Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Dear-GitHub: Host Github by itself as an open source project

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 74 posts

Re: Dear-GitHub: Host Github by itself as an open source project

#11

Post by cutety »

Like the other commenter said, if it aligns with their business interest, they will. That said, I do find it funny that essentially the "home" of most open source projects itself isn't open source. I'm not a heavy user of GitHub, as we use a self hosted instance of Gitlab at work, so my only use is browsing projects & throwing up my various side projects on it, so maybe someone can enlighten me on my next question.

Does GitHub have some proprietary tech/functionality that is valuable enough to warrant it being closed source? As far as I can tell, GitHub's most valuable assets are it's large user base and the brand itself, it's actual functionality seems to be pretty standard amongst git hosting applications (Gitlab, Gitea/Gogs, Bitbucket, etc...). However, like I said, I myself am not a heavy user of it, so there could be some feature the others are lacking that GitHub would like to keep the code closed to prevent others from replicating.

Re: Dear-GitHub: Host Github by itself as an open source project

#12

Post by derefr »

tbrock wrote: post #3

Why? It’s free for open source, reasonable for enterprise and private use and I think you could build a better one starting from scratch. GitHub’s success is largely due to the network effect and it’s entrenched status as the canonical code repository. Besides libgit2, aka “the secret sauce”, is already open source. What are you waiting for?

> libgit2, aka “the secret sauce”

I would describe GitHub's real "secret sauce" as the issue-tracking, wikis, project boards, and release management parts, that don't get represented in the repo itself.

Which is to say, if you wanted to commoditize GitHub (which is basically what "open-sourcing your secret sauce" means), you'd have to create some sort of library that allowed you to treat a git repo + all those other things as one structured data-object. You would be able to use said library to both operate on all those pieces of data locally; and to sync them between different Git hosting services that all share those features.

Or, better yet, figure out a way to put all those features into git itself, so that every git repo automatically transports those pieces of data alongside itself.

Re: Dear-GitHub: Host Github by itself as an open source project

#13

Post by eropple »

whoisjuan wrote: post #9

GitLab is not open source though. They call their approach "open core" which imho is just a marketing gimmick to appear as an open source solution when in fact they are not fully open source.

I am not a big fan of GitLab-the-company. But GitLab CE is licensed as MIT. You can do with it what you wilt.

I have a hunch that your actual complaint is that they too do with it what they wilt, and what they wilt is not "give to you everything they add on top of GitLab for free and forever".

Re: Dear-GitHub: Host Github by itself as an open source project

#14

Post by mehrdadn »

tbrock wrote: post #3

Why? It’s free for open source, reasonable for enterprise and private use and I think you could build a better one starting from scratch. GitHub’s success is largely due to the network effect and it’s entrenched status as the canonical code repository. Besides libgit2, aka “the secret sauce”, is already open source. What are you waiting for?

Exactly. I wonder how people would react to if Microsoft made the GitHub source public (and available for further extension by the community) but didn't grant the license to redistribute/deploy it anywhere else. Would people be content with that, or would they be grabbing more pitchforks and protesting Microsoft's actions as some kind of toxic evil? I'm skeptical that that would make people happy, and if it doesn't, then it goes to show the ulterior motivation isn't actually to just to extend the platform and "scratch my own itch", as they put it. It's to let themselves move off GitHub.

Re: Dear-GitHub: Host Github by itself as an open source project

#15

Post by jasode »

>Microsoft open sourced Xamarin after acquisition and it was good for community.

I don't think Microsoft's previous open sourcing of Xamarin is a good indicator and may lead us to misunderstand MS's strategy. To me, it would be very out of character for MS to open source Github.

Yes, MS has released things like C# compiler (Rosalyn), Visual Studio Code (Javascript Electron app), and Xamarin to the open source community.

But, MS has not open sourced CodePlex, Visual Studio Team Foundation Server, Skype, Linkedin.

I see a difference between "programming tools" and "collaboration platforms" and Github is in the 2nd category. I see no strategic reason why MS would pay $7.5 billion for Github to just turn around and open source it.

Re: Dear-GitHub: Host Github by itself as an open source project

#16

Post by Arnt »

tbrock wrote: post #3

Why? It’s free for open source, reasonable for enterprise and private use and I think you could build a better one starting from scratch. GitHub’s success is largely due to the network effect and it’s entrenched status as the canonical code repository. Besides libgit2, aka “the secret sauce”, is already open source. What are you waiting for?

Github has had stunning stability. I bet their architecture is nontrivial, that dozens of parts of their code are tied intricately to their architecture, and that opensourcing only the bits that will run on typical AMIs or on debian^Wdevuan would be little more than opensourcing helloworld.rb.

Re: Dear-GitHub: Host Github by itself as an open source project

#17

Post by tbrock »

Arnt wrote: post #16
tbrock wrote: post #3

Why? It’s free for open source, reasonable for enterprise and private use and I think you could build a better one starting from scratch. GitHub’s success is largely due to the network effect and it’s entrenched status as the canonical code repository. Besides libgit2, aka “the secret sauce”, is already open source. What are you waiting for?

Github has had stunning stability. I bet their architecture is nontrivial, that dozens of parts of their code are tied intricately to their architecture, and that opensourcing only the bits that will run on typical AMIs or on debian^Wdevuan would be little more than opensourcing helloworld.rb.

Right and I don’t want to discount that. The scale they’ve achieved and the team that delivered it are incredible but presumably the people who want it to be open source won’t need any of that.

They’ll be running it on a raspberry pi, not hosting the Rails or NodeJS repo.

Re: Dear-GitHub: Host Github by itself as an open source project

#18

Post by enturn »

derefr wrote: post #12
tbrock wrote: post #3

Why? It’s free for open source, reasonable for enterprise and private use and I think you could build a better one starting from scratch. GitHub’s success is largely due to the network effect and it’s entrenched status as the canonical code repository. Besides libgit2, aka “the secret sauce”, is already open source. What are you waiting for?

> libgit2, aka “the secret sauce” I would describe GitHub's real "secret sauce" as the issue-tracking, wikis, project boards, and release management parts, that don't get represented in the repo itself. Which is to say, if you wanted to commoditize GitHub (which is basically what "open-sourcing your secret sauce" means), you'd have to create some sort of library that allowed you to treat a git repo + all those other…

Fossil SCM has Integrated Bug Tracking, Wiki, and Technotes. It's not git but is distributed. It's used for sqlite project.

Re: Dear-GitHub: Host Github by itself as an open source project

#19

Post by derefr »

enturn wrote: post #18
derefr wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> libgit2, aka “the secret sauce” I would describe GitHub's real "secret sauce" as the issue-tracking, wikis, project boards, and release management parts, that don't get represented in the repo itself. Which is to say, if you wanted to commoditize GitHub (which is basically what "open-sourcing your secret sauce" means), you'd have to create some sort of library that allowed you to treat a git repo + all those other…

Fossil SCM has Integrated Bug Tracking, Wiki, and Technotes. It's not git but is distributed. It's used for sqlite project.

That's cool. I wonder why Git hasn't copied the implementation.
Post reply on HN