The thought of losing Github to the startup graveyard is kind of scary. It was bad enough to lose Google Code and when SourceForge had their "great purge" of inactive projects.
In the developer space, it seems pretty much the same. SourceForge was good/cool until it wasn't, so people moved to Github. Now, as Github perhaps gradually loses steam or coolness (might not happen either), another company will emerge (maybe it's Gitlab) who will take share while Github perhaps spins into irrelevance. Wash, rinse, repeat - but each time the software tends to get cheaper and cheaper, creating a massive deflationary environment as the particular developer tool set becomes commodity.
Or maybe AWS or Google step in with an actual good product (hasn't happened yet as far as I can tell in CI/CD but hey you never know), and they charge nothing for it because it's part of a basket of services. Margin for the standalone company goes to zero.
Developers have, as far as I can tell, almost zero brand loyalty - and that probably makes sense - but it's very tough in my opinion to create great products for developers and make money as a company at the same time.
That is, politics is not something you can opt out of. Choosing to do or not do certain things impacts certain individuals and groups. The result is politics. It comes to you. If you operate any system by which humans can communicate, politics is inevitable.
The ban hammer is not wielded impartially.
Then again, Snapchat.
(it's not about politics, it's about money)
https://github.com/opal/opal/issues/941
TLDR: Some possibly transphobic person said something on the internet that got traced back to his github account. Some person not connected to the project complains and get's transphobic person removed from github. Github hires complainer to "improve diversity".
That and a couple of other things like their code of conduct have indicated that github wants to be the PC police more than a service provider. I want a dumb service provider.
I don't know if google has cleared out their "fake news" but the top hits on the subject are from heavily biased sources (geekfeminism.com and breitbart).
That was the thing that got me to delete my private repos and stop paying Github for its services - that day, they stopped being a neutral platform and became an opinionated service provider, and while I don't tend to do anything that would run afoul of their policies, I am exceptionally uncomfortable with the prospect of a platform provider exercising editorial control over others' code. I still use it for open source stuff, but I moved all my private stuff to Gitlab and have been exceptionally happy with the choice to do so.
What I do find unsettling is the fallout, including GitHub's behaviour. I like GitHub as a product, and I use it all the time, but it seems at least moderately prudent to migrate repositories to Gitlab (or somewhere else) and keep them up to date, if only to have a backup other than my local copies if GitHub decided to close my account(1).
Looking at the wider context in the developer community, and across society, I am concerned by the number of people who want to immediately resort to the metaphorical thermonuclear option in the event of a disagreement. I mean this in terms of unyielding aggression, complete disengagement and exclusion.
I'm not specifically talking about gender issues either: Brexit and the US election are other prime examples. There's a complete lack of empathy from all sides in many online debates. It's starting to make me think psychopathy isn't so much a disorder as a spectrum on which we all sit.
On that cheerful thought, back to work...
(1) There's no reason they should that I'm aware of, but who knows what might happen in the future? Old chestnut about all eggs in one basket, etc.
The other old chestnut is "first they came for the..."
I think you're getting a bit off in terms of perspective here. There's a huge difference between [words on a page] and [Human being I'm talking to]. I might well say something that makes someone on the internet cry, I might laugh and post pubbietears.jpg if they said my comment had made them cry.
If I saw someone crying in close proximity it's likely I'd stop and ask if they were ok (albeit i would also feel very uncomfortable and undecided on said course of action in case it's imposition).
I'm being artificially extreme but it's certainly true that empathy in most people will be more pronounced for a physical person than an online username (who, lets face it, may or may not be representing their reality).
(And, sorry, my wry sense of humour doesn't necessarily work in plain text and I should make more effort to remember that. To me the spectrum idea is interesting, but it's just an idea.)
I can think of a few comments by family members (aunts/uncles etc especially) on rants by 20 somethings on facebook about how the idiot olds were screwing us all over - being quite hurt by the positions taken in the rants.
Some of this is to do with the weirdness that is facebook crossing virtual/real world interactions. But most of the people who are still obsessed with spouting their personal views on [Global warming/Brexit/Trump/Syria/etc] will quickly find a partner to trade verbal blows with
some of these people have a point - their small minority though is pretty rabid and off point. i've never seen "RESPECT ME!" ever not backfire, on any scale and for any group.
it'll be interesting how we will resolve this kind of emergent social angst - before too much of our future falls victim to it.
there was a code of conduct that people working together adhered to back in the day, and as long as it was kept minimal and professional things are just fine - but it's always over applied, and it always contributes to the fall of its parent. PC and SJWs fall into that catigory these days. they should revise their tactic, i think it does them more harm and causes them to lose credibility, rather than gain any. they might win a few battles, but we'd all lose the war.
i belong to a majority that gets shit due to what a minority does - in my head, i think the way to change that is by serving as an example for the good - and fight the bad together with everyone willing.
the Opal folk should have just apologized, said they'll talk to their dev about his actions and closed the issue, then moved on. instead, that thread's curator u/meh just fanned the flames because of his own spartan approach to community health that overshadowed project health, and ended up causing more damage than it set out to avoid.
here's hoping github survives this.
i've never seen "RESPECT ME!" ever not backfire, on any scale and for any group.
