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Give up GitHub: The time has come

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Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#241

Post by BeetleB »

marcosdumay wrote: post #193
brundolf wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I say this as a senior dev with 8+ years of experience working with git: git is nightmarishly complex. Highly stateful, insanely large CLI surface, huge amounts of terminology/concepts relative to the complexity of what you're actually trying to do with it. I've learned to navigate its waters over the years, fully appreciate the difference between git and GitHub, etc etc, and I don't blame anybody for being scared aw…

The more relevant point is: do you refuse to work on some code or use a VCS on your code because of this complexity? That was the GP's point. He acknowledged it's complex. But it's a very clear and very large amount of value left on the table, so people that gets scared away by it will probably practice other kinds of harmful behavior. (Of course, the option of just using a simpler VCS doesn't tell anything bad about…

> Of course, the option of just using a simpler VCS doesn't tell anything bad about people. Why did we standardize on git again?

My issue wasn't with their refusal to use Git per se. It was their refusal to find something better than SVN.

Given the choice, I too would pick something other than Git. But still better than SVN.

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#242

Post by sreevisakh »

throwk8s wrote: post #38
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…

Why is it baffling? GitHub and GitLab have embraced and extended git so much that it is no longer independently visible to most users. If you didn't already know git was independent of the SaaS products, you'd have no reason to suspect it was independent.

It's baffling because practically all learning resources on git emphasize its decentralized nature. Even the online free book explains that several times. They never left me with any confusion regarding the difference between git and github, even though my first version control was the centralized subversion. I don't understand how any developer can learn git without this idea being drilled in constantly.

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#243

Post by distrill »

i_like_apis wrote: post #126

I disagree with all of their reasons for disliking GitHub. * They make money from Co-Pilot? Great! * They sell software to ICE? Good. Why wouldn’t they? I’m not interested in anti-immigration-enforcement politics. * They’re a closed-source for-profit company? Great! That’s why their product is high quality.

uh, for the record, selling data is a problem in and of itself. but good to note you don't mind as you can attach a palatable political spin to it.

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#244

Post by chrismorgan »

towelrod wrote: post #41
rgrmrts wrote: post #18

Does Github give users a toggle to opt-out of being in the copilot training dataset? I feel like that would be a decent compromise for folks not down with their code being used in copilot.

I should not have to opt out. GitHub should have to respect my license. I already said they can use my code, as long as they keep an attribution intact (via a BSD license, for example) GitHub is taking my code and ignoring the license. I don’t understand why anyone would think that is ok.

That’s what fair use doctrine is about. Copyright doesn’t say “you can’t do anything without permission”, it says “you can’t do anything without permission, except for a few categories of things which cannot be forbidden”, and Copilot claims that what they’re doing fits in one of those categories.

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#245

Post by chrismorgan »

UglyToad wrote: post #110

Where does this end? You write a license that your GPL code can only be re-hosted on non-GitHub hosts? git still exists, if I'm unhappy with GitHub I can just add a new origin (sourcehut, gitea, gitlab, self-hosting, etc) and push there. But I'm perfectly happy with GitHub and I'm fine if their ML thingy makes money off my code, I get free actions runners, a nice UI, pull-requests, etc, into the bargain, not bad. Lik…

> Where does this end? You write a license that your GPL code can only be re-hosted on non-GitHub hosts?

Copilot’s contention is that it’s exempt from copyright restrictions under fair use doctrine, which means that your license that says they can’t use it is irrelevant and legally void.

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#246

Post by evouga »

longrod wrote: post #212

I find it very strange that the same HN crowd that loves open source and wouldn't touch anything proprietary with a 10 foot pole has so many reservations against moving off of GitHub. I am not generalizing here, just surprised. According to what I have seen in my short experience, HN should have ditched GitHub long since. Anyway... I have always been curious as to why the largest hosting for OSS isn't open source its…

> But I suppose convenience always trumps openness and freedom. It's especially sad because the whole point behind FOSS was this. Is the whole FOSS idea getting old?

