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Ghostty is leaving GitHub

mitchellh.com

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Re: Ghostty is leaving GitHub

#461

Post by gwittel »

idan wrote: post #96
mitchellh wrote: post #26

I know this is ridiculously dramatic, but its the truth: I actually cried writing this blog post (tears hit my keyboard, I'm embarrassed to say). Nobody should cry over a SaaS, of all things. But GitHub has meant so much more to me than that (all laid out in the post). I have an unhealthy relationship with it. Its given me so much and I'm so thankful for it. But, it's not what it used to be. I don't know. We've been…

Hi there! Longtime fan and hubber here. It's okay to have emotions. I have similar emotions. I'm GitHub User 22723 which is effectively the same as you (considering there's ~180m GH accounts nowadays) My version of your post reads differently: "GitHub only gets better if people who give a shit stick around to make it better" Walking away would be easy. I felt that way when I left Heroku ~six years ago. I left that jo…

> "GitHub only gets better if people who give a shit stick around to make it better"

At a basic level I appreciate this sentiment. However, the common dysfunction I see in large corporation is its not the lack of people who give a shit. Its lacking a sufficient number of people in positions of power that give a shit -- such that they can actually make change happen.

All too often competing pressures (features, profit, delivery speed, politics) take precedence; not leaving time for things that would really move the needle. In essence, too many leaders are happy to ship garbage; they don't care (or don't know).

If Github were to put out a statement saying "service quality is our priority", it is fairly meaningless. If they added "here's how we'll get there", maybe it helps some. Moreso -- "from now on executive compensation is tied to these SLOs", then maybe something would actually happen.

Re: Ghostty is leaving GitHub

#462

Post by fnordpiglet »

kivle wrote: post #137
yetihehe wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some years ago I wondered how long will it take them to go they way sourceforge went. Once you grow too much without a proper leader, you will fall :(.

Sourceforge died in a very different way though. Bundling spyware/crapware in install packages for open source software was a serious breach of trust, and was pretty much the direct reason for mass migration to Github. Github is failing on the technical side, but they at least mostly have their brand value intact. I think it will still take quite a lot for a mass migration of the same scale to happen.

Microsoft specializes in taking successful products and pumping them full of malware, spyware, bloatware, and adware once they have a critical mass of users. It is often preceded by quality dropping significantly due to under investment and McKinsey being brought in to find a way to prop up declining revenues - of course the answer is never to invest in making it a superior product again, but monetization strategies.

Re: Ghostty is leaving GitHub

#463

Post by nikolay »

User 2882 here. What I know is that once a mass exodus occurs from service A to service B, the issues of service A that led people to leave it for service B will start to appear in service B as well.

Re: Ghostty is leaving GitHub

#464

Post by Klathmon »

pyb wrote: post #411
valleyer wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hm. I read that as saying that their users are writing more code with the assistance of LLMs, thus placing more stress on their systems. I do not read it as making any comment about their own practices.

Oh you're right, I misread. They're actually blaming their customer's vibe coding on their problems. I which case I call BS

In our internal metrics you can see a clear increase in PRs and CI runs in general that tracks with agentic coding adoption, and it's significant, so I absolutely buy that GitHub would be struggling to take the brunt of that without big changes

Re: Ghostty is leaving GitHub

#465

Post by mmooss »

bombcar wrote: post #391
munificent wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it feels like everything on the web is more flimsy and low quality nowadays. Not just the web either. It feels like the whole world is in a race to throw shit together and cash out as quickly as possible: influencers, hustle culture, enshittification, etc. My pet theory is that all of the global chaos around the climate, politics, pandemic, etc. is leading people to no longer believe in the future. Once you lose th…

And you, my father, there on the sad height, Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray. Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light. We can't really change the tide lest we be King Cnut - but we can at least take the time and effort in the things we do to fight against entropy - bring more order and durability into our lives. Or perhaps another adaptation: God, grant me…

We can; the tide changed to where it is now and can change again - and somebody will change it.

People need to stop bemoaning it, and think and do something. The enshittification is an idiotic, failing, extremely short-sighted strategy.

It's a huge opportunity - your competition has stopped investing in its product, fired its talent, treats its customers with utter contempt, and is managed by imbeciles. Who is a better target for disruption? Hire the talent, market your quality, treat your customers with respect, point out the BS your competition does every time they do it. Stop staring at your navel.