[1] clearly not meant to be an exhaustive list
When deployed during a minor skirmish, going nuclear often risks similarly nuclear retaliation.
But what I meant is the "REAPECT ME" that leads to being "tolerated" rather than it being earned respect.
Should I take from this that what is being done today is likened to what suffragettes did back in the days of first wave feminism?
As far as I can tell projects are still managing themselves as they and their leaders see fit. Seems fine to me.
The spectre of spooky SJWs haunting silicon valley shouldn't be the thing prompting people to consider redundancy in their source code management.
They suddenly decided to be a PC/feminist stronghold, with the associated reverse-logic, claiming words like "meritocracy" were actually oppressing and not empowering, and what not.
http://readwrite.com/2014/01/24/github-meritocracy-rug/
After that stance was lost, you would every now and then read about just another piece about Github where PC politics were being inserted as Github policy.
https://hacked.com/github-promotes-reverse-racism-sexism/
It's been a gradual, but noticeable process.
You may or may not agree with the means/politics itself, but there should be no question that Github itself has been getting increasingly political recent years.
And when you do that, you are bound to alienate someone. I, like many others, would prefer Github to remain a dumb/neutral service-provider. That's what I use it for. I don't need it to throw a political platform in my face.
There was the bruhaha over banning someone from the whole site for using the triggering eggplant emoji: https://mobile.twitter.com/evilaubergine/status/679108445421...
https://www.google.com.tw/amp/s/amp.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAct...
I think you argued the wrong way. The maintainer states it's skill not political views that give merit. If github hired Coraline for her political views, then github stated it's political views not skills that give merit.
> Either they have an obligation to be politically correct as a VC-funded startup that needs to ensure its public face is immaculate
Immaculate? There's no black and white here.
> or Coraline is a fantastic Ruby developer who is good at building community management tools and her politics are irrelevant.
Yes but Coraline will never be satisfied with just being a fantastic ruby developer. It was pretty clear from her comments she cares more (or at least as much) about people than software.
Who is saying this, exactly? The conclusion of that thread was the top maintainer on Opal siding with the originator. If you're worried about him removing you from his projects for your political opinions, don't work with him. This is the argument of the other side in that debate. That this thread happened on GitHub is largely irrelevant. If you're talking about hiring Coraline then you're exhibiting the same kind of intolerance for varying political opinions that people are chiding the "SJWs" for in that thread.
Bluntly: I simply don't understand why you think a controversial issue thread reflects at all on how GitHub will function as a product. It's like switching toaster brands because the toaster company hired a proponent of the Atkins diet.
The parent's point is not that they want a source code platform to agree with them in all political issues. They simply don't want a platform that kicks people off for political reasons. I agree with this. Perhaps an analogy will help you understand:
I don't know or care what the political leanings of my local water and utilities companies are. But I will never willingly be a customer of a water company that occasionally shuts off the tap based on a few tweets they disagree with.
Why are you assuming that GitHub will discriminate against you for your politics? I fully support your choice and in fact I think it's justified, but if you really didn't care about politics, you would keep using GitHub until they kick you off of it for thoughtcrime, as @meh would have the "SJWs" doing in that thread. It honestly just seems that you want a platform whose politics you agree with, and don't want to use a platform whose politics you disagree with.
That is totally fine and valid and is a thing everyone has the right to do. Nonetheless, it's still a politics. Politics is unavoidable, it is a consequence of being able to think and disagree. You can dislike the internal politics, but to do so you have to hold contradictory views yourself. That is the essence of disagreement, and cloaking it in anti-politics does nothing to change that.
I do care about politics, but it is irrelevant to my projects. The time to care about losing access to your source code is before you lose access to it (like backups). Github has shown that there is a signifact risk to hosting my code there so I'm moving off it.
> It honestly just seems that you want a platform whose politics you agree with, and don't want to use a platform whose politics you disagree with.
No, it want a platform that doesn't get involved with politics. Just like I don't care about the politics of any other service I use, as long as it doesn't interfere with my using it.
