Dear-GitHub: Host Github by itself as an open source project • Hacker News Board

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

#71

Post by joelhandwell » Tue, Jul 03, 2018, 8:07 AM UTC

jasode wrote: post #36

WorldMaker wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Xamarin is an easy to use leading indicator because of Nat Friedman's involvement in both. Simply in choosing Nat Friedman as new CEO it is hard not to wonder if Microsoft at least has the intention to explore Open Source as an operating option for GitHub moving forward. > But, MS has not open sourced CodePlex, Visual Studio Team Foundation Server, Skype, Linkedin. [...] I see a difference between "programming tools"…

>LinkedIn has a large open source footprint: http://linkedin.github.io/ >More importantly, Azure has a ton of Open Source: https://azure.github.io/ Sure I get those examples of "bits and pieces" being open source. Likewise, Google open sources lots of things like Protobufs (BSD license), CityHash (MIT license), and Kubernetes (Apache license) -- but they don't open source their crown jewels of proprietary source code…

>Those limited examples didn't seem to be the spirit of Joel Handwell's wish.

My wish is the same wish as the open letter dear-github (https://github.com/dear-github/dear-github) signers and not to host open source github in other server than github.com. Just hoping to see requested feature implemented earlier by cooperating with OSS community. I wish to still use github.com after it's open sourced. So for me, the limited partial component open source can be a starting point and the open source effort do not need to go all the way to the production backend which is distributed performance optimizing hacks usually not directly affects UX/UI.

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

#72

Post by Arnt » Tue, Jul 03, 2018, 9:42 AM UTC

daxelrod wrote: post #49

Arnt wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can already get GitHub in an AMI; it’s called GitHub Enterprise.

Complete with all the features in today's github.com? Including load balancing, sharding, DDOS protection etc.?

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

#73

Post by jhasse » Tue, Jul 03, 2018, 9:50 AM UTC

simula67 wrote: post #52

derefr wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe "secret sauce" is the wrong term. People ended up choosing GitHub purely because of network effects, I think. But those features are the "lock-in" preventing individual projects from easily migrating away. If Git repos just "had" wikis, issues, etc. inside them, the lock-in wouldn't be there, so people would be switching between Git hosts all the time—and there wouldn't really be much value in a "git host" at a…

> If Git repos just "had" wikis, issues, etc. inside them, the lock-in wouldn't be there People clearly never cared about that, since Fossil ( https://www.fossil-scm.org/index.html/doc/trunk/www/index.wi... ) has these things and it never caught on

Maybe it didn't catch on because of other reasons.

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

#74

Post by freedomben » Tue, Jul 03, 2018, 3:16 PM UTC

kanwisher wrote: post #67

freedomben wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This would be interesting to hear about from an insider. I suspect you're right. Having worked at a company that open sources most of their code, I've seen first hand how much better the code quality is when you know it's going out to the world. When you know it's gonna be hidden and only a handful of people will ever see it, you're much less hesitant to push up hacks :-) We open sourced something that wasn't origina…

What’s the business value in spending weeks of developer time refactoring things that are going open source. For some industries it’s required like blockchain. For average shop seems like more expense with no profit

In our case, the business value was that it was a contractual clause with a customer. The idea was that keeping a million dollar customer and spending weeks refactoring was cheaper than losing the customer and getting sued for breach of contract. So we're probably in a similar boat as block chain like you mention.

However, I think you underestimate the value of open source. Besides being the right thing to do (respects freedom, allows developers who built it to use their code later in line with license agreement, allows others to learn by contributing or at least reading, plus many other benefits) it can be a powerful recruiting tool. There's real business value in getting good hires.