10 ms·

How GitHub Conquered Google, Microsoft, and Everyone Else

233 points by Libertatea 12y ago

storrgie 12y ago
Now if only Github could conquer the aging mess of forge.mil.
- imroot 12y ago
  Forge.mil is a mess -- and will probably always be a mess until they ditch Collabnet's SourceForge Enterprise Edition as a platform. There is code out there that would transform GitLab's Open source edition to use PKI for authentication (I wrote it for an employer and threw it on, ironically enough, github), but, the DOD is set in its ways and I'm sure that CollabNet (and Steel Thread) is trying to milk that contract twenty ways from Sunday.
daddykotex 12y ago
Possibly the worst font of all time. Now that I've said, I can read :P edit : (font of the title)
xkarga00 12y ago
I hope they will do something about merged commits in history logs though
esja 12y ago
With a bit of work their Enterprise product could be huge... it's a real shame they've not invested in it properly.
- icey 12y ago
  We've done an enormous amount of work on GitHub Enterprise over the past year. Click on any of the release headings for the 2.x series at https://enterprise.github.com/releases https://enterprise.github.com/releases and you'll see the pace at which we've been shipping features enterprises have been asking for. If it's been a little while since you checked it out I'd recommend looking at it again :)
  - mcintyre1994 12y ago
    Can I email you some information on why a large company I interned at mentioned they didn't use Github (they were adopting Atlassian)? I'd rather not post here but happy to share.
    - icey 12y ago
      Please do! Shoot me an email at pauln@github.com; the feedback would be very appreciated.
      - scoggs 12y ago
        I just wanted to say I love the blog posts on the enterprise portion of the site. Each release's page is an awesome snapshot of what you guys were focused on for that release and everything, right down to the screen shots, is beautiful. Even a simple image like: https://enterprise.github.com/assets/releases/2.1.0/screenshot-maintenance-dash-ae772faadb148955a08c3bef6754c43a.jpg https://enterprise.github.com/assets/releases/2.1.0/screensh... looks beautiful and makes me want to use GitHub Enterprise even though I don't have any good use for it outside of work :). Keep up the good work!
shubhamjain 12y ago
I think one of the underappreciated point of github is its excellent business model. The freemium model of providing everything for free if your code is public and charging only for private repositories allowed them to grow exponentially with rising popularity among open source projects. Sourceforge and Google code tried to cater only for open source projects, while never thinking that code hosting is the problem that needs to be solved.
- jldugger 12y ago
  IMO, Google's problem is that many enterprise customers believe they need on-premise, and realistically, Google cannot deliver on-premise solutions of systems designed to work on their Google scale platforms. I mean, that google search appliance seems like a reverse engineering / wikileaks dream. 'Here's a box accesses internal customer documents, and nobody knows how to upgrade'.
- jbigelow76 12y ago
  I wish Sourceforge would have come to that realization. Anytime I search for something that tends to be older enterprisy-ish code and it shows up in Sourceforge (iText for example) I can never figure out what the hell is and isn't an ad. If I didn't know better I would suspect a malware vendor purchased it and turned it into a honeypot for lazy devs.
  - saintgimp 12y ago
    Yes, this, a thousand times yes. The transparently-malicious abuse of ads on SourceForge is a tragedy and it's been that way for years and years. It is a honeypot for lazy people (or those without meticulous attention to detail) and the malware venders didn't even have to purchase the site. SourceForge just rolled over and let them do it.
  - eevilspock 12y ago
    Dalton Caldwell, who once worked at SourceForge, blames the ad-supported business model as the underlying reason Sourceforge sucked[1]. The users were the product and the real customers were the advertisers no matter how much he and his coworkers wanted to believe otherwise. He credits GitHub's straight up reliance on just user revenue as the key to the quality of their product. We've all been duped into thinking that ads give us things for free. Sourceforge and all other ad-supported sites are not only not free, they are costing us more than if we just paid[2]. We users neec to hear Maciej Cegłowski[3] exhortation, "Don't Be a Free User"[4]. I can't wait for the day when more people realize that entire web is being held hostage by advertising and a web without ads would be to today's web what GitHub is to Sourceforge. [1] http://daltoncaldwell.com/an-audacious-proposal http://daltoncaldwell.com/an-audacious-proposal [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8585237 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8585237 [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=idlewords https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=idlewords [4] https://blog.pinboard.in/2011/12/don_t_be_a_free_user/ https://blog.pinboard.in/2011/12/don_t_be_a_free_user/