> Nonetheless, it's still a politics. Politics is unavoidable, it is a consequence of being able to think and disagree.
So you'd be happy to shop somewhere that doesn't allow gay people?
So I'll ask again. How, concretely, do Coraline's politics interfere with your current usage of GitHub?
And how do you know Coraline wasn't interacting in the same vein?
Something may be causing something.
There's no proof of that.
Ah, but is there any evidence that 'Something' is *not* causing it.
There's even a name for it. It's called: argumentum ad ignorantiam (guess what that translates as), also known as an appeal to ignorance.
And just to be clear, "prove they're not leaving" is not a great argument. I mean I guess they might be? But $66m dollars is a lot of money. They'd have to lose over a million paying customers to lose that much from people switching away. This is a simple calculation that returns a boolean, there are either a significant number of paying customers leaving such that it impacts on the scale of millions of dollars (and we're talking about a product that is $7/month for individuals here, that's a lot of $7 subs) or there aren't.
What do you think the ballpark is for paying customers irritated enough by that thread's existence that they leave the service altogether? I honestly don't know, I wouldn't know where to begin quantifying.
so there might be something to it honestly.
Apparently the cliche is right: a large portion of programmers are sorta insular and socially awkward white guys who embrace the concept of "nerd" as a positive and so are a bit defensive and feel threatened about other views and groups and people invading their social space. They may have legitimate concerns here or in similar cases, but the level of energy about it is so clearly defensive and of a magnitude that's wholly unwarrented.
There's just more going on with the sort of people who would get that up in arms over this stuff than just the surface issues themselves.
Noticed, didn't give a shit.
Frankly it was a complete over reaction based on virtue signalling, band wagoning and the general mesd that is any kind of nuanced debate online.
When I run into that stuff now I just close the tab, life is literally too short for it.
A few people making a lot of noise.
Any suggestion this had a material impact on githubs business is pure speculation.
It seems logical that GitHub will eventually figure out how to make money, even if it is just by following the tried and trusted "project management system" model
It was certainly a valuable tool and definitely the GitHub of its time, but man- soooo spammy.
Any source or info on this?
I feel like part of this stems from the fact that every service now wants to charge a monthly fee instead of offering a one time purchase.
If you want me to pay $X/mo, that fee has to correlate to the value you are providing me each month. The minute that equation changes, people start to consider other options.
One of the benefits to SaaS is that you can make more money and your revenue is more predictable, but on the other hand it means your market is more susceptible to competition because companies are comparing their options more frequently.
If I am not mistaken Imgur is doing quite well for many years now.
With that many eyeballs on your site it's no surprise that even their subtle advertising style [1] is profitable. I'd personally much rather see sponsored posts everywhere than pandering direct marketing and spying/tracking.
Not any more - https://techcrunch.com/2016/05/25/reddit-image-uploads/
Actually that is still the case. He said "de facto" not "official". Imgur still represents the majority of image links on most subreddits.
https://www.reddit.com/domain/i.imgur.com/
r/all shows more imgur links than i.reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/all/
Your article dates from half a year ago and they still couldn't snuff imgur out with built-in upload facilities, suffice to say, as far as the users are concerned, imgur is the defacto beloved service. People on twitter are more likely to use twitter's img upload than redditors are to use their own.
They certainly made a lot of mistakes, had changes in the leadership team and are successful despite that not because of it, but I don't see them dying anytime soon.
$60M burn over 9 months after raising $250M isn't horrible either. If they continue to grow which seems to be the case, they will be break-even long before they run out of money.
The numbers aren't surprising to me; I'm more surprised why Bloomberg makes such a big deal out of it. GitHub's bigger problem is certainly that they stopped improving, had internal team issues, etc. but that's only a small part of the article (vs. a big focus on those numbers).
What are you basing that on?
The article says that in 2015 they had revenue of $95 million and lost $27 million.
For the first 3 quarters of 2016 the article says they “surpassed last year’s revenue […] with $98 million”, but also that they lost $66 million in that same period.
So while revenue doubled, the loss more than doubled, which does not look like they are on the path to break even.
Of course there are many unknowns, but going by the numbers in the article alone, it does not look like a slam dunk.
But, let's take some of those numbers: $25M in Sep'14 (subscription revenue annualized => ARR), $95M in Sep'16 ("revenue" - let's assume it's ARR; recognized revenue would be even better) - that's very impressive growth.
If that continues slowly, let's say they went from $25M to $70M, then growth slowed and they grew to $95M and can get to $120M by the end of next year and grow from there - that's a lot of additional revenue to offset the burn.
