Change GitBucket user interface to make difference with GitHub | Hacker News Reader

Change GitBucket user interface to make difference with GitHub

gitbucket.github.io

140 pointssandGorgon79 comments

Looking at the screenshot I thought "Wow, I can see why Github would be annoyed at that" before realising that was their proposed not-at-all-like-github-now-honestly new UI.

Their demo looks like they just stole Github's CSS templates.

I had exactly the same reaction. There are more screenshots of their previous look in other posts:

https://gitbucket.github.io/gitbucket-news/images/gitbucket-... (there's even "GitBucket now supports current GitHub UI" in the post?!)

https://gitbucket.github.io/gitbucket-news/images/gitbucket-...

Not defending the ui aping, but GH css is open source: http://primercss.io/layout/

They should have kept it proprietary if their lawyers are touchy about liberal open source licenses.

>Open source Available for use under the MIT license and built with open source projects like SCSS, Jekyll, Grunt, and more.

Open source covers the copyright. This is more a trademark issue. The trademark issue is independent of the copyright-openness of their assets, as it is not valid to infringe their trademark either with their assets, or with fully copyright-independent assets.

This is correct and highlighted by the fact that Github doesn't focus on the CSS at all -- their claim would have been exactly the same if they did not copy anything and wrote everything from scratch. It's about trademark and user confusion, not copyright.

The first URL is gitbucket[.]github[.]io/gitbucket-news/images/gitbucket-3.12/new-github-ui.png, just saying.

For what it's worth, Github open sourced much of their CSS http://primercss.io/

Well, this reminds of the Microsoft Office UI (I think its called Ribbon?). I think the rule around that is that people can make apps that mimic that UI EXCEPT in the case where the apps are direct competitors. Seems to be the case here too.

Fabric is the one I think : https://github.com/OfficeDev/Office-UI-Fabric

Na actually I am referring to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ribbon_(computing)

Yeah, you could easily think you were looking at Github. I think it would be polite of them to change it a little bit more. Also, while it's natural for them to want to have a link to their Github account in the header of their site, as it is now (in combination with the extremely similar look) it almost makes them look like they are affiliated with Github.

Yea, Gitlab and Bitbucket are pretty significantly different in look. Although those two were commercial entities that probably had the foresight to think about these issues.

Gitbucket looks like it's independent devs just trying to create a clone in Scala. It would be pretty cool to have a github alternative in scala :-)

They also don't overtly describe themselves as Github clones. Slightly different goals: one tries to compete and aims to offer something superior, the other is intentionally a cheap knock-off (not intended to sound derogatory - there's a place for that).

Really any website that uses one of the major CSS templates (bootstrap, etc) looks pretty much the same. I see a dozen websites a day that all have the same fonts, button styles, layout, etc.

This is still preferable over the travesty that was flash buttons people baked in Fireworks before the dawn of the flashless web.

And Github looks like they're just using Bootstrap.

It's because Github's CSS toolkit is maintained[0] by the same creator of Bootstrap[1], @mdo.

[0] http://primercss.io/about/

[1] http://getbootstrap.com/1.0.0/#footer

Yea I double checked the date to make sure this wasn't an April Fools, it looks exactly like Github...

I want to applaud GitHub for doing this in a peaceful manner. They have every right to ask this. I think having all project develop their own UI style will allow for more innovation to happen. At GitLab we are greatly inspired by GitHub but over time the GitLab became more distinctive. And that allowed a trickle of innovation to flow back, for example protected branches.

Not really. I wish most GUIs would be the same if they are offered for pretty much the same functionality, like searching for hotels or flights. Too bad to see the smaller is giving up the good fight. Last thing I would care is someone takes my GUI -- only means I designed something extremely useful in the first place. Go ahead! Duplicate for everyone's benefit.

And notice they said its a good first start. This will get similar to Apple having issues with corner's curve of Samsung devices... never enough curved to actually not remind of Apple's products.

Bad move on Github part, but I'm happy with Btibucket anyways.

> Not really. I wish most GUIs would be the same if they are offered for pretty much the same functionality, like searching for hotels or flights.

Agreed. Remember when one of the complaints about Linux apps was that they used so many different toolkits (e.g. Athena, qt, gtk+ &c.)? Now we use web apps, and every single one looks different, and none of them is as usable as xterm.

'Progress'!

Really Gitbucket should seek to change their UX. Not just the UI. Right now gitbucket looks like a functional clone of github, that's bad.