Canada 12y ago
Github hasn't centralized all open source code Because git itself is decentralized. If only other social networks let you extract your data so easily.
- yarrel 12y ago
  Socially and server-wise it has centralized them. I do agree about other social networks though.
- panic 12y ago
  git itself is decentralized The source code itself is stored in a decentralized way, sure, but the git repository doesn't include pull request comments, wiki pages and issues. Of course, you can fetch these using the (rate-limited) GitHub API, but it's not quite the same (and other social networks typically let you extract your data in the same way).
  - xPaw 12y ago
    It is actually possible to clone/push wiki pages using git: https://help.github.com/articles/adding-and-editing-wiki-pages-locally/ https://help.github.com/articles/adding-and-editing-wiki-pag...
MollyR 12y ago
I'm a little paranoid about my code. I want to like github's private repos, but I don't want my code to be stolen by github's internal employees. I've heard that their employees do shady things on occasion (2nd hand knowledge).
- scott_karana 12y ago
  Employees of any company in the world can do shady things. You need to trust your server hosting company, your server OS vendor, your own workstation's software, your OS, all your firmware... If GitHub employees stole proprietary code from you, and commercialized it, proving "prior art" and theft should be extremely easy for you. IANAL, but it's not something I'd worry about with most companies hosting on Github.
  - ProAm 12y ago
    > proving "prior art" and theft should be extremely easy for you If you even find out, and if you do it would cost a lot of time and money to reclaim what is yours. It's not hard to setup your own servers, it's becoming a lost art in today's cloud microcosm but its really not hard to do yourself and do it right.
    - scott_karana 12y ago
      I agree that self-hosting can be cheaper than lawyers. I self-host all my own stuff, but I still understand how it's better for some businesses to pay for cloud services, instead.
  - RaleyField 12y ago
    > your server OS vendor, your own workstation's software, your OS, all your firmware They all stake their reputation so in theory they have checks in place to minimize rogue behavior (in practice though they are often clueless, see starfish). Also they put their code/hardware into public so they normally can't target individuals without fearing others to discover their attempts. Contrast this to rogue employees at Github who can copy repositories for their old colleagues from college to give them an edge and the only difference you will ever see manifested is competitors seemingly always having timely answers to any new features you are about to unveil in your solution, because they were too smart to copy/paste your code directly.
wink 12y ago
> a site bootstrapped by a quirky San Francisco startup of the same name. When they bootstrapped, weren't they called Logical Awesome? :)
chuhnk 12y ago
Legitimate question. Do you think GitHub would accept a lucrative offer from Google? On the order of billions of dollars. How would that look? Where would we all be then? How much would it change things? Is it even realistic?
- ChuckMcM 12y ago
  Actually, I don't think today's Google would make that bet because of challenges in monetizing it without actually incurring a customer service overhead.
- Mahn 12y ago
  I think it's perfectly realistic, and wouldn't necessarily mean things would go south post take over. YouTube is still very much alive, brand and all, and it's been many years since the take over.
  - bronson 12y ago
    But YouTube has definitely started south. One example: I was given a Google+ profile (no idea how), and I can't delete it because then all my YouTube videos get deleted. It's baffling.
- hyperbovine 12y ago
  Google sells ads. Something like 98% of their revenue is ads. I seriously think they are at this point becoming allergic to any sort of for-pay business model.
  - aurora72 12y ago
    Just as a little correction, Google makes 6% of its revenue throgh Youtube, so saying 98% is from ads is wrong. Link: http://www.digitalmusicnews.com/permalink/2015/02/27/10-years-youtube-still-isnt-profitable http://www.digitalmusicnews.com/permalink/2015/02/27/10-year...
