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I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA

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Re: I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA

#71

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

marricks wrote: post #18
jameslk wrote: post #11

> That said, the GitHub team reports that the set of users who have migrated or closed their accounts is extremely small, and this is more than made up for by the surge of new signups and new interest in GitHub this week. It's interesting to hear this. If you were on HN the past week, it might have seemed from all the front page articles that GitHub was about to implode due to an an exodus to GitLab.

I’m more willing to believe the openly viewable GitLab migration tracker, which shows several thousand projects migrated. Just another way Gitlab is nice is the openly viewable statistics versus a generalization. https://about.gitlab.com/2018/06/03/movingtogitlab/

14 cross-site scripts... I'll pass.

Re: I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA

#72

Post by Tloewald »

k_sh wrote: post #67
Deadron wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Github is only a high profile Git peer. If it explodes someone just pushes up to a different repo hosting site or goes back to trading chagesets some other way.

It also has project management features that tightly integrate with Git repositories, which are not stored within the repository itself. Most (semi-)serious projects make use of this, which makes migration harder.

It would be pretty cool if someone devised a core set of meta-services (e.g. the feature branch / pull-request / review / commit that lived entirely on top of git and some simple command lines so that you could basically not care where your cloud repo was.

(I'm expecting that this has been done and I'll be deluged with links...)

Re: I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA

#73

Post by gaius »

craftyguy wrote: post #28
hari_seldon_ wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the standard HN effect. I also love when I think some startups are killing it based on what I read here; but then they end up shutting down soon after due to a lack of any real revenue model.

Given how 1) he's provided no evidence to support his claim, 2) he would never publicly say "a significant number of users have moved", and 3) gitlab has a public tracker showing thousands of projects being imported, I'd take his comment with a large grain of salt.

Github has 28 million users with 85 million repos. Thousands is a very small proportion.

Also: Gitlab also has to exit one day. The only question is who buys them.

Re: I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA

#74

Post by tway4567897 »

fermienrico wrote: post #31
ajeet_dhaliwal wrote: post #3

What would you rather fight - a horse sized duck, or 100 duck sized horses? Hope he answers that one.

I really dislike this kind of questions. "A little fun doesn't hurt" Reddit and the internet has a lot of fun things to do. Don't waste the opportunity of someone important willing to spend what little 30 mins they have in their schedule to take questions from the community and these questions come up - there are important things to ask. Absolutely useless question and should not be asked.

I hope you understand that this is the person you're talking about:

> Miguel de Icaza: but the idea of the nugget

> Miguel de Icaza: The essence of the nugget

> Miguel de Icaza: The nugget

> Miguel de Icaza: It keeps me away from the radio

> Nat Friedman: yeah i can see that

> Nat Friedman: what you've got, son, is a nugget fixation

> Nat Friedman: a common issue in the mid-30s man

> Miguel de Icaza: I do

> Miguel de Icaza: Oh, is that what it is?

> Miguel de Icaza: Is there some ointment I can use?

> Nat Friedman: you need baboon urine

> Nat Friedman: very expensive

> Nat Friedman: luckily i have some that i acquired on ebay some months back

> Nat Friedman: using the 'sort by price' selection mechanism

Re: I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA

#75

Post by orand »

staunch wrote: post #68
orand wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comment is a significant misreading of his current statements as well as where he's come from. Yes, he's very skilled in the corporate world, but he's just as skilled in the open source world. You absolutely need to be awesome at both to be able to do the right thing as the CEO of GitHub. Check out his history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nat_Friedman

I've read his Wikipedia page. I see work at Microsoft, Novell, an open source version of Microsoft .NET that had little to no adoption, a Microsoft acquisition, and more Microsoft employment. What's there to be excited about there? He's not an open source developer with a great project that now leads GitHub. He's a corporate guy that now leads GitHub under Microsoft executives.

The vast majority of his career has been leading open source projects and companies. You really can't do that successfully without deeply getting open source philosophy and culture. The most talented open source devs simply won't work for you otherwise.

While Mono itself wasn't widely adopted, it was the code base that Xamarin came from, which _is_ quite widely adopted. And Xamarin Studio (now Visual Studio for Mac) is built using the "no adoption" Mono. http://sotagtrends.com/?tags=[mono,xamarin,monotouch,monodro...

Re: I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA

#76

Post by bytematic »

euroclydon wrote: post #65

Thinking about MS's recent acquisitions, how long will it take to recoup the money they spent on: LinkedIn, MineCraft and now GitHub? LinkedIn: $26b MineCraft: $2.5b Github: $7.5b

Did the Minecraft thing not make money for them? I imagine now that it's on a ton of platforms it's made that back?

Re: I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA

#77

Post by darzu »

eklavya wrote: post #24

Ever since I heard of "Monaco" the online code editor which is used in VSCode. I always assumed Microsoft will eventually come up with a completely online IDE >> deploy toolchain like a GitHub on steroids. I think this acquisition is pretty much all about that. Nobody seems to have mentioned this yet though, at least not that I have read of.

Microsoft already has VSTS which has source hosting, CI, issue tracking, kanban, release management and more.

I suspect acquiring GitHub was more about the developer mind-share than the technology.

Re: I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA

#78

Post by Sir_Cmpwn »

notatoad wrote: post #48
jameslk wrote: post #11

> That said, the GitHub team reports that the set of users who have migrated or closed their accounts is extremely small, and this is more than made up for by the surge of new signups and new interest in GitHub this week. It's interesting to hear this. If you were on HN the past week, it might have seemed from all the front page articles that GitHub was about to implode due to an an exodus to GitLab.

My sense is that any projects willing to move from GitHub to gitlab on a Sunday evening because of a rumour that GitHub was going to be sold were not really serious projects and losing them isn't a big loss for GitHub.

This is exactly right. However, just because some projects can't up and move on a moment's notice doesn't mean the ball isn't rolling.

Re: I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA

#79

Post by darzu »

minimaxir wrote: post #49
Shank wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's worth noting that until the deal closes, Nat isn't actually part of GitHub. That would make it the Microsoft PR team or his deal -- not GitHub's.

That makes less sense as Microsoft has done some excellent AMAs with the Excel team: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/3rid26/we_are_the_mic... https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/777mb6/we_are_the_mic...

You might be overestimating the coordination between different teams at Microsoft :) It's a big company. I doubt there is any overlap between the people involved in the Excel IAMAs and Nat's

Re: I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA

#80

Post by n42 »

gaius wrote: post #73
craftyguy wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given how 1) he's provided no evidence to support his claim, 2) he would never publicly say "a significant number of users have moved", and 3) gitlab has a public tracker showing thousands of projects being imported, I'd take his comment with a large grain of salt.

Github has 28 million users with 85 million repos. Thousands is a very small proportion. Also: Gitlab also has to exit one day. The only question is who buys them.

how active are those users and repositories? both of these statistics are meaningless without additional context
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