It's possible to appear different, but retain feature-set it's just hard. And obvisously -- I think, you could bundle a legacy Github theme as an addon to gitbucket provided by the community if you really wanted to. Just not ship the product out the door as a 100% clone of github, UI and all.

But... GitBucket is a project that is trying to be a Scala-based clone of GitHub. That's what their project is about. They're trying to copy the look and feel of GitHub because that's exactly what they're trying to do.

It (to me) would be like Microsoft asking LibreOffice to change their look and feel because it looks too similar to MS Office. LibreOffice is SUPPOSED to look like MS Office so that users can switch without much pain.

Right?

Interestingly, Github seems to be in a similar product vs infrastructure quagmire to Twitter.

If Github were an infrastructure company, we'd all want our git repos mirrored there and we'd all want to use the collaboration and reputation APIs.

But viewed through the product lens, Github is a user interface for git which ought to be considered proprietary.

When Github first launched issues, I was hoping that it would be pulled into .git itself, so that we might all manage issues locally using a cli and then sync changes with peer copies of the repo.

Then, when Github launched jobs, I thought the idea was that hiring managers would get a very good sense of a candidate's skills by seeing information surfaced by github about a coder's habits and social network. This would in effect be a big data approach to evaluating a coder as a function of commits, and a meritocratic leader board for the industry.

Then, when Github announced Atom, I was expecting a bunch of Github branded open source tooling, yet the approach seems hesitant and focused on beginners.

All along, Github charges a premium for private repos, which has allowed its competitors to grow.

Now Github has an incentive to become proprietary, because it no longer has a free network effect. With a $100M investment, one needs pretty big numbers to move the needle.

I think a turning point was when Github decided to stop being a rubygems repo. It is exactly that kind of deep integration of hosting, reputation system, and build system that Github offers a unique competitive advantage. Github's search was also broken for years.

This allowed NPM to spring up, but lacking the ability to innovate deeply in the area of reputation the way Github could have.

So now Github has to decide if it can be a trusted platform or if it's going to fight petty battles over producty things like Twitter has done.

I think it's kind of funny they start out by saying:

At first, we have never copied any materials from GitHub so this is not problem.

But later when you scroll to their footer it says:

GitBucket is a GitHub clone powered by Scala.

Clone when used in this sense doesn't mean copying. Copying pretty much means re-using the exact same source, like literally copy and pasted. A clone is just something that does the same thing as something else. I'm not saying GitBucket didn't copy or take code, I'm just saying that calling something a clone doesn't usually convey that they took code, it's just that they're very similar in what they do as another thing. You could say Gitlab is a GitHub clone but it doesn't look anything like GitHub (although it did at one time).

Even the name GitBucket is very confusing. At first, I thought it was referring to BitBucket. But it's not GitHub or BitBucket.

It's till comment that I realized it's not talking about Bitbucket

You're not the only one.

GNU started out as a UNIX clone, but that doesn't mean it copied code from UNIX.

There's nothing wrong with building a compatible clone of a proprietary program or platform; that's a valuable contribution.

... and?

What am I missing here?? I thought look and feel wasn't copyrightable. Didn't we learn that in the 80's?

Two things happening here. First, look and feel may in fact be an artistic expression, which is copyrightable, and cannot be copied under copyright law.

More importantly, though is that look and feel may be trade dress, which is a trademark issue, because it helps consumers identify the source of the service. Do you look at Gitbucket's website, which does the same thing at GitHub, and think for a second you're not sure if this is a service that GitHub made? That's trademark infringement.

We also learned about trade dress in the 80s. [1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29wNCH4RBrk (Coming to America)

I expect it's eligible for the same protection as any other creative work. You can paint a painting in the same style as another artist, but if you straight up copy every stroke from someone else's painting it's copyright infringement.

There has to be a line somewhere between "I own the copyright on the appearance of this painting" and "I own the copyright on the appearance of text documents showing 12pt Times New Roman on a white background" where it no longer qualifies as a copyrightable work, but I wouldn't be surprised if GitHub's page layout fell on the copyrightable side of it.

For another example: magazine page layout. If you designed a magazine and a competing publication in the same industry lifted your design pixel-for-pixel, it'd be lawsuit time. If a satirical magazine did it to imitate your publication, they'd be doing it under a fair-use exception for satire. GitBucket is more like the former.

I'm far from having any real legal knowledge on the matter, but I suppose copying the look and feel is different from looking so much the same that people might miss that they are two different projects. There are probably also some difuse border between look and feel and branding.