Re: Ghostty is leaving GitHub

#466

Post by gen220 »

fnordpiglet wrote: post #451
gen220 wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In their defense, they dramatically "over"-report sev-2/3's (things like, avatar urls are not loading in saudi arabia), which makes their cumulative uptime look much worse than it is. If you filter for major/critical outages, their uptime of core services in trailing 12 months all have two 9's. https://isgithubcooked.com/?severities=major.critical Also, a huge part of their cumulatively-bad availability story is copi…

Two 9’s? You have to work pretty hard to do that badly. That’s like bragging you graduated with a C average from Harvard after your father endowed a chair to get you in. Given GitHub has become a utility service globally this should be frankly worrisome to everyone let alone the developer community actively using it. It’s intertwined into many things now beyond simply source code hosting and PRs. And I am surprised G…

Oh yea I'm not trying to defend it as amazing or tolerable, just clarifying the actual benchmark/reality of their performance!

I think at least three 9's would be the baseline. But I'm also sympathetic that they had a *post-exit* scaling of write volume of like, idk, 1000x???

Very few orgs would survive that kind of scale and retain three 9's.

Re: Ghostty is leaving GitHub

#467

Post by jitl »

jabedude wrote: post #388
LeCompteSftware wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW I also think an underappreciated advantage is Windows Server (last I checked that was still rock-solid) and Active Directory. Lots of CIOs / CTOs would correctly veto a move off of these, absent a specific technical problem. This is really more of a "hard knocks" lesson than anything fundamental to operating system design or implementation, but: the two Linux shops I worked at got at least a little sloppy about…

> and a truly 21st-century monolith-microkernel hybrid whose specific design is a mystery to public science What is this a reference to? Fuchsia?

They're referring to the Windows kernel; see the preceding paragraph on the Windows kernel - the three general purpose OS families are Linux, macOS, Windows.

Personally I think not enough credit to macOS here; Apple's Mach/XNU has been microkernel flavored since the NeXT days and many subsystems run in userspace like Windows.

Re: Ghostty is leaving GitHub

#468

Post by mvkel »

_doctor_love wrote: post #138
tedivm wrote: post #8

It really has been remarkable watching GitHub just crumble as an organization. There's a lot of discussion about why: the switch from being independent to being part of Microsoft, having resources pushed to Copilot instead of core service, the organization structure itself, a reliance on vibe coding, etc etc. Regardless of the reason, it's undeniable that GitHub is facing some serious issues. The unofficial status pa…

> insider perspective on this I do not work at MSFT but I don't feel that I need insider perspective to understand what's going on. GitHub is being managed the way other services get managed once they're bought by big companies. Initially fine, then starts to decline, then eventually craters. Everything becomes the numbers game. Microsoft, Oracle, VMware, CA (where software goes to die), Salesforce, the list goes on.…

> GitHub is being managed the way other services get managed once they're bought by big companies. Initially fine, then starts to decline, then eventually craters

Can you explain what you mean by this? Like what does "fine" mean? What, specifically in the management, is the "decline"? What does "craters" mean?

Re: Ghostty is leaving GitHub

#469

Post by bittlesnet »

mitchellh wrote: post #26

I know this is ridiculously dramatic, but its the truth: I actually cried writing this blog post (tears hit my keyboard, I'm embarrassed to say). Nobody should cry over a SaaS, of all things. But GitHub has meant so much more to me than that (all laid out in the post). I have an unhealthy relationship with it. Its given me so much and I'm so thankful for it. But, it's not what it used to be. I don't know. We've been…

Bud. Right decision. Time is a forward moving arrow. You gotta do what's right for the project and over the years I've rarely seen your decisions going against the stream.

Re: Ghostty is leaving GitHub

#470

Post by altairprime »

idan wrote: post #415
margalabargala wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "GitHub only gets better if people who give a shit stick around to make it better" This is true but misleading. Unfortunately. It is a true statement for developers working in GitHub at Microsoft. It's not a true statement for users. There is no avenue by which you make GitHub better by continuing to use it as it has been.

I do work at GitHub. I shared the above as a nuanced "yes and" to the pain that Mitchell is feeling. In the same way that Mastodon didn't replace Twitter even when Twitter went to shit, I don't believe in the various GitHub alternatives becoming a broadly-used thing. Maybe we'll end up with more GitHub-alikes like Codeberg, mabye we'll end up with some communities adopting novel forges like Tangled and Forgejo. But i…

I think a better comparison would be between GitHub and 1Password. Both started out as really excellent things for individuals and both became really awful things for individuals in their pursuit of enterprises.
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