deployment strategies if it goes beyond pushing a package to npm and co. Just to poke at the wound again. But Gitea has interfaces here as well, didn't try them though.

ericzundel 10mo ago

> Now it is paying money for running their software on your own hardware. (facepalm)

brightball 10mo ago

I honestly don't have any issue paying the self-hosted runner fee. Paying it and counting it against our total allocated minutes when we bought the machine is going too far though.