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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 th

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.
- patcon 13y ago
  > Renaissance? Open source has never been less healthy. I stopped reading. We're not operating on the same plane of reality.
  - WoodenChair 13y ago
    Then you missed out on an intelligent and frankly important critique. He managed to put in words what I have been thinking for a while. I was skeptical after the first two sentences too...
    - frossie 13y ago
      The statement made upthread was that (a) github destroyed open source social structure and (b) has resulted in buggy releases when there are releases. I would have liked to see some examples in such a broad statement. I am struggling to think of an O/S project I used pre-github that fits the bill.
    - ak217 13y ago
      > an intelligent and frankly important critique I disagree on both counts. Actually, I find the assertions in that post callous and destructive. This cathedral that the poster is referring to never existed. Open source has never been healthier, and Github is a very big part of the reason why.
    - vdaniuk 13y ago
      Such extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and the person supplied zero evidence.
  - dinkumthinkum 13y ago
    The parent makes very salient points, I think you'd do we'll to understand rather than brush then away because they don't comport with the conventional echo chamber wisdom.
- Fauntleroy 13y ago
  Oh no, people are having fun...

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.

patcon 13y ago
> Renaissance? Open source has never been less healthy. I stopped reading. We're not operating on the same plane of reality.
- WoodenChair 13y ago
  Then you missed out on an intelligent and frankly important critique. He managed to put in words what I have been thinking for a while. I was skeptical after the first two sentences too...
  - frossie 13y ago
    The statement made upthread was that (a) github destroyed open source social structure and (b) has resulted in buggy releases when there are releases. I would have liked to see some examples in such a broad statement. I am struggling to think of an O/S project I used pre-github that fits the bill.
  - ak217 13y ago
    > an intelligent and frankly important critique I disagree on both counts. Actually, I find the assertions in that post callous and destructive. This cathedral that the poster is referring to never existed. Open source has never been healthier, and Github is a very big part of the reason why.
  - vdaniuk 13y ago
    Such extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and the person supplied zero evidence.
- dinkumthinkum 13y ago
  The parent makes very salient points, I think you'd do we'll to understand rather than brush then away because they don't comport with the conventional echo chamber wisdom.
Fauntleroy 13y ago
Oh no, people are having fun...