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Give up GitHub: The time has come

sfconservancy.org

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Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#11

Post by apocalyptic0n3 »

travisgriggs wrote: post #5

> For its part, Git was designed specifically to make software development distributed without a centralized site. Just yesterday I had to explain the basic premise/history of Git to a young intern. I had asked him if he was using Git to manage his little pet project the company gave him to play with. “No”, he replied, he didn’t know what the company’s policy was to posting code in public on GitHub. As I explained to…

That scenario plays itself out time and time again.

1. Base technology arrives and is adopted en masse

2. Some entity wraps it in an easier-to-use interface

3. After some time, that interface becomes the de facto standard

4. Developers who started developing after #2 and especially #3 don't understand how the underlying technology works or even that the wrapper is just a wrapper

I'm reminded of how many Juniors I trained that didn't know jQuery was itself just a Javascript library and not a language in and of itself. None of them knew much of any of the underlying Javascript it was wrapping. I'm seeing the same scenario play out with React and Vue right now as well.

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#12

Post by lvncelot »

pabs3 wrote: post #10
travisgriggs wrote: post #5

> For its part, Git was designed specifically to make software development distributed without a centralized site. Just yesterday I had to explain the basic premise/history of Git to a young intern. I had asked him if he was using Git to manage his little pet project the company gave him to play with. “No”, he replied, he didn’t know what the company’s policy was to posting code in public on GitHub. As I explained to…

Are you saying they use GitHub (via the web editor?) but have never heard of Git? or don't know how Git works? or just don't know the Git CLI? or something else?

I think many a junior just never initialized a repository, and 'git clone' is what they've used to "get a repository". So I would forgive them for thinking that a remote is needed for having a repository on their drive.

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#13

Post by Georgelemental »

happymellon wrote: post #8
Georgelemental wrote: post #4

Quoted post unavailable.

What is it with Americans and their dismissal of other people's concerns as always being "politics". It totally does break licencing laws, just because Americans think they can change the terms of an agreement and relicense your code because you didn't remove it doesn't make that legal.

I haven't looked into this extensively or tried Copilot myself, so I might be completely wrong about this. But from what I understand, the code Copilot generates is generally different enough from the source data that it shouldn't be an issue. In a sense, Copilot reading lots of code on Github to train a code-writing model is analogous to a human reading lots of code on GitHub and learning from some of the design patterns they see—as long as the output is not too similar to the input, it should be fine.

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#14

Post by Kon-Peki »

pabs3 wrote: post #10
travisgriggs wrote: post #5

> For its part, Git was designed specifically to make software development distributed without a centralized site. Just yesterday I had to explain the basic premise/history of Git to a young intern. I had asked him if he was using Git to manage his little pet project the company gave him to play with. “No”, he replied, he didn’t know what the company’s policy was to posting code in public on GitHub. As I explained to…

Are you saying they use GitHub (via the web editor?) but have never heard of Git? or don't know how Git works? or just don't know the Git CLI? or something else?

I have seen the same phenomenon where I work. However, I disagree with the implication that this is limited to young people. I know of a few people that are 50 and 60 years old, that have been using source control for 30+ years, that didn't have any idea that git and GitHub were different things. Now, they were easy to set right; the concepts are all familiar to them.

My experience with younger folks that have never been outside the Windows world has been that it was a lot harder to make them understand. Young folks with a unix-y background were much easier.

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#16

Post by chrisan »

travisgriggs wrote: post #5

> For its part, Git was designed specifically to make software development distributed without a centralized site. Just yesterday I had to explain the basic premise/history of Git to a young intern. I had asked him if he was using Git to manage his little pet project the company gave him to play with. “No”, he replied, he didn’t know what the company’s policy was to posting code in public on GitHub. As I explained to…

What is so baffling about explaining git to a novice? I'm more baffled that you are baffled about this.

Git wasn't even invented yet when I was in school and I did not learn about SVN until my first programming job in 2001 where a senior explained it to me.

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#19

Post by no_wizard »

You can either try and sway people purely philosophically as the software freedom conservancy is trying to do here, but I think ultimately in today's world, you need more, most of the time, you need to show that:

- what you opposed negatively affects your target audience in real ways that matter, for their career, livelihood, or some other means

- Show that continuing to be apart of an old model will be damaging in the long term

- Also importantly, the thing you are referring people to do needs to be seamless. For instance, they mention SourceHut, and I sure hope SourceHut has all the core features and ease of use of GitHub, because if not, you are likely already going to lose in this conversation to most

Without factoring these things, its great to point out issues, and rightfully they should, but its not going to mean much in terms of action

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#20

Post by dreamcompiler »

chrisan wrote: post #16
travisgriggs wrote: post #5

> For its part, Git was designed specifically to make software development distributed without a centralized site. Just yesterday I had to explain the basic premise/history of Git to a young intern. I had asked him if he was using Git to manage his little pet project the company gave him to play with. “No”, he replied, he didn’t know what the company’s policy was to posting code in public on GitHub. As I explained to…

What is so baffling about explaining git to a novice? I'm more baffled that you are baffled about this. Git wasn't even invented yet when I was in school and I did not learn about SVN until my first programming job in 2001 where a senior explained it to me.

I think the parent's point was that the intern knew about github and assumed git was github.
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