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GitHub Codespaces

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581–590 of 619 posts

Re: GitHub Codespaces

#582

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Hopefully the licensing requirements can be made simple as well! I recently wanted to submit a 3 character change to golang that significantly speeds up strconv.ParseFloat(), but lost interest about 2-3 minutes into reading this: https://golang.org/doc/contribute.html

Technical advancements are always held back by politics. This is one of the main advantages of GPL, there is no CLA to sign.

Sure there is: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-assign.html

The owner of a GPL project doesn't own the copyright for contributed code (and therefore can't license it themselves under GPL), unless they receive a copyright assignment.

Re: GitHub Codespaces

#583
post #548

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I will say it would be nice to review a PR while standing in line for groceries.

I'm gonna say you are in the minority there. Firstly, a Review should be just that a review of the code - not just a blind acceptance of a button. Its going to be hard to properly review code, which may be across multiple files, or may require switching within the same file, on a phone. And secondly, work life balance, just because you can work while waiting in line for groceries doesn't mean you should

My main usage of the app so far has been to approve PRs when pair/mob programming. Instead of going back to my desk where my computer is, I can approve the PR I've co-authored immediately.

Obviously it's quite a narrow use case, but I imagine there are lots of similar cases where the review is simple for one reason or the other and you want to get it done quickly.

Re: GitHub Codespaces

#584
post #366
post #272

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All that is nice. But who are they building this for? Who is asking for this stuff?

For Github Actions, the product launch has been a major success and has become a new monetizable product. Anecdotally, I've heard of some companies moving their Jenkins/Circle CI/Travis CI workflows over to it, better proof is the sheer number of Github Actions that are now easy to install. This also allows Github to compete directly with Bitbucket and Bitbucket pipelines. If your question is about who is asking for…

I can imagine this being very useful in educational settings. Instead of students and teachers spending time on getting everyone's lab environments set up they just fork the course repository and tada it's there and it works.

Re: GitHub Codespaces

#585

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They announced developer productivity analytics in the same keynote as they announced codespaces. It's not just coming, it's here! Funny enough, after introducing the analytics stuff, they started the next section by showing that the more code you write the more security vulnerabilities you have. Which is it, Github? Do I want to stay on top of your SLOC leaderboards so my manager doesn't fire me? Or does writing the…

Do I get points for deleting lines of code?

You should get double points!

Re: GitHub Codespaces

#586

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Jetbrains shows no signs of wanting to be a monopoly player in development tools. I've been a customer a long time, and I think they've done a great job of balancing making money with doing solid work and serving their customers. Microsoft, on the other hand, has a long history of willful domination and exploitation, and they've specifically done that with free products to kneecap competitors.

Ahh, so we get to it. You just don’t like MS. I think that’s a valid reason not to use their products.

No, I like competitive marketplaces, as they're one of the core engines of capitalism. I deeply dislike willful monopolies and oligopolies in general, because their goal is to break that engine in ways that harm consumers and often society. Microsoft themselves I can take or leave now that they've been mostly defanged.

I also really like having good developer tools. Many of them come out of community-driven open source. But some of them cost money. And for those, I very much want there to be a competitive marketplace, so there are strong incentives for all players to keep improving.

Re: GitHub Codespaces

#587
post #293

Must be fun for @sytse to watch these GitHub announcements every year, where they consistently release the same thing GitLab rolled out two years prior. Codespaces -> https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/web_ide/ Insights -> https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/insights/ GH Actions -> https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/ etc

GH is clearly not innovating nearly as much as GitLab and hasn’t been for a long time, but since they have so a huge chunk of the market already they can see what works and what doesn’t work for GitLab and cherry pick what they like. Apple operates in a very similar manner - in many areas they lag behind.

My view is that GitLab is more prone to feature creep. They have a lot of innovative features, but because of the number of features, most of them really only feel 90% or 95% of the way there. GitHub chooses a smaller number of features, but they feel more polished.

I don't think the feature creep is all bad. Sometimes the new features are amazingly useful, if not totally polished. It depends on what you need, and sometimes you need features that only GitLab has.

Re: GitHub Codespaces

#588

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For the love of God please make it work at least manageably in phones! Tall ask no doubt, but y'all seem capable of it. GitHub does everything right except getting the phone experience right!

Do you really want to write coffee on your phone? I couldn't imagine wanting to every do that myself. Am I weird? :)

Well played, autocorrect.

Re: GitHub Codespaces

#590
post #564

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It could be a lot of things. Would you like to argue that it is some specific thing that couldn't possibly lead to the sort of oligopoly or monopoly position that Microsoft has eagerly sought and maintained in the past? If so, which exact thing?

I'm arguing that the premise of non-free software and services being somehow better because there must be a catch is just ludicrous. So no, I don't want to argue "it is some specific thing". I don't think MS is very charitable company and dislike many things about them, but sometimes a deal is just mutually beneficial. Better at times than with paid products. And if Microsoft has something terrible planned, the commu…

I'm not saying paid IDEs are necessarily better. But I am saying that in practice, commercial IDE vendors have been making superior products to the free-as-in-speech ones, and have been for 20 years at least.

You blow a lot of smoke here, with "sometimes" and "might". Sure, Microsoft could have been taken over by angels straight from heaven, and is now only intent on doing charitable works until the money runs out. Many things are possible. But possible doesn't mean true. If you'd like to argue something's true, by all means do it.

I think the only substance is "the community would just fork". One, there's no particular proof that a bunch of volunteers can make something like that. Two, that's an enormous effort. Look at how much work and time it took between MS using a free IE to kill Netscape and the emergence of Firefox. And that only worked because Mozilla found a revenue model that let it afford the large number of full-time engineers needed to produce a browser.

So if you're serious about your argument, why don't you explain exactly how "the community" will afford to do that fork. And why your imagined destruction of paid developer tool vendors like JetBrains and handing MS a monopoly in the market is ok as long as you're getting something free right now.

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