Dear-GitHub: Host Github by itself as an open source project
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Re: Dear-GitHub: Host Github by itself as an open source project
#2Don’t matter if you say pretty please, if it aligns with their business they will do it. They’ve probably thought of this move already.
Re: Dear-GitHub: Host Github by itself as an open source project
#3Why? 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?
Re: Dear-GitHub: Host Github by itself as an open source project
#4Don’t matter if you say pretty please, if it aligns with their business they will do it. They’ve probably thought of this move already.
Which one would argue is exactly what they should and must do, given the money they paid for it.
Re: Dear-GitHub: Host Github by itself as an open source project
#5after seeing what they did with xamarin, i would not be surprised if they did. but unlike xamarin, open sourcing github wouldnt help them gain more developers on their platform and i do not see any other business benefits. i would love to see this happen though
Re: Dear-GitHub: Host Github by itself as an open source project
#6Don’t matter if you say pretty please, if it aligns with their business they will do it. They’ve probably thought of this move already.
There is no way I can see them open sourcing GitHub. If you have studied the history of versioning control systems (ClearCear, Perforce, TFS, Subversion, etc.) you would know how insanely powerful controlling the hosting solution is. I can see Microsoft making private repos for free and/or making GitHub Enterprise free for the first 10 users though.
Re: Dear-GitHub: Host Github by itself as an open source project
#7It's kind of funny how Open Source is now a strategic initiative of many big tech companies. They open source projects for a variety of reasons: 1) to attract tech talent, 2) to "build a community" (aka get customers to become unpaid tech support), 3) to increase quality by increasing eyes on lines of code, 4) to reduce cost of maintenance by allowing the community to provide development work, 5) contributing back to existing tools allows companies to re-use technology rather than having to roll their own, 6) defeat competition by releasing a supported product for free.
The last one is a really powerful move for a software company. Normally, people will use your software if it's free, but if there's performance or other limits, it decreases the number of potential users. External open source projects then pick up the user base you might have acquired later. By open sourcing your own product, you effectively eliminate the need market for the external projects, giving you back your user base (which helps your community, potentially leads to sales, etc).
For some companies this would be cutting things very close in terms of profit margins, but Microsoft has plenty of other income that it doesn't need to worry about an occasional loss. It has way more to gain from leveraging this product in all its other tech offerings, even if they made zero money off enterprise support.
Re: Dear-GitHub: Host Github by itself as an open source project
#8They could, but I'd argue GitHub is powerful for the community, shared user accounts between projects, and integrations. None of which you'd benefit from if you deployed your own instance.
If Microsoft open sourced GitHub, I'd still use GitHub.com, for the reasons I stated above. Heck GitLab is already OSS and I don't use that because GitHub wins via the network effect[0].
PS - I have no issue with people asking for this; I'm simply pointing out the "win" if Microsoft agreed, is lower than you'd immediately anticipate.
Re: Dear-GitHub: Host Github by itself as an open source project
#9GitLab 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.
Re: Dear-GitHub: Host Github by itself as an open source project
#10I really don't see the value in open sourcing GitHub when Gitlab exists if you are looking for a replacement incase MS decides to go full tyrant - unless if you believe GitHub enterprise is an amazing project.
If GitHub wasn't built from the start for hosted deployments, it will probably be both expensive and a pain in the neck to run. GitLab probably has it's issues, but I won't be surprised if there are assumptions made in GitHub's code that assumes you are essentially running on high memory / high cpu machines to reduce latency.