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I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA

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Re: I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA

#91

Post by mikece »

kartan wrote: post #6

Nat is being really smart here. It should not backfire unless he acts pedantic or insults Redditors intelligence. I think that both are unlikely. Maybe Nat is trying to counteract any PR damage to GitHub, or maybe he just wants to see how much can skyrocket his account's karma. If I was in his situation I will be happy doing it for both reasons.

How long is it going to take Redditors / HN readers / open source advocates to realize that Nat is one of them and that being an employee of Microsoft or Microsoft's designee to lead GitHub doesn't diminish this?

Re: I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA

#92

Post by hultner »

gaius wrote: post #73
craftyguy wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given how 1) he's provided no evidence to support his claim, 2) he would never publicly say "a significant number of users have moved", and 3) gitlab has a public tracker showing thousands of projects being imported, I'd take his comment with a large grain of salt.

Github has 28 million users with 85 million repos. Thousands is a very small proportion. Also: Gitlab also has to exit one day. The only question is who buys them.

Do they? Are they backed by capital pushing for an “Exit”, and even if so, couldn’t an IPO be a viable option?

Re: I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA

#93

Post by fipple »

Semaphor wrote: post #85
gaius wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Github has 28 million users with 85 million repos. Thousands is a very small proportion. Also: Gitlab also has to exit one day. The only question is who buys them.

FWIW, Gitlab would prefer an IPO and they say they are on track for it. Source: Gitlab guy in one of the many, many, many Gitlab or Github threads recently.

Everyone says they’d prefer an IPO but a lot of them change their minds when a man puts a $7.5 billion check on the table.

Re: I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA

#94

Post by djsumdog »

pera wrote: post #26
jameslk wrote: post #11

> That said, the GitHub team reports that the set of users who have migrated or closed their accounts is extremely small, and this is more than made up for by the surge of new signups and new interest in GitHub this week. It's interesting to hear this. If you were on HN the past week, it might have seemed from all the front page articles that GitHub was about to implode due to an an exodus to GitLab.

The announcement happened just 3 days ago, so it's still too early to draw any conclusions. I personally decided to move my stuff out of GitHub, but it will take me a week or so to know where exactly as I'm still analyzing various options. And after migrating, I don't think I will close my account (even when I really distrust Microsoft) simply because too many libre software projects are currently using GitHub.

Exactly. How can they measure this stuff. You can add a new remote and push your code somewhere else, update the readme file to point to the new location, and that's a migration. That's not an easy thing for Github to track. So this statement doesn't even make a lot of sense. They simply cannot really know -- they can only measure the people who explicitly close projects and accounts.

Re: I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA

#95

Post by fipple »

emilsedgh wrote: post #14

Microsoft should just make Github open source. It would be a great PR move and an amazing build of trust. I don't know why Github was not open source to begin with. Why do companies still think source code is a big deal? This is not Google Search or some advanced AI.

What is the value of Github’s source? Seems like Gitlab’s source is almost as good. The value of Github is the community, which isn’t really impacted one way or the other by open sourcing.

Re: I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA

#96

Post by detaro »

EpicEng wrote: post #69
detaro wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you think it's more reasonable to assume most of the migrating projects didn't mirror, but deleted themselves from Github with only a few days warning? That (IMHO) would point even more to it mainly being small, mostly 1-person projects where there's no community to consider.

No, what I think is that you just added some context to another person's comment. The top level comment is: >It's interesting to hear this. If you were on HN the past week, it might have seemed from all the front page articles that GitHub was about to implode due to an an exodus to Gitlab. and the-dude said: >I think most people mirrored instead of closing. Spin. You changed that to >I think most people (who migrated…

yes, then we did read the-dude's comment differently, I took him as only talking about the moving repositories, as e.g. reported by gitlab's importer numbers.

Re: I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA

#97

Post by alxlaz »

jameslk wrote: post #11

> That said, the GitHub team reports that the set of users who have migrated or closed their accounts is extremely small, and this is more than made up for by the surge of new signups and new interest in GitHub this week. It's interesting to hear this. If you were on HN the past week, it might have seemed from all the front page articles that GitHub was about to implode due to an an exodus to GitLab.

It's not unexpected. Serious projects need more than a few days to move off Github; and there's some overlap between HN users and users who would move their tiny projects off Github on a Sunday afternoon.

That being said, it's way too early to tell how this will evolve trust-wise. Microsoft has a tremendous deficit of trust in the open source community. Younger folks probably don't realize how deep it runs; most of my friends and colleagues who were involved in FOSS in the late 1990s and early 00s wouldn't touch anything with Microsoft on it with a ten-foot pole -- not just because of prejudice, but because fool me once etc etc.. And I wasn't thrilled about hosting code on someone else's computer before, either, but now I'm even less thrilled about hosting it on Microsoft's computer.

Re: I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA

#98

Post by praneshp »

fermienrico wrote: post #31
ajeet_dhaliwal wrote: post #3

What would you rather fight - a horse sized duck, or 100 duck sized horses? Hope he answers that one.

I really dislike this kind of questions. "A little fun doesn't hurt" Reddit and the internet has a lot of fun things to do. Don't waste the opportunity of someone important willing to spend what little 30 mins they have in their schedule to take questions from the community and these questions come up - there are important things to ask. Absolutely useless question and should not be asked.

> Absolutely useless question

Sure

> and should not be asked.

None of your business.

Re: I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA

#99

Post by irq11 »

hultner wrote: post #92
gaius wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Github has 28 million users with 85 million repos. Thousands is a very small proportion. Also: Gitlab also has to exit one day. The only question is who buys them.

Do they? Are they backed by capital pushing for an “Exit”, and even if so, couldn’t an IPO be a viable option?

They’ve taken a big pile of VC funding, so the answer to your first question is yes.

Meanwhile, the biggest player (by far) in the market just abandoned dreams of an IPO. Gitlab is a distant third place in that market, and has a revenue model that is best described as “like Github, but cheaper.”

IPOs are only viable if you have a business capable of supporting them.

Re: I’m Nat Friedman, Future CEO of GitHub. AMA

#100

Post by foepys »

darzu wrote: post #77
eklavya wrote: post #24

Ever since I heard of "Monaco" the online code editor which is used in VSCode. I always assumed Microsoft will eventually come up with a completely online IDE >> deploy toolchain like a GitHub on steroids. I think this acquisition is pretty much all about that. Nobody seems to have mentioned this yet though, at least not that I have read of.

Microsoft already has VSTS which has source hosting, CI, issue tracking, kanban, release management and more. I suspect acquiring GitHub was more about the developer mind-share than the technology.

Are you sure that VSTS will live more than two more years? I'd suspect that Microsoft will eventually want to integrate GitHub with their CI and get rid of TFS (of which VSTS is just a hosted version) entirely. I don't know if you've used TFS/VSTS but it's not exactly user-friendly and well designed. Especially their CI configuration is horrendous.
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