It is a violation of GitHub's ToS. GitBucket is hosted on GitHub.

Which would likely be a violation of anti-trust law, as we learned in the 90s.

I hope GitBucket posts the email from Github.

I mean this in the kindest tone I can muster in a text medium: go read a Wikipedia page on antitrust, or specifically read the details of the 90s MSFT case (which I assume you are referring to) before using the phrase "anti-trust law" in a sentence again. You'll realize why others view your comment as bordering on non-sequitor.

I would welcome a counterpoint in fact (vs personal statements). To me, the argument would be that Github has a dominant market position in public source code hosting, and using their ToS in this way would limit competition by hindering their distribution, and that this is contrary to the public interest (see "Dear Github" etc). I am by no means a lawyer, and would welcome correction and clarification.

> I would welcome a counterpoint in fact (vs personal statements)

It would help, to make a counterpoint, if you spelled out exactly what in the 90s this reminds you of.

My wild guess is that this reminds you of the legal agreements Microsoft got in trouble for having computermakers sign that kept BeOS off their computers.

But that's wildly inapplicable here. Nevermind the important fact that a TOS for Github's own service forbidding using it to create a competing service is materially different from signing an agreement with a 3rd part to not do business with a competitor, the simple fact is Anti-Trust laws only apply to Trusts.

At the time Microsoft got in trouble, they had previously signed a legal agreement acknowledging they were a trust, in 1994. Github hasn't done that. Microsoft signed a legally binding document that said "We acknowledge we are a Trust, and we agree to play by the rules governing Trusts" and then broke those rules. That's what they got in trouble for. None of that applies here, however much you "think Github has a dominant position". That's not enough to get you slapped with antitrust violations.

If Github were a monopoly in it's market (which it isn't, but let's pretend), that's not illegal! They would first have to be shown to be leveraging that position to enter into other markets, or to in some other way be illegally using that position to prevent 3rd parties from doing business with competitors, which is a violation of the Sherman Act. Simply saying that competitors can't use their free service is not a violation of the Sherman Act.

Thank you for the explanation. Can you provide a citation that antitrust law applies only to Trusts?

To answer your question though, I was thinking of the accusation that Microsoft leveraged the Windows market position to promote Internet Explorer.

It still seems that (if a monopoly) Github's behavior could be covered by the "essential facilities" section. However both whether Github is a monopoly and whether their behaviour would be covered seem very fuzzy, and I suggest we leave that discussion to the lawyers!

Not a lot of time at the moment, but I'll start with the fact that there's BitBucket, Unfuddle, and others I've forgotten (hell, SourceForge is still around) that may allow a dominant position in that space, but GitHub is a long way from being a trust or monopoly. Additionally, the barrier to switching to competitor is low. GitHub has arguably little control or influence over the hosted source control market. Unlike Microsoft in the 90s, there is little but goodwill and reputation to keep us all from switching to BitBucket tomorrow.

Theres a lot of subtlety I'm missing, but that's the best this non-lawyer can do for the time being.

> Which would likely be a violation of anti-trust law, as we learned in the 90s

Whatever it is that you think you learned in the 90s that would somehow make that an antitrust violation is quite mistaken.

Github is not a trust, in no sense. The closest part of it is the developer mindshare and hostility to a competitive hosting ecosystem for some incredibly irrational reason a lot of devs have. But even then, gitlab is a direct and successful competitor in the exact same space.

Are you suggesting that GitHub is a monopoly and subject to the Sherman Act?

Please explain

It's not. The CSS is copyrightable, but there's absolutely nothing from stopping another site from copying the design. The Github logo is probably trademarked and a competitor could not use that or any similar trademark, but that's a different issue.

What I find odd is that, even though they appear to be publicly released, they still develop their own project in GitHub! Anyone know what's holding them back from self-hosting?

Well, I believe it's easier to get contributors on GH than to force newcomers to create an account on a new service just to submit a patch.

What slig said, and also all of the infrastructure that GitHub provides for free.

i was thinking the same thing...how weird

Considering the blatant similarities between the GitBucket and Github UI, I'm really not surprised they were getting upset about it. Surely GitBucket can not be surprised either?

This was one of those predictable things. Generally when you start your project on the words "x clone", x is going to take issue with it. Often an application's UI is one of it's greatest assets, and copying it is generally a no-go.

Changing the colors of your theme doesn't really substantially change the UI. They should strive to become something of their own, and go after improving past what GitHub offers.

That's their refresh? It looks exactly like GitHub...

