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The single most important criteria when replacing GitHub

joeyh.name

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Re: The single most important criteria when replacing GitHub

#51

Post by hueving »

tschellenbach wrote: post #37

I'm perfectly happy with Github. They have a very clear value proposition which they offer at a price point which is only a tiny percentage of the value they create. Great company that has empowered accelerated software innovation across the world. Not sure what's up with this whole company X makes money so must be evil vibe. Most of the people complaining about this have well paid jobs so there's a bit of hypocrisy…

Nobody cares that they make money. They care about it not being open source or having easy-to-migrate data (lock-in).

Re: The single most important criteria when replacing GitHub

#52

Post by rmsaksida »

chatmasta wrote: post #21

I’ve always thought of version control systems and issue trackers as separate products. GitHub just happens to implement them both in one place. As others are alluding to in the comments, I’m highly skeptical of coupling the issue tracker and other non-VCS features with git. A far better solution would be to keep them decoupled, but easily pluggable and extendable. In fact, this is basically the status quo with any i…

Exactly. But an OSS community is very different from Twitter or Instagram. People will migrate to another website if Microsoft screws this up. Even if they don't screw it up, a lot of people are already willing to move because they hold grudges or are against a company like Microsoft owning the space.

If a GitLab or Gitea-backed community surfaces managed by a foundation, GitHub will be vulnerable.

Right now there isn't much of a point in moving to GitLab.com because they could be acquired as well.

Re: The single most important criteria when replacing GitHub

#53

Post by sametmax »

hueving wrote: post #48
MBCook wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How often do you test your backups? How many places (physical) do they exist? How often are they taken? What’s your server’s uptime? Is it highly available? How often do you patch? Do you test them first? How do you keep up with security updates from other software on the machine(s). How is your security team in general? Do they monitor for stolen credentials? Do pen-tests? Watch for network scans and attacks? Look f…

Yet github has still had outages from being the target of nation-state attacks. The bigger the service, the worse the enemies.

I have the simplest self hosted wordpress blog. That's not really what I'd call "critical infra". It still goes down a few time a year.

My non self hosted blog ? Maybe a few hours a year, and I don't have to do anything to restore it.

Re: The single most important criteria when replacing GitHub

#54

Post by lotyrin »

sametmax wrote: post #13

Even if I ended up migrating from github, I would still look for a centralized instance. Why ? The price for one migration in a few years is not a big deal compare to self hosting, which is a human resource hog for small entities. I have more important things to do than to deal with deploy, configure, maintain, document, secure, and test my own instance. I really don't want to admin one more server just for that. I d…

I think a properly decentralized system (basically everything Github was except stored inside or alongside the repo) solves the self-hosting headaches also -- If everyone has the issue queue, kanban board, yadda, CI results, etc. on their laptops you don't have to host and administer some app to do any of those things, only a dumb storage for backup and sync and services like CI that support those things in any kind of centralized way -- all of which you can still pay someone else to do for you.

Re: The single most important criteria when replacing GitHub

#55

Post by Shank »

cortesoft wrote: post #32
chatmasta wrote: post #21

I’ve always thought of version control systems and issue trackers as separate products. GitHub just happens to implement them both in one place. As others are alluding to in the comments, I’m highly skeptical of coupling the issue tracker and other non-VCS features with git. A far better solution would be to keep them decoupled, but easily pluggable and extendable. In fact, this is basically the status quo with any i…

I feel like the HN community fails repeatedly to really grok this concept. They focus on the negatives of having a single dominant player for a service (with worries about monopolistic practices and stagnation), but completely ignore WHY these single providers become dominant. There are HUGE network-effect benefits to having a single dominant provider. Right now, if I am looking for a code library, I pretty much only…

I find that this network effect really makes me want to improve my projects, too. I've worked for hours on README files, making sure I had my licenses in check, and crafting the short repo description to be informative and useful for this reason [0]. If it's on GitHub, I feel like it needs to be presentation ready. Not everyone feels this way, but I do.

If I just need a git repository, I store it locally. Git is a DVCS for a reason -- most single person projects don't need a remote anyway. This makes GitHub the home for my more permanent projects, with local git for everything else.

[0]: https://github.com/Pryaxis/TShock

Re: The single most important criteria when replacing GitHub

#56

Post by cortesoft »

shawn wrote: post #45
cortesoft wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like the HN community fails repeatedly to really grok this concept. They focus on the negatives of having a single dominant player for a service (with worries about monopolistic practices and stagnation), but completely ignore WHY these single providers become dominant. There are HUGE network-effect benefits to having a single dominant provider. Right now, if I am looking for a code library, I pretty much only…

It works both ways. If you're too lazy to learn a service I chose to host my code, you don't deserve my code. (Sorry to put it harshly, but it's felt like we're all getting a bit spoiled. Especially compared to the old days.) For better or worse, you are the product if you use a centralized, free service. And the only thing keeping those dominant players dominant is the blind loyalty we seem to give freely. It's all…

> It works both ways. If you're too lazy to learn a service I chose to host my code, you don't deserve my code.

I have infinite work that needs to be done, and a finite amount of time. I have found in my experience that only looking at github works for maximizing my productivity; I can get almost everything there, and the returns for learning another system does not make up for the time it takes. This isn't about laziness, it is about choosing to put effort where I get the most value for it.

> For better or worse, you are the product if you use a centralized, free service

I pay for github (7 bucks a month for a personal account, and my company pays $100k+ for github enterprise).

I think the thing we should be nervous about is not centralization, but vendor lock-in. As long as we can switch, we are ok. Making sure we use abstractions in our interaction with github API helps with this.

However, as long as they keep providing the best service, I will keep using them.

Re: The single most important criteria when replacing GitHub

#57

Post by sigjuice »

amelius wrote: post #27
chatmasta wrote: post #21

I’ve always thought of version control systems and issue trackers as separate products. GitHub just happens to implement them both in one place. As others are alluding to in the comments, I’m highly skeptical of coupling the issue tracker and other non-VCS features with git. A far better solution would be to keep them decoupled, but easily pluggable and extendable. In fact, this is basically the status quo with any i…

> I’m highly skeptical of coupling the issue tracker and other non-VCS features with git. But isn't it nice that you can say "issue X has been solved in commit Y"?

That’s a matter of preference. A git repo will probably outlive fashionable-issue-tracker-of-the-day, so it might make sense to not embed this sort of information right inside git commits.

Re: The single most important criteria when replacing GitHub

#58

Post by erichurkman »

sametmax wrote: post #41
Walkman wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like everybody is overestimating the cost of self hosting. I run my own instance of GitLab, but the "costly" part was setting it up and making backups. Since then I just "apt-get upgrade" and there is a new version and that's it. Since I set it up, I haven't touched any of the configuration files. The availability guarantees are much easier to keep for a small team than for thousands, so you don't really have…

Don't you forget a little something ? Buying the server, reading the docs, setting it up, buying an URL domain, binding it to the server, getting the backup server, setting it up, testing that everything works, training the team on the new UI, documenting the whole things for when you are not available or it's not your job anymore, blocking one team of 5 devs from working for 2 hours (or a man day of work) because so…

Isn't that why GitLab (and others) publish things like AMIs where config is easy and takes 10 minutes? https://about.gitlab.com/aws/

Re: The single most important criteria when replacing GitHub

#60

Post by philwelch »

nwah1 wrote: post #2

This reminds me Fossil SCM. The bug tracking and wiki are part of the distributed version control system. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fossil_(software)

I had a job once where we used Lotus Notes. I'll take extensibility over integration any day.
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