    - maratd 12y ago
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
oAlbe 12y ago
For a matter of completeness, this[1] is an article worth the six minutes it takes to read it. [...]Bruce Sterling calls them “the Stacks”: Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, [GitHub]. [...] They don’t want much, those Stacks. Just your identity, your allegiance, and all of your data. Just to be your sole provider of messaging, media, merchandise, and metadata. Just to take part in as much of your online existence as they possibly can, and maybe to one day mediate your every interaction with the world around you, online or off. [...] It’s very convenient to live in a Stack. It’s easy, it’s seamless, it’s comfortable. And it means putting much, or very nearly all, of our increasingly important online existences into the hands of a few titanic megacorporations. It means relying on their benevolence, not just today, but for the foreseeable future. [1] http://techcrunch.com/2013/08/18/the-internet-were-doing-it-wrong/ http://techcrunch.com/2013/08/18/the-internet-were-doing-it-...
- bcg1 12y ago
  Thanks for pointing this out and for the link. I'm sort of surprised to see that sort of opinion published in the tech media. I agree with everything the author says... including how nice Github is to use, and I too use it all the time. At the same time the secret to Github's success in my opinion is all of you hackers who use it to collaborate, not their genius business model or anything like that. When git was gaining traction they were quickest to pivot that way because, well, they had nothing to pivot away from. The real test IMO with only come when the git-killer scm tool starts to take off; if they can keep their market share at that point then I'll be really impressed.
  - dasil003 12y ago
    Never say never, but I don't see the git killer anywhere on the horizon. Look at how hard it was for git to beat out svn, and that was with the advantage of svn being built on an irredeemably broken repository design that no objective engineer could ever put on the same playing field with git, hg, etc. Nevertheless there was a definite period of flame wars where large groups clung to svn religiously until they were dragged kicking and screaming. Now git has its own weaknesses with large objects, steep learning curve and complex UI, and difficulty of central control. But the difference is that those things are all the result of tradeoffs which make git very very good for the most talented programmers, and open source in particular. You're not going to magically make something that solves all those problems but still is as good as git for versioning the average small to medium open source software project. But even if you do, will it be good enough to convince the greybeards to switch? Did Sublime kill vim? I actually think that whatever kills GitHub will not be the same thing that kills git. It will probably be a convergence of trends that remains unforeseeable for the time being, much in the same way that GitHub rode a series of trends which would have been utterly unpredictable 10 years ago.
deanotron 12y ago
I haven't seen anyone mention this but part of the success is that they had git in their name. All social platform successes aside, they had the right technology at the right time. Before I had ever heard of GitHub, I had seen presentations at the large company I worked for praising git. Git was thrown into the limelight at the same time as subversion, CVS, perforce etc. were being eschewed.
supercoder 12y ago
GitHub sounds very interesting !
aaddaarrsshh 12y ago
Yes yes yes!!
cpeterso 12y ago
The slideshow on this article doesn't work on Firefox. Not "doesn't work" in some subtle way; clicking a photo produces a white page. How did Wired not catch this problem? Is there no one testing or even casually using Firefox at Wired? btw, the slideshow is broken by a flexbox fix in Firefox 33 (October 2014): https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1142690 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1142690
visarga 12y ago
Good thing they used the word "fork" between quotes, as to not offend anyone who might think it's a sexual innuendo.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
reidrac 12y ago
I love GitHub, but the "everybody to GitHub!" call makes me worry a little bit in the same way the predominance of Sourceforge didn't sound right back in the day; at least from the point of view of the open source community, because there's nothing wrong with using the best tool available. Obviously I'd love GitHub to go on for ever, but that Bitbucket (and others?) are still there going strong is definitely a good thing!

