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What's the big deal about Github? Too much hype. Whenever you hear about the number of repos, most of them are just forks. In fact, I've created many by acci

by yapcguy 13y ago

What's the big deal about Github? Too much hype. Whenever you hear about the number of repos, most of them are just forks. In fact, I've created many by accident because Github changed their UI so clicking the icon instantly starts a fork instead of asking for confirmation first. I guess it's good for bumping the numbers up when getting private equity investors interested (cynical, I know). Security wise, meh. Why would anybody pay to put their closed-source proprietary code onto Github? More holes than a sieve with their Rails setup. Ok, you want somewhere to stash some private repos, nothing confidential. So why would you pay for Github when you can use Bitbucket for unlimited private repos? Plenty of other providers too. Their enterprise product? Expensive meh. Atlassian's enterprise Stash is shared/open source when you get a license. You can also just install Gitlab, Gitorious, etc. for free on your own servers. Github fanboys get excited whenever a big name dumps some code onto Github, like when Linus copied the kernel code over, but it was just a dumping ground while they sorted out server problems of their own. Ubuntu uses Bazaar and Trac, Linux Kernel development uses git on their own servers, KDE is over at Gitorious. Heck, there are some people still using Darcs and SVN. Github is popular but it's not essential unless crave social karma points and your name/handle in lights. Sorry for the rant like writing, lots of thoughts above, but I just never saw what the big deal about Github was. A good business and a slick offering but it's not going to suddenly transform your software projects or your abilities as a programmer.

jmathai 13y ago
> A good business and a slick offering but it's not going to suddenly transform your software projects or your abilities as a programmer. I'd wager a pretty penny that Github has exposed a few orders of magnitude more people to the actual source of open source software than its predecessor, SourceForge. Edit: grammar
- ternaryoperator 13y ago
  A few orders of magnitude? So at least 100x more? You might want to rethink that. sf.net gets more traffic today than github does. So, two orders of magnitude is most unlikely.
  - njr123 13y ago
    But most of the traffic to sf is just users downloading the software. If you were to look at the number of commits per day on sf v github, I wouldn't be surprised to see a x100 difference.
  - jmathai 13y ago
    I don't know what's a valid source of traffic data but according to Compete you're absolutely right. I'm pretty surprised. It's also nice to see that their traffic has been trending upward. You should have wagered.
techpeace 13y ago
The big deal about GitHub is that they were in large part responsible for the current Open Source Renaissance we currently find ourselves in. Do you remember the world before? Where you would hunt for someone's private SVN repo on their personal site and email them patches, only to hope that something comes of your effort? Compare that with the world of today, where, if I'm using GitHub, I can submit a fix to a project I happen upon entirely from my web browser, if I wish. The maintainer is notified immediately, we can have a line-by-line discussion about the change, and then it can be merged - also entirely from the browser, if that's what you're into. Introducing DVCS and the pull request model to the wider development world is the reason that the pace of OS software development has accelerated so much in the past half decade. Of course, GitHub did not invent git, but they made it easy to host your repositories, and once Rails migrated to GitHub, the rest of the Ruby world came with it - followed shortly thereafter by a sizable chunk of the wider web development community. If you use one of their many competitors, that's fine - but they wouldn't exist had it not been for GitHub. Remember that Bitbucket started out as a GitHub clone for Mercurial. Gitlab is unashamedly an OS clone of GitHub. > More holes than a sieve with their Rails setup. This is just unnecessary FUD. The GitHub and Rails teams have both been fast to deal with security issues as they are raised. Just because a security issue is well publicized, it does not mean that every other piece of software ever written does not have its own security issues.
- strumptrumpet 13y ago
  Renaissance? Open source has never been less healthy. All the previous social constructs around properly documenting, testing, and releasing stable versions of your code have been swept away. Instead we're faced with the constant churn of semi-functional code, users working in silos and then showing up with patches well after it's too late to give them direction, animated GIFs instead of careful engineering discussion. Github optimized being lazy, and this was appealing, and in doing so they broke most of the technical and social structure that held together open source's ability to produce reliable, stable, well-documented software. I've watched stable projects either wither and die or become commercialized, and now instead we live in a world of rolling mostly-broken hacked out releases (if there are releases at all), a confusion of forks (which one is the 'real' one?), while animated GIFs and "oh snap" responses permeate our bug trackers. This isn't a renaissance, it's a circus.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
namuol 13y ago
You're misunderstanding what "problem" GitHub is trying to solve. Remember their slogan? "Social Coding." No other platform out there has the userbase, let alone the sheer usability of GitHub. There's a reason GitHub fanboys exist: it's a service that's delightful to use.
- XODsQToxwi1eOy8 13y ago
  Let me tell you about this great new invention called the internet! Even though it is still pretty new, it does actually have a quite large userbase! I guess, soon people will forget that you can call other people without a conference service, and praise some conference service for its huge user base.
  - namuol 13y ago
    I can't even tell what you're being sarcastic about.
    - XODsQToxwi1eOy8 13y ago
      Well, git is a distributed VCS, so all you need in order to use it socially is the Internet. Just publish your fork on your machine (or just anywhere on the net) and anyone else connected to the Internet can pull it, github is simply superfluous for that, the Internet already connects everyone to everyone.
      - amirmc 13y ago
        That's akin to saying you're part of a 'social network' by virtue of having your own homepage. Sure, everyone can come to your site to see your updates/pics/etc but it's not a fair comparison to the things Facebook/twitter/G+ provide.
        XODsQToxwi1eOy8 13y ago
        No, you have a "social network" because of your social contacts, that doesn't need the Internet at all. Also, the internet consists of more than the Web - e-mail and IM are also fine tools for maintaining your social network over the Internet, for example. Now, there may be functionality that those services provide that others currently do not, and I never disputed that. But the original argument was that somehow that little fenced garden had a large userbase. Other than that, I am not sure I am interested in the surveillance, lock-in (potential), and manipulation possibility that FB/twitter/G+/github/whathaveyou "provide".

