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An open letter of gratitude to GitHub

github.com

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Re: An open letter of gratitude to GitHub

#41

Post by forgottenpass »

luso_brazilian wrote: post #8

Before 2007, the way to participate in Open Source was fragmented. Each project had their own workflow, patches circulated in emails, issues were reported in a myriad ways, and if anyone wanted to contribute they had to figure out every project's rules. Then, a handful of guys took the challenge to build an awesome platform and as a consequence of their hard work, their platform earned its hegemony. Two things stand…

IMO, the "Dear Github" open letter is a constructive way to call attention to the perceived problems

I agree entirety. The responses are fanboy trash in a "using my serious voice" wrapper.

I don't use github enough to share the gripes in "Dear GitHub." They seemed kinda minor and I understand why they wouldn't be in the product. But in light of the poor communication from GitHub explained in the letter, it seemed like a perfectly reasonable and polite step to try and open a channel of communication.

Re: An open letter of gratitude to GitHub

#42

Post by DannoHung »

Gorbzel wrote: post #14
mmcclure wrote: post #4

I assume this is a response to the "Dear Github" letter. I'm fairly certain that everyone involved in that letter (including myself), is very appreciative of Github and its impact on OSS. That letter didn't feel ungrateful or malicious at all to me, but I sure hope it didn't come off that way to others. What I do frequently see with Github, is that they've managed to work their way into almost being beyond reproach.…

> That letter didn't feel ungrateful or malicious at all to me, but I sure hope it didn't come off that way to others. It might have; software engineering is a big tent, and people who touch Github (in at least someway) no doubt comprise a huge part of it. Full disclaimer, I'm biased, as I opened an issue attempting to address some potential editorial/tone issues, and the initial response was not good (a big part of…

> Full disclaimer, I'm biased, as I opened an issue attempting to address some potential editorial/tone issues

Is this your issue? https://github.com/dear-github/dear-github/issues/47

If so, the way you've written your issue is almost incomprehensible and your point is seriously irrelevant to the requests made by the project creators.

Re: An open letter of gratitude to GitHub

#43

Post by hueving »

shawn-furyan wrote: post #30
luso_brazilian wrote: post #8

Before 2007, the way to participate in Open Source was fragmented. Each project had their own workflow, patches circulated in emails, issues were reported in a myriad ways, and if anyone wanted to contribute they had to figure out every project's rules. Then, a handful of guys took the challenge to build an awesome platform and as a consequence of their hard work, their platform earned its hegemony. Two things stand…

> 1. While the situation improved tremendously in certain areas the way to participate in Open Source is still very much fragmented. Most of the major open source projects (like Linux, Mozilla, Apache and nginx, to name a few) still have their own workflows, patches are still circulated in emails and issues are still being reported in a myriad ways. Despite of the big visibility GitHub has among the new open source p…

No, there are still newer projects that refuse to use github because it's a closed source system (e.g openstack).

Re: An open letter of gratitude to GitHub

#45

Post by chazu »

phaed wrote: post #12

The motivation behind this letter is embarrassing. It's as if they were talking to GitHub the thankless FOSS maintainer. Quit mirroring guys. It's a for-profit enterprise that would do well to listen to the concerns of its userbase.

I agree - there's nothing wrong with the original Dear Github letter - github is a big company with lots of inertia, being called out on failing to support the growth of their OSS community isn't going to hurt their feelings but it may spur some change.

This letter just feels sycophantic and obsequious to me. And sucking up to billion-dollar companies doesn't feel like its in the hacker spirit, if you'll allow me to posit that such a thing still exists.

Re: An open letter of gratitude to GitHub

#47

Post by bachmeier »

mmcclure wrote: post #4

I assume this is a response to the "Dear Github" letter. I'm fairly certain that everyone involved in that letter (including myself), is very appreciative of Github and its impact on OSS. That letter didn't feel ungrateful or malicious at all to me, but I sure hope it didn't come off that way to others. What I do frequently see with Github, is that they've managed to work their way into almost being beyond reproach.…

> they've managed to work their way into almost being beyond reproach

Yep. It's annoying as hell when I tell someone I use Bitbucket and they try to get me to change to Github. And I'm not talking about for FOSS repos, they want me to convert my free Bitbucket repos to paid Github repos, because Github.

> A (by all indications), very profitable product that wants to make money off you. That is its goal and purpose in life, and OSS furthers it.

I'd go a little further than that. Their strategy, while good for some FOSS projects, is a common marketing tool. I can use Wunderlist, Evernote, and Dropbox for free in a limited capacity as well. The thing about those strategies is that they last as long as it's in the interest of the company to provide them.

Re: An open letter of gratitude to GitHub

#48

Post by smt88 »

phaed wrote: post #12

The motivation behind this letter is embarrassing. It's as if they were talking to GitHub the thankless FOSS maintainer. Quit mirroring guys. It's a for-profit enterprise that would do well to listen to the concerns of its userbase.

> It's a for-profit enterprise that would do well to listen to the concerns of its userbase.

Very true, and I'm surprised this is the first comment that points this out. GitHub doesn't need our thanks -- it gets our money. You could easily argue that the OSS/social aspects are excellent marketing tactics, not anything remotely like altruism.

I'm also starting to become concerned that GitHub, a for-profit, has locked in so much of our industry. In my opinion, they need to be responsible stewards of all that lock-in. Look at what happened when SourceForge stagnated and then started to spread malware. There's no reason the same thing couldn't happen to GitHub.

Re: An open letter of gratitude to GitHub

#49

Post by autoreleasepool »

jacquesm wrote: post #23
msellout wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The bug tracking data might be tough to replicate, but everything else is stored on each contributor's machine. I think recovery time wouldn't be so bad.

That's a huge mistake you're making there. Recovery time would be in the years because github is a hub . It became a focal point for a very large amount of activity, losing that hub would be an absolute disaster.

> losing that hub would be an absolute disaster.

Not really. I agree GitHub is a great for open source, but its not essential. It would be a shame to lose the community, central location, user activity history, etc... but actively maintained projects would not suffer much.

The recovery process would be as simple as pushing to a new remote and emailing the core developers. It would probably take a few months to properly set up a JIRA or other bug tracker and for everyone to settle into the new work flow.

The genius of git (or should I say BitKeeper) is that its distributed, so having a hub isn't really important.

Re: An open letter of gratitude to GitHub

#50

Post by forgottenpass »

bitsoda wrote: post #24
swillis16 wrote: post #5

Github makes millions of dollars per year and has a huge amount of users so the product is proven good. While I understand the need to be appreciative of Github, giving the organization a bit of user feedback is not going to hurt them very much. The response assumes that this is written because of the "Dear Github" letter.

While GitHub makes millions per year, it's important to keep in mind that "GitHub" and every other company is really just a collection of people like you and me. I'm sure their engineers are paid well, but money isn't everything, and it's nice (and motivating) to show up at the office and know there's people out there who appreciate the work you put in regardless of what you're being paid. There's nothing wrong with…

every other company is really just a collection of people like you and me

That's cool and all, but wasn't the motivation for the first letter the lack of humanity from GitHub in communication with the userbase?

I don't think they deserve a cooing public letter to reassure them on the basis of humanity after they've decided to give "empty response or even no response at all" to what read like perfectly reasonable attempts to communicate with them.

I'm entirely willing to use person-to-person social standards for a company. I'll start with a trust-but-verity attitude, because leveraging a double standard in customer facing business is often a way for companies to take advantage of customers. Once they show they're not interested: fuck 'em.

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