233 points by Libertatea 12y ago

storrgie 12y ago

Now if only Github could conquer the aging mess of forge.mil.

imroot 12y ago
Forge.mil is a mess -- and will probably always be a mess until they ditch Collabnet's SourceForge Enterprise Edition as a platform. There is code out there that would transform GitLab's Open source edition to use PKI for authentication (I wrote it for an employer and threw it on, ironically enough, github), but, the DOD is set in its ways and I'm sure that CollabNet (and Steel Thread) is trying to milk that contract twenty ways from Sunday.

daddykotex 12y ago

Possibly the worst font of all time. Now that I've said, I can read :P edit : (font of the title)

xkarga00 12y ago

I hope they will do something about merged commits in history logs though

esja 12y ago

With a bit of work their Enterprise product could be huge... it's a real shame they've not invested in it properly.

icey 12y ago
We've done an enormous amount of work on GitHub Enterprise over the past year. Click on any of the release headings for the 2.x series at https://enterprise.github.com/releases https://enterprise.github.com/releases and you'll see the pace at which we've been shipping features enterprises have been asking for. If it's been a little while since you checked it out I'd recommend looking at it again :)
- mcintyre1994 12y ago
  Can I email you some information on why a large company I interned at mentioned they didn't use Github (they were adopting Atlassian)? I'd rather not post here but happy to share.
  - icey 12y ago
    Please do! Shoot me an email at pauln@github.com; the feedback would be very appreciated.
    - scoggs 12y ago
      I just wanted to say I love the blog posts on the enterprise portion of the site. Each release's page is an awesome snapshot of what you guys were focused on for that release and everything, right down to the screen shots, is beautiful. Even a simple image like: https://enterprise.github.com/assets/releases/2.1.0/screenshot-maintenance-dash-ae772faadb148955a08c3bef6754c43a.jpg https://enterprise.github.com/assets/releases/2.1.0/screensh... looks beautiful and makes me want to use GitHub Enterprise even though I don't have any good use for it outside of work :). Keep up the good work!

shubhamjain 12y ago

I think one of the underappreciated point of github is its excellent business model. The freemium model of providing everything for free if your code is public and charging only for private repositories allowed them to grow exponentially with rising popularity among open source projects. Sourceforge and Google code tried to cater only for open source projects, while never thinking that code hosting is the problem that needs to be solved.

jldugger 12y ago
IMO, Google's problem is that many enterprise customers believe they need on-premise, and realistically, Google cannot deliver on-premise solutions of systems designed to work on their Google scale platforms. I mean, that google search appliance seems like a reverse engineering / wikileaks dream. 'Here's a box accesses internal customer documents, and nobody knows how to upgrade'.
jbigelow76 12y ago
I wish Sourceforge would have come to that realization. Anytime I search for something that tends to be older enterprisy-ish code and it shows up in Sourceforge (iText for example) I can never figure out what the hell is and isn't an ad. If I didn't know better I would suspect a malware vendor purchased it and turned it into a honeypot for lazy devs.
- saintgimp 12y ago
  Yes, this, a thousand times yes. The transparently-malicious abuse of ads on SourceForge is a tragedy and it's been that way for years and years. It is a honeypot for lazy people (or those without meticulous attention to detail) and the malware venders didn't even have to purchase the site. SourceForge just rolled over and let them do it.
- eevilspock 12y ago
  Dalton Caldwell, who once worked at SourceForge, blames the ad-supported business model as the underlying reason Sourceforge sucked[1]. The users were the product and the real customers were the advertisers no matter how much he and his coworkers wanted to believe otherwise. He credits GitHub's straight up reliance on just user revenue as the key to the quality of their product. We've all been duped into thinking that ads give us things for free. Sourceforge and all other ad-supported sites are not only not free, they are costing us more than if we just paid[2]. We users neec to hear Maciej Cegłowski[3] exhortation, "Don't Be a Free User"[4]. I can't wait for the day when more people realize that entire web is being held hostage by advertising and a web without ads would be to today's web what GitHub is to Sourceforge. [1] http://daltoncaldwell.com/an-audacious-proposal http://daltoncaldwell.com/an-audacious-proposal [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8585237 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8585237 [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=idlewords https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=idlewords [4] https://blog.pinboard.in/2011/12/don_t_be_a_free_user/ https://blog.pinboard.in/2011/12/don_t_be_a_free_user/

