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Comment by sylvinus | Hacker News Reader

I can't understand why GitHub isn't responding to the "Dear GitHub" people. They are not requesting huge political changes, it just boils down to a CONTRIBUTING.md and a basic voting system that many alternatives already have. It might take a couple weeks/months to spec and develop but they should at least send some kind of acknowledgement?

Do they actually want all those large open source projects to leave?

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Since I haven't noticed anyone mention it directly while advocating for voting functionality: GitHub issues originally had voting. The feature was removed with the release of Issues 2.0. Back when the GitHub blog had comments, the Issues 2.0 announcement's comments included this one from pjhyett (https://web.archive.org/web/20110412131836/https://github.co...)

> Issue ordering and voting were used by an incredibly small number of users and we made the decision to drop them. Leaving features in that only ten people use is how to create Jira, not GitHub.

Obviously, that was a while ago and things might be different now.

For the same reason that the open-source projects don't say yes to all the feature requests they get... because once you make a new feature, you now own it. It's so easy to ask. So much harder to support it forever and ever afterward.

I find it ironic that open-source maintainers sent the same kind of ranting letter "demanding" certain features in the same "entitled" manner that their users do to them. :)

Github is neither open source nor volunteer-based. They are a product which a lot of people pay for, including most of those who signed the letter.

And I paid for this Mac. Apple doesn't care about my feedback. :)

Just because you pay for something doesn't change the rules. New code has to be supported. And if it's a business, you have to pay people to support that new code.

The point is that GitHub, as a fairly new company, is still establishing its reputation.

By being unresponsive, they are establishing precedent. They can establish the precedent they want, but it's also ok for people to question which way they're going to go.

Heya, random GitHubber here -- I can't provide any information about things that are in-progress, but we see these threads and are paying attention to them. The "Dear GitHub" letter, etc all get sent around here, show up in chat rooms, and get talked about quite a lot internally. We value feedback from all our users -- GitHub.com users, Open Source maintainers, and our Enterprise users. There's a lot for us to do to make GitHub better for everybody, and everyone's feedback is valuable. While it's true that we've put a lot of effort into getting GitHub Enterprise into the shape we wanted it, it's important to note that a lot of enterprises use GitHub because of the millions of people on GitHub.com -- they see how powerful open-source style development is and want to emulate it internally. It would be utterly disastrous for us to ignore the feedback of all the users who got us to where we are today.

I know you are trying to provide some comfort to people and doubt you have very much impact/authority w.r.t community relations, but this is literally just another "we value feedback, you're important to us" without any actual plan to fix the issues or even acknowledgement that they are being worked on...

There's been no official communication in a month, so I don't think its unreasonable that projects are starting to look at alternatives and start to believe that github is unresponsive to their problems.

Mostly it's about letting folks know we're paying attention. I'm not in a community function at all (I'm a developer turned salesperson -- I just happen to be a long-time HN user and thought I'd mention that this stuff isn't falling on deaf ears). A challenge is that we get thousands of feature requests all over the board; and no matter what we do, we'll miss something that people want. That doesn't mean it's not coming, it may just mean that it's not ready (although to be fair, we are pretty unlikely to ever build everything people want). It's useful to us to see this feedback (truly), and I just wanted to mention that we see it. A quick glance at Pulse for the main GitHub repository shows that there have been over 200 Pull Requests merged (and shipped) and over 50 issues closed just in the past 7 days -- these are things that somebody somewhere wanted, even if it's not everything that's on one specific person's list. That's just in one repository -- there are similarly active repos with a similar number of ships in the past week.

Can we be better? Absolutely, yes. This is the most "care hard" company I've ever worked at, and we really want to do things to the best of our abilities. I know this doesn't help you if there's something you've asked for, or something you legitimately _need_ and don't have yet; what I hope will help is knowing that these requests aren't being ignored.

This just doesn't mean anything to us given that these issues have been talked about for much, much, much longer than a single month. Why is a random GitHubber telling us this and not someone in a more authoritative position? It seems painfully obvious to tell people you're working on it, and I think it's perfectly reasonable to worry when you hear literally /nothing/.

You'll probably be surprised to know most companies do care about your feedback. Even Apple. The thing is, companies are out to make profit. If your power users all go leave and use a competitors product where do you think all the companies who they work for are going to end up? Yea at the competitor.

I would very much be surprised.

Some personal examples:

For years I've worked with Microsoft products. The company I worked for paid big bucks for Microsoft enterprise support. Tried to use many times, always same results. "We'll send this to engineering." Never a response.

