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GitHub has alternatives, but no replacement

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Re: GitHub has alternatives, but no replacement

#51

Post by vkou »

phinnaeus wrote: post #37
manlymuppet wrote: post #27

I think people trying to move off GitHub are being over righteous. There are far worse companies than GitHub. People acting like this company is the Nazi regime are being ridiculous. GitHub (like most of tech) is rather progressive, and trivial differences in perspective should not be taken so seriously. Of course, you can choose whichever service you'd like, for whatever reason you'd like, but acting like allies tha…

I might have moved off for self righteousness but my company might be more interested in moving off because their reliability is absolutely garbage

A devops friend of mine raises an intriguing point - he does not aim for many-nines reliability with dev infrastructure.

He aims for people being able to keep doing their work when whatever service they regularly use is down.

(Which also means that he is able to go on vacation.)

Re: GitHub has alternatives, but no replacement

#52

Post by manlymuppet »

phinnaeus wrote: post #37
manlymuppet wrote: post #27

I think people trying to move off GitHub are being over righteous. There are far worse companies than GitHub. People acting like this company is the Nazi regime are being ridiculous. GitHub (like most of tech) is rather progressive, and trivial differences in perspective should not be taken so seriously. Of course, you can choose whichever service you'd like, for whatever reason you'd like, but acting like allies tha…

I might have moved off for self righteousness but my company might be more interested in moving off because their reliability is absolutely garbage

I hear you, and that's a perfectly valid reason to leave. Even if your company left for righteousness reasons rather than reliability, supporting businesses based on your morals is a commendable thing.

I just think GitHub is a long way from Tammany Hall.

Re: GitHub has alternatives, but no replacement

#53

Post by cedws »

markerz wrote: post #44
cedws wrote: post #13

Running a git forge is easy, I find the social coding/network effect the stickiest part of GitHub. I want my code to be discoverable, and I want to discover others' code. I wanted to leave GitHub but I'm still stuck there. What it would take for me to finally leave is some kind of federation of the social features, so I can port my stars over, see what others are working on, etc.

Are we using GitHub differently? I don’t understand how the social network part of GitHub has to do with having your code discoverable and to discover. I’ve never stumbled upon a project by browsing GitHub casually. It’s always through finding the product first and trying to find the source code. If the source code is on some other website, I’ll probably figure it out, but it’s be a new muscle. Same with making an is…

Yes, I think many people use GitHub just for code storage, and that's fine.

I casually browse GitHub sometimes in the same way I do HN. I follow friends and colleagues and through the feed see what they're building and starring. I use global search to find tools and libraries that do what I want.

Sometimes, I come across a repo I like that's on say GitLab, but not GitHub. I quickly forget about such projects because they live in my bookmarks instead of my stars list.

>I find the social tools on GitHub like PR reviews, issue management, and notifications

I don't consider these social features, at least not in the way I'm talking about.

Re: GitHub has alternatives, but no replacement

#54

Post by greysonp »

manlymuppet wrote: post #27

I think people trying to move off GitHub are being over righteous. There are far worse companies than GitHub. People acting like this company is the Nazi regime are being ridiculous. GitHub (like most of tech) is rather progressive, and trivial differences in perspective should not be taken so seriously. Of course, you can choose whichever service you'd like, for whatever reason you'd like, but acting like allies tha…

While many have ethical issues with GitHub, my understanding is that the current wave of people leaving are doing so because of _reliability_ reasons.

Re: GitHub has alternatives, but no replacement

#55

Post by taminka »

throwuxiytayq wrote: post #10
delduca wrote: post #3

The only reason I keep my projects on it is the Windows and macOS runners.

They’re free, too. If your project is public, you can spin up dozens (hundreds?) of jobs (10 or so of which will run in parallel) on every push and Microsoft casually pays for it. I’d love to move off GH but I would have to significantly reduce my CI usage (before you ask - already more optimized than anything you usually see) or pay quite a lot for my hobby projects.

might be a silly question, but isn't macos relatively easily virtualisable? i understand it's not done commercially bc of licensing issues, but is there a piece of software where you just get a vps or two and virtualise all of your build targets yourself, so your ci bill is just the vps bill?

Re: GitHub has alternatives, but no replacement

#56

Post by tombert »

thataccount wrote: post #48
010101010101 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your apparent problems with Git the source control system aren’t what any of this is talking about, this is about GitHub as a platform. SourceForge is your better “pre-git” analogue here, and it, like SVN, still exists and is actively maintained and used.

I am aware of what this article is talking about in terms of platforms. Sourceforge might be a better analogy. What I was saying is that development of other source control like Subversion halted as Git entered the scene. Git was first version control, subsequently a platform.

But Git isn't the platform. It's still just a version control.

The article itself is explaining other platforms that work with Git, of which there are dozens. The `git` program itself isn't even developed on Github; it's developed on the kernel.org site [1]. Git != Github.

There's still development for SVN, Perforce still has plenty of paying customers, and Epic games themselves released a new version control a few weeks ago [2], so it's not like everyone assumes that version control is a "solved" problem. I'm honestly not sure what your point is.

[1] https://git.kernel.org/

[2] https://lore.org/

Re: GitHub has alternatives, but no replacement

#57

Post by Marsymars »

hungryhobbit wrote: post #26
hungryhobbit wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Convenience.

To be a little less flippant, small companies don't have an IT department to setup and maintain a git server ... and more. GitHib is also an issue tracker. It's also a (minimal) static webhost. And it's also a way to run actions on your builds. All that isn't trivial to setup or maintain, so small folks especially will often find it cheaper and faster to pay M$ for all that.

And once you’re no longer a small company, setting up any server comes with a pile of bureaucracy. As a dev, I don’t want to set up a server when 80% of the work is filling out SOC 2 change management forms and dealing with crowdstrike. (And nobody wants to spend time debugging why crowdstrike makes the CI pipeline slow or arguing with your auditors about why your ephemeral images don’t actually need crowdstrike.)

Re: GitHub has alternatives, but no replacement

#58

Post by thataccount »

HumblyTossed wrote: post #50
thataccount wrote: post #11

Github is not something that should be replaced. Rather, a different kind of model needs to exist. Before Git, there were things like Subversion, for instance. All of that slowed way down after Git showed up to the party because people liked the fact Git was "easier to use" and eventually networking effects. When Microsoft purchased Git, the death knell had all ready sounded, but nobody was listening.

The issue isn't the technology (git, subversion, cvs, etc), it's that developers FOMO and glom on to what every other developer uses so you end up with these huge silos that they inevitably complain about.

But WHY they glom on to it and not say, Subversion is my point. We can imagine an alternative world in which Subversion mutated into something more like Git. Why doesn't it exist? Because Git came in and everyone decided it was "the answer to all things".

Re: GitHub has alternatives, but no replacement

#60

Post by inigyou »

cedws wrote: post #13

Running a git forge is easy, I find the social coding/network effect the stickiest part of GitHub. I want my code to be discoverable, and I want to discover others' code. I wanted to leave GitHub but I'm still stuck there. What it would take for me to finally leave is some kind of federation of the social features, so I can port my stars over, see what others are working on, etc.

How much do you actually use social features of GitHub besides bug reporting?

Your stars list is browser bookmarks. You can see what others are doing even if you don't have accounts on their sites.

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