Canada 12y ago

Github hasn't centralized all open source code Because git itself is decentralized. If only other social networks let you extract your data so easily.

yarrel 12y ago
Socially and server-wise it has centralized them. I do agree about other social networks though.
panic 12y ago
git itself is decentralized The source code itself is stored in a decentralized way, sure, but the git repository doesn't include pull request comments, wiki pages and issues. Of course, you can fetch these using the (rate-limited) GitHub API, but it's not quite the same (and other social networks typically let you extract your data in the same way).
- xPaw 12y ago
  It is actually possible to clone/push wiki pages using git: https://help.github.com/articles/adding-and-editing-wiki-pages-locally/ https://help.github.com/articles/adding-and-editing-wiki-pag...

MollyR 12y ago

I'm a little paranoid about my code. I want to like github's private repos, but I don't want my code to be stolen by github's internal employees. I've heard that their employees do shady things on occasion (2nd hand knowledge).

scott_karana 12y ago
Employees of any company in the world can do shady things. You need to trust your server hosting company, your server OS vendor, your own workstation's software, your OS, all your firmware... If GitHub employees stole proprietary code from you, and commercialized it, proving "prior art" and theft should be extremely easy for you. IANAL, but it's not something I'd worry about with most companies hosting on Github.
- ProAm 12y ago
  > proving "prior art" and theft should be extremely easy for you If you even find out, and if you do it would cost a lot of time and money to reclaim what is yours. It's not hard to setup your own servers, it's becoming a lost art in today's cloud microcosm but its really not hard to do yourself and do it right.
  - scott_karana 12y ago
    I agree that self-hosting can be cheaper than lawyers. I self-host all my own stuff, but I still understand how it's better for some businesses to pay for cloud services, instead.
- RaleyField 12y ago
  > your server OS vendor, your own workstation's software, your OS, all your firmware They all stake their reputation so in theory they have checks in place to minimize rogue behavior (in practice though they are often clueless, see starfish). Also they put their code/hardware into public so they normally can't target individuals without fearing others to discover their attempts. Contrast this to rogue employees at Github who can copy repositories for their old colleagues from college to give them an edge and the only difference you will ever see manifested is competitors seemingly always having timely answers to any new features you are about to unveil in your solution, because they were too smart to copy/paste your code directly.

wink 12y ago

> a site bootstrapped by a quirky San Francisco startup of the same name. When they bootstrapped, weren't they called Logical Awesome? :)

chuhnk 12y ago

Legitimate question. Do you think GitHub would accept a lucrative offer from Google? On the order of billions of dollars. How would that look? Where would we all be then? How much would it change things? Is it even realistic?

ChuckMcM 12y ago
Actually, I don't think today's Google would make that bet because of challenges in monetizing it without actually incurring a customer service overhead.
Mahn 12y ago
I think it's perfectly realistic, and wouldn't necessarily mean things would go south post take over. YouTube is still very much alive, brand and all, and it's been many years since the take over.
- bronson 12y ago
  But YouTube has definitely started south. One example: I was given a Google+ profile (no idea how), and I can't delete it because then all my YouTube videos get deleted. It's baffling.
hyperbovine 12y ago
Google sells ads. Something like 98% of their revenue is ads. I seriously think they are at this point becoming allergic to any sort of for-pay business model.
- aurora72 12y ago
  Just as a little correction, Google makes 6% of its revenue throgh Youtube, so saying 98% is from ads is wrong. Link: http://www.digitalmusicnews.com/permalink/2015/02/27/10-years-youtube-still-isnt-profitable http://www.digitalmusicnews.com/permalink/2015/02/27/10-year...
  - maratd 12y ago