by yapcguy 13y ago

jmathai 13y ago

> A good business and a slick offering but it's not going to suddenly transform your software projects or your abilities as a programmer. I'd wager a pretty penny that Github has exposed a few orders of magnitude more people to the actual source of open source software than its predecessor, SourceForge. Edit: grammar

ternaryoperator 13y ago
A few orders of magnitude? So at least 100x more? You might want to rethink that. sf.net gets more traffic today than github does. So, two orders of magnitude is most unlikely.
- njr123 13y ago
  But most of the traffic to sf is just users downloading the software. If you were to look at the number of commits per day on sf v github, I wouldn't be surprised to see a x100 difference.
- jmathai 13y ago
  I don't know what's a valid source of traffic data but according to Compete you're absolutely right. I'm pretty surprised. It's also nice to see that their traffic has been trending upward. You should have wagered.

techpeace 13y ago

The big deal about GitHub is that they were in large part responsible for the current Open Source Renaissance we currently find ourselves in. Do you remember the world before? Where you would hunt for someone's private SVN repo on their personal site and email them patches, only to hope that something comes of your effort? Compare that with the world of today, where, if I'm using GitHub, I can submit a fix to a project I happen upon entirely from my web browser, if I wish. The maintainer is notified immediately, we can have a line-by-line discussion about the change, and then it can be merged - also entirely from the browser, if that's what you're into. Introducing DVCS and the pull request model to the wider development world is the reason that the pace of OS software development has accelerated so much in the past half decade. Of course, GitHub did not invent git, but they made it easy to host your repositories, and once Rails migrated to GitHub, the rest of the Ruby world came with it - followed shortly thereafter by a sizable chunk of the wider web development community. If you use one of their many competitors, that's fine - but they wouldn't exist had it not been for GitHub. Remember that Bitbucket started out as a GitHub clone for Mercurial. Gitlab is unashamedly an OS clone of GitHub. > More holes than a sieve with their Rails setup. This is just unnecessary FUD. The GitHub and Rails teams have both been fast to deal with security issues as they are raised. Just because a security issue is well publicized, it does not mean that every other piece of software ever written does not have its own security issues.

strumptrumpet 13y ago
Renaissance? Open source has never been less healthy. All the previous social constructs around properly documenting, testing, and releasing stable versions of your code have been swept away. Instead we're faced with the constant churn of semi-functional code, users working in silos and then showing up with patches well after it's too late to give them direction, animated GIFs instead of careful engineering discussion. Github optimized being lazy, and this was appealing, and in doing so they broke most of the technical and social structure that held together open source's ability to produce reliable, stable, well-documented software. I've watched stable projects either wither and die or become commercialized, and now instead we live in a world of rolling mostly-broken hacked out releases (if there are releases at all), a confusion of forks (which one is the 'real' one?), while animated GIFs and "oh snap" responses permeate our bug trackers. This isn't a renaissance, it's a circus.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

namuol 13y ago

You're misunderstanding what "problem" GitHub is trying to solve. Remember their slogan? "Social Coding." No other platform out there has the userbase, let alone the sheer usability of GitHub. There's a reason GitHub fanboys exist: it's a service that's delightful to use.

XODsQToxwi1eOy8 13y ago
Let me tell you about this great new invention called the internet! Even though it is still pretty new, it does actually have a quite large userbase! I guess, soon people will forget that you can call other people without a conference service, and praise some conference service for its huge user base.
- namuol 13y ago
  I can't even tell what you're being sarcastic about.
  - XODsQToxwi1eOy8 13y ago
    Well, git is a distributed VCS, so all you need in order to use it socially is the Internet. Just publish your fork on your machine (or just anywhere on the net) and anyone else connected to the Internet can pull it, github is simply superfluous for that, the Internet already connects everyone to everyone.
    - amirmc 13y ago
      That's akin to saying you're part of a 'social network' by virtue of having your own homepage. Sure, everyone can come to your site to see your updates/pics/etc but it's not a fair comparison to the things Facebook/twitter/G+ provide.
      - XODsQToxwi1eOy8 13y ago
        No, you have a "social network" because of your social contacts, that doesn't need the Internet at all. Also, the internet consists of more than the Web - e-mail and IM are also fine tools for maintaining your social network over the Internet, for example. Now, there may be functionality that those services provide that others currently do not, and I never disputed that. But the original argument was that somehow that little fenced garden had a large userbase. Other than that, I am not sure I am interested in the surveillance, lock-in (potential), and manipulation possibility that FB/twitter/G+/github/whathaveyou "provide".