Same with Apple. Bought an iMac that repeatedly ejected USB disks. Known issue. Apple support forums have hundreds of unanswered, unresolved threads on this issue. Yet Apple support had "never heard of it." Same "we'll send your logs to engineering and get back to you." And never heard back.

Local cable companies call you constantly to get you to sign up for services. Then when there's a problem they'll come out and fix when they feel like it.

Got a problem with your Google Apps account you pay for? Good luck.

Sell something on Ebay and someone screws you over? Ebay still keeps their cut of course.

Paid $1500 for Google Glass, found out explorer project was shutting down through Twitter and The Verge, rather than Google.

Had a Digital Ocean box disappear for no reason. Response from them was "sorry." Saw a recent article where someone else had that problem too.

Had a similar issue with a Linode box. Same results.

So maybe I just have terrible luck.

But I'm willing to bet that there's way more money in sales and marketing than there is in supporting existing customers.

Forking over money to a company provides zero benefits other than the use of the product or service, in my experience. You get no say in how things work there, and you're lucky to get someone who is actually empowered to help you.

Pretty sure improving the Issues system is a wontfix. :)

Perhaps is a matter of principle? I would think that if you add those changes, problems would go away. But you could also make the argument that once you show everyone that complaining /boycotting/etc works against you, more people will go for it?

Seems far fetched, but might just make sense given who pays their bills..

That's still not really a reason for GitHub to not respond. They don't have to agree or promise anything one way or another, but a response from GitHub outlining their position would at least give everyone a clear baseline for what to expect from GitHub in the future.

> a response from GitHub outlining their position would at least give everyone a clear baseline for what to expect from GitHub in the future.

Um, exactly?

A "Fuck off and die, you don't pay our bills" response is going to provoke outrage and maybe even action. It would certainly provide reinforcement for those of us who don't really like github for various reasons.

Not responding at all leaves things vague and doesn't provoke action.

Want github to respond? Start moving some famous projects off of github and onto something else. A couple big name projects that start making some other service look like the "default" winner and github will get REAL responsive.

Until people start moving projects (like this one), github doesn't have to care.

Edit: for bad grammar.

I just feel the risk of major projects moving (increasingly likely) seems much higher than the complexity of adding the couple very small features, that probably don't go against anything they might be doing Enterprise-side.

I'm probably alone in this opinion but I think the OSS community should be patient and supportive of the organization that has supported our OSS projects all along.

From an outsider perspective, it looks like they're preoccupied with putting out fires.

The flat organizational structure, absent strong leadership, has allowed some bad actors to manipulate there way into positions of power/influence within the organization. The CEO and driving force of the organization from its outset has been ejected after making the mistake of fraternizing with his employees. The new CEO lacks the leadership and strong personality required to take up the reigns with the current structure. A culture that was established to be inclusive is being leveraged by a malicious outspoken minority to achieve the opposite; which is causing a lot of backlash internally and externally. The public perception of the company is in free fall. Most, if not all of these issues present a legal and/or financial threat to the future of the company.

In short, GitHub's open and informal culture has become a liability.

It takes an established record of misbehavior to legally justify firing bad employees. Especially, those who will use their 'protected' status and public support to attack GitHub after being fired. I'd be willing to bet that their lack of organizational structure has left them without justification/protection and they're scrambling to make up for it.

To protect their investment, the wise thing to do would be to build some management hierarchy; which they're doing by pulling in all of the leadership from remote positions. They need to shield the current CEO from any more mishaps. They'll follow by establishing a record of poor performance for the outspoken assholes. Eventually, when they've established sufficient justification they'll eject the toxic individuals from the organization.

GitHub will emerge a mature and stable but less friendly/open organization. Hopefully, this doesn't negatively impact GitHub's willingness to support OSS.

"Do they actually want all those large open source projects to leave?"

Absolutely not. To ensure GitHub has a future, they have to fix the present.

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What we may be witnessing is the hastening recovery of an organization that experienced a systematic failure.

They'll survive... Not before shedding some blood.

That would require them to hire HR and CR people who know something about software as opposed to constructing political narratives.

I wonder what distribution their income from private users vs orgs vs enterprise looks like. It feels like they don't care overmuch about the two former.

>I can't understand why GitHub isn't responding to the "Dear GitHub" people.

Too busy firing white males and hiring minorities to please the diversity committee.

"Dear GitHub" lives matter.

lol

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