No no... as you can clearly see, the buttons on Gitbucket have a border-radius of 6px while Github is 5.

Er... it does look an awful lot like GitHub. Like down to the pixel.

Props to both parties for dealing with this like adults versus suing each other, which is how most of these situations usually end.

Round of applause for everyone involved for staying level-headed and agreeable.

After reading the article and looking at the screenshots I can only say: No shit Sherlock!

I've been using GitBucket since about version 0.5.0 and I honestly liked the GitBucket UI better before the push to look just like GitHub.

Feature-wise, it's behind both GitHub and GitLab, but for company internal repositories, it also doesn't me to risk the security of my server by running RoR. I lost a server to hackers (temporarily) due to an RoR vulnerability that was exposed through Redmine, so perhaps I'm a bit sensitive.

If it's just for internal use, why not close off external access or put an authentication layer "over" the application? I have my personal services protected with Basic Auth¹, it's just a matter of running a command to create the passwords file and adding two lines to your Nginx config.

¹ With HTTPS, of course, but that should be used anyway, to protect the app's own authentication.

> I lost a server to hackers (temporarily) due to an RoR vulnerability that was exposed through Redmine, so perhaps I'm a bit sensitive.

That's more of a redmine vuln than a ruby one. Someone can write bad/vulnerable code in any language... I know, I write PHP daily :)

Seems to me that nearly every UI component in the screenshot is stock Bootstrap.

GitHub was not wrong to do this. Gitbucket's UI is confusingly similar to GitHub's so I have no qualms with the actions taken. The good thing is that they took a reasonable approach to this.

I'm not sure I understand how someone can get confused between a reputed SaaS like GitHub and something called GitBucket. Don't software engineers look at URLs and page titles nowadays?

What makes you think only software engineers use Github?

Most humans do not pause to consciously inspect the URL and header of every single one of the hundreds or thousands of pages they look at every day, no.

gitbucket is selfhosted... there was really no realistic way to mix them up

Guys should be bought by Rocket Internet.

I don't understant why people think gitbucket should look different then github.

Ofcourse logo, icons, css, js files must be rewrited by project contributors but looks can be same as github.

We love github, we use github, we promote github to companies, friends and community, we help them grow and being great with open letters, whishes, advises, even we publish our codes under gpl or other free/open source projects on github

They change and show how we can interact with other developers.

Github have a great experiences with coding community, resources to explore more ways to do things with rigth way with our help.

Github must be proud them self and its good.

But as a community driven projects doesnt have this experiences and/or knowlage. Copying ui and ux it's not be issue for those projects if they dont go to commertial way.

Its shows what github doing rigth. In this community we have great hackers, they can offer help to gitbucket, but we don't have great ux hackers as code hackers. Until we have ux developers (in general speaking) copying experiences from somewhere and given them to people sould not be issue.

It kind of looks like this is a cultural difference. It's an Asian project, and it seems like they simply don't care about IP as much over there.

We don't really care about it here either, but we'll at least try to hide it by changing the UI so it doesn't look like a clone, even if it blatantly is.

There, the _point_ is to be a clone. It's sort of a mark of respect.

It's just a very different mentality around this stuff, I hope it can be resolved amicably.

As always, if you're HNs darling, it's fine to send the lawyers.

>GitBucket is a GitHub clone powered by Scala.

site footer

Note that this is blog post is not from "BitBucket" but "GitBucket", it took my brain longer than it should have to realise this.

I didn't realize it until I read your comment and can attest I was extremely confused. "Wait, bitbucket is hosted on github? Wait they redesigned to look like github? Why is the blog post for this major cloud provider written in broken english?"

(to be clear I didn't have a problem understanding the blog post and don't mind that the english isn't perfect, I just thought it was curious).

> "It was saying GitHub does not allow to clone..."

One of the things they did not clone from GitHub is well written prose. GitHub's blog posts are always well written and enjoyable to read.

It's true, but you might want to give them a pass on this one. The post isn't attributed to any particular author, but it looks like the top five contributors are all Japanese:

https://github.com/gitbucket/gitbucket/graphs/contributors

To be fair to them they are not native English speakers. I would have an equally hard time (of not impossible) writing well written Japanese prose.

It would be impossible for me to write at all in Japanese. Romans would laugh hysterically if they read the blog I wrote in Latin. Which is why any corporate communications to my Roman customers would not come from my stylus. I can't imagine building a brand and or loyal customer base any other way.

Quite an unsporting comment mate

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