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

oAlbe 12y ago

For a matter of completeness, this[1] is an article worth the six minutes it takes to read it. [...]Bruce Sterling calls them “the Stacks”: Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, [GitHub]. [...] They don’t want much, those Stacks. Just your identity, your allegiance, and all of your data. Just to be your sole provider of messaging, media, merchandise, and metadata. Just to take part in as much of your online existence as they possibly can, and maybe to one day mediate your every interaction with the world around you, online or off. [...] It’s very convenient to live in a Stack. It’s easy, it’s seamless, it’s comfortable. And it means putting much, or very nearly all, of our increasingly important online existences into the hands of a few titanic megacorporations. It means relying on their benevolence, not just today, but for the foreseeable future. [1] http://techcrunch.com/2013/08/18/the-internet-were-doing-it-wrong/ http://techcrunch.com/2013/08/18/the-internet-were-doing-it-...

bcg1 12y ago
Thanks for pointing this out and for the link. I'm sort of surprised to see that sort of opinion published in the tech media. I agree with everything the author says... including how nice Github is to use, and I too use it all the time. At the same time the secret to Github's success in my opinion is all of you hackers who use it to collaborate, not their genius business model or anything like that. When git was gaining traction they were quickest to pivot that way because, well, they had nothing to pivot away from. The real test IMO with only come when the git-killer scm tool starts to take off; if they can keep their market share at that point then I'll be really impressed.
- dasil003 12y ago
  Never say never, but I don't see the git killer anywhere on the horizon. Look at how hard it was for git to beat out svn, and that was with the advantage of svn being built on an irredeemably broken repository design that no objective engineer could ever put on the same playing field with git, hg, etc. Nevertheless there was a definite period of flame wars where large groups clung to svn religiously until they were dragged kicking and screaming. Now git has its own weaknesses with large objects, steep learning curve and complex UI, and difficulty of central control. But the difference is that those things are all the result of tradeoffs which make git very very good for the most talented programmers, and open source in particular. You're not going to magically make something that solves all those problems but still is as good as git for versioning the average small to medium open source software project. But even if you do, will it be good enough to convince the greybeards to switch? Did Sublime kill vim? I actually think that whatever kills GitHub will not be the same thing that kills git. It will probably be a convergence of trends that remains unforeseeable for the time being, much in the same way that GitHub rode a series of trends which would have been utterly unpredictable 10 years ago.

deanotron 12y ago

I haven't seen anyone mention this but part of the success is that they had git in their name. All social platform successes aside, they had the right technology at the right time. Before I had ever heard of GitHub, I had seen presentations at the large company I worked for praising git. Git was thrown into the limelight at the same time as subversion, CVS, perforce etc. were being eschewed.

supercoder 12y ago

GitHub sounds very interesting !

aaddaarrsshh 12y ago

Yes yes yes!!

cpeterso 12y ago

The slideshow on this article doesn't work on Firefox. Not "doesn't work" in some subtle way; clicking a photo produces a white page. How did Wired not catch this problem? Is there no one testing or even casually using Firefox at Wired? btw, the slideshow is broken by a flexbox fix in Firefox 33 (October 2014): https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1142690 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1142690

visarga 12y ago

Good thing they used the word "fork" between quotes, as to not offend anyone who might think it's a sexual innuendo.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

reidrac 12y ago

I love GitHub, but the "everybody to GitHub!" call makes me worry a little bit in the same way the predominance of Sourceforge didn't sound right back in the day; at least from the point of view of the open source community, because there's nothing wrong with using the best tool available. Obviously I'd love GitHub to go on for ever, but that Bitbucket (and others?) are still there going strong is definitely a good thing!