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I tweeted just today that GitHub was the coolest thing out in the past <some unspecified bit of time>.

by mattculbreth 17y ago

there 17y ago
why?
- simonw 17y ago
  It's completely changed my approach to open source software. Before GitHub, open sourcing something was a bit of a drag - you were committing yourself to setting up a mailing list, accepting patches etc - the administrative overhead was enough to put me off releasing a lot of my code. GitHub is ideal for the "fire and forget" method of open source. I can knock out a bit of code that might be useful to someone, throw it up there and forget about it. If someone likes it and wants to improve it they can go ahead and fork it without me ever having to think about it again. If I /do/ want to maintain it, it's really easy to keep track of the modifications people make and merge them back in to my version. The amount of high quality code coming out of GitHub projects these days is astounding, and I'm willing to bet a LOT of it wouldn't ever have been released using the older systems like Sourceforge and Google code.
  - davidw 17y ago
    IMO, open source means a lot more than just dumping code. Not to contradict what you say about github (which is nice - I'm using it for Hecl these days), but as people like to say at the Apache Software Foundation, community is more important than code.
    - simonw 17y ago
      "Community is more important than code" - completely agree. That was my problem - I had code to share, but didn't want to work hard on the community around it. I kind of see GitHub as providing that community for me - it can form itself without any extra effort on my behalf. Obviously the best projects are the ones with proper maintainers actively working on the community side of things - but GitHub enables the community to take up a project even if the original creator just threw it over the wall. (There's a lot more to GitHub than just enabling me to create irresponsible throw-away projects, but personally I've found that aspect of it to be very liberating)
      - freetard 17y ago
        Gitorious, google code and others allow that too.
  - freetard 17y ago
    There were already tons of quality open source projects before github and there'll be after it.
    - simonw 17y ago
      My hunch is that GitHub is resulting in more quality OS projects, developed faster.
      - freetard 17y ago
        I have doubts about this, do you have any proof?
        qubit 17y ago
        A hunch is a gut feeling or intuition about something. Asking someone to prove a hunch seems odd to me.

I tweeted just today that GitHub was the coolest thing out in the past <some unspecified bit of time>.

there 17y ago

why?

simonw 17y ago
It's completely changed my approach to open source software. Before GitHub, open sourcing something was a bit of a drag - you were committing yourself to setting up a mailing list, accepting patches etc - the administrative overhead was enough to put me off releasing a lot of my code. GitHub is ideal for the "fire and forget" method of open source. I can knock out a bit of code that might be useful to someone, throw it up there and forget about it. If someone likes it and wants to improve it they can go ahead and fork it without me ever having to think about it again. If I /do/ want to maintain it, it's really easy to keep track of the modifications people make and merge them back in to my version. The amount of high quality code coming out of GitHub projects these days is astounding, and I'm willing to bet a LOT of it wouldn't ever have been released using the older systems like Sourceforge and Google code.
- davidw 17y ago
  IMO, open source means a lot more than just dumping code. Not to contradict what you say about github (which is nice - I'm using it for Hecl these days), but as people like to say at the Apache Software Foundation, community is more important than code.
  - simonw 17y ago
    "Community is more important than code" - completely agree. That was my problem - I had code to share, but didn't want to work hard on the community around it. I kind of see GitHub as providing that community for me - it can form itself without any extra effort on my behalf. Obviously the best projects are the ones with proper maintainers actively working on the community side of things - but GitHub enables the community to take up a project even if the original creator just threw it over the wall. (There's a lot more to GitHub than just enabling me to create irresponsible throw-away projects, but personally I've found that aspect of it to be very liberating)
    - freetard 17y ago
      Gitorious, google code and others allow that too.
- freetard 17y ago
  There were already tons of quality open source projects before github and there'll be after it.
  - simonw 17y ago
    My hunch is that GitHub is resulting in more quality OS projects, developed faster.
    - freetard 17y ago
      I have doubts about this, do you have any proof?
      - qubit 17y ago
        A hunch is a gut feeling or intuition about something. Asking someone to prove a hunch seems odd to me.