It seems so---I read the post above saying essentially "I don't care about any of this criticism, I'm going to keep using GitHub because switching would cause too much churn" and did a double-take.

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#247

Post by starik36 »

jrm4 wrote: post #199
brundolf wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's fair to frame this as specific to GitHub, or even as a thing to wring hands over. New devs - especially those coming from bootcamps (I say this without judgement) - mostly start with practical skills. Industry-standard ways to just get things done. That's how you get a job, that's how you get off the ground. This goes beyond source-control; languages/frameworks, tooling, etc. You enter the territor…

There is absolutely a need for moral panic if, like me, you believe that code and industry quality of product is more important than onboarding more people into the profession. I can't think of a worse idea than subconsciously letting the idea "By default, the way we are supposed store and write code is by putting it in the hands of a deeply centralized third party that will exploit you and owes you nothing" just sor…

> I can't think of a worse idea

There are lots of worse ideas. Things get abstracted from us over time. 99% of the code in active development today probably lives in a source control repo that's in the cloud.

At one point, decades ago, I looked with amusement on devs that couldn't do C/C++. But the reality was that it wasn't really needed anymore for most tasks.

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#248

Post by samatman »

buchoo wrote: post #231
alexklarjr wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their code were awful about 30 years before that.

Was it? I recall the kuro5hin analysis of the leaked Windows 2000 source code[0] that said: >there is nothing really surprising in this leak. Microsoft does not steal open-source code. Their older code is flaky, their modern code excellent. Their programmers are skilled and enthusiastic. Problems are generally due to a trade-off of current quality against vast hardware, software and backward compatibility. [0] https:…

30 years ago was 1992. That's the older flaky code they're referring to in the quote.

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#249

Post by corrral »

BeetleB wrote: post #81
swader999 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does a typical enterprise need a distributed source control system? It makes a lot of sense for open source. Doesn't the uptake in Github which centralizes this distributed system kind of invalidate its main tenant? I haven't been a hundred percent sure the overhead was ever worth it at most other types of paid gigs over the years. Adding complexity without value is a mistake imo. Maybe it's my own fault I haven't se…

The (side?) benefit of a DVCS is that you commit locally. So I can do all my fun experiments on my team's codebase on my laptop - it doesn't pollute the number of branches on the server, etc. Indeed, even when forced to use SVN, I would simply check out the SVN trunk, create a Mercurial repository in that "working" directory, and then clone from their whenever I did any development (one clone per feature). I would th…

> Indeed, even when forced to use SVN, I would simply check out the SVN trunk, create a Mercurial repository in that "working" directory, and then clone from their whenever I did any development (one clone per feature). I would then push back to the main Mercurial repository, and push that to the SVN server.

Once did something similar with Git, the one time I was at a place that used SVN. I didn't trust any of the git-to-SVN tools so I just did all my work in a local git repo, then copied my working directory to an SVN-controlled directory and committed maybe once or twice a day, when I had something worth preserving.

The ~week before I switched to this workflow was nerve-wracking. Not being able to make all the branches I want for any purpose at all without it showing up for anyone else, or to make shitty commit messages for my own local junk-commits before it was ready for consumption by anyone else, was awful. Having to worry that every little vcs operation might mess up someone else's stuff was the worst.

Luckily I was working on an isolated part of a larger system on my own, so this worked OK. No incoming code to worry about, so SVN was write-only from my perspective.

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#250

Post by sreevisakh »

shrimpx wrote: post #230
remram wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gitea (and a few others) are working on federation for pull requests, which would allow someone to fork your project to their own server, and send a pull request offering you to merge from their server into yours. It also builds on top of ActivityPub which is supposed to allow federation with the greater ActivityPub ecosystem ("fediverse"). I guess this would allow people to like or comment your issue or pull request…

Why is gitea hosted on GitHub? That seems ironic.

Gitea and Gogs weren't originally meant to be replacements for Github. They were meant for self-hosted internal repositories. That's why they are still on Github, even though hosts like Codeberg use them for public hosting these days.
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