Burning $88M per year ($66M in 9 months) after getting $250M from investors + probably a large credit line - even if they don't grow at all, don't reduce cost, that's cash for 3 years.
If they reduce their costs (let's say by $15M), make $25M more in revenue, then it's a $40M lower burn ($48M), and they would still have plenty of the $250M in the bank (+ credit line + what they had before they raised the round).
I'm not saying it's easy or that they are doing phenomenally well. I'm just saying that they can get it under control relatively easily compared to other companies that have high burn rates.
I got the feeling that they are selling rather aggressively right now.
They're probably sounding alarmist to try maximising attention. :/
Which is a bummer. I wish there would be somebody more closely analyzing the industry. There's so much going on and I believe that surfacing more of that to the broader community would be beneficial for all of us and result in stronger companies. I think nobody wants to see GitHub going out of Business. We need health competition (as consumers of their products). That GitLab forced pressure on them to improve the product is awesome. I wish Bloomberg would have put more focus on the cultural/leadership issues because a more diverse/inclusive GitHub, again, is better for all of us.
And it shouldn't be different. If the financials are not well, then the financials are not well. Docker, like github, DOES NOT have their future "locked up" 100%. There are a lot of reasons why both could ultimately fail and burning piles of cash seems pretty darn relevant despite the echo chamber that is Silicon Valley.
For me, it's especially not surprising because GitHub needed to heavily invest into GitHub Enterprise, start doing Sales, etc. to keep growing at the rate they wanted and they probably made a lot of mistakes when they started Sales. It's hard, and especially if you put Sales into a very developer-driven culture (=> takes you longer to figure it out => more mistakes => costs you more money). That all being said, some things they did are certainly a sign of being a bit too confident (office, etc.).
But, that's all not their biggest threat. You can get the burn easily under control and reduce cost especially if they are primarily in Marketing/Sales. The bigger issue is a decrease in product quality, a (perceived) slower pace for innovating/improving than their competitors (GitLab) and all the internal culture/team struggles. Having changes in your key positions, 2 out of 4 founders leaving, CEO change, etc. - that's all far more dangerous. A good leadership team can control the burn and reduce it if necessary. A good leadership team sets the right culture.
git remote add neworigin ...this is a pretty bad hit piece from Bloomberg, they should be ashamed
Maintaining the app and not moving forward with new features and adding value (because of lack of resources), I would assume it would just die eventually.
Doubly so when a brand reaches infrastructure level - like Github, or arguably Dropbox. Just don't screw with the product that's working well. Not breaking things isn't expensive.
It's the corpse model of product development.
That, ironically, makes me REALLY not want them to go under: they don't deserve to.
The problems are issues, code comments, pull request discussions, etc, which may be harder, and their API helps here.
Github's huge win is the network effect of having one account and being able to interact on thousands of issue trackers, create PRs, etc. It would super cool if GitLab could achieve some of that same experience without requiring everyone to all be on gitlab.com. It would go a long way toward addressing the criticisms that Github is too centralized.
Yeah, I think it'd be awesome if there was some form of optional federation between GitLab instances (sort of like Matrix or NextCloud).
I also recommend to check out Gitea (community fork of Gogs) if you haven't yet, it's a nice alternative to Gitlab for selfhosting.
It seems like other smaller companies have exploited the profitable parts of Github's niche out from under them.
I think I here a bell tolling.
Maybe I'm too nice to them, but that doesn't seem like Microsoft's modus operandi anymore. These days they're all about getting people to buy more CPU cycles from Azure, rather than trying to seriously pursue Windows platform lock-in (which is a lost cause and they know it).
I imagine if Microsoft did buy GitHub, they'd have all kinds of offers like "get automated tests and CI to your Azure machines every time you push", or allowing you to host the repo on your own Azure VMs but still use the GitHub interface, stuff like that. They'd probably keep the free GitHub mostly as it is, with some nagging to upsell premium Azure stuff but nothing worse than that.
As for Google, I agree that they tend to get easily distracted and drop things, but I would hope that GitHub is popular enough (both inside and outside Google) that there would be serious pressure not to let it die on the vine. Contrast with abandonware like Wave and Google+ which never got enough mindshare that anyone felt like really fighting for it.
Supposedly competitors may be cheaper or offer more in the free tier, and I could imagine you'd call Git itself a 'misstep', but otherwise I can only think of incredible cultural and technical achievements by GitHub?
That being said, the product itself is stellar.
I'll take Oracle, SalesForce, or Microsoft over Google any day of the week. The worst Oracle will do is start charging me more, but god only knows what kind of sleazy ad tracking Google will add. No thank you, I'll move everything over to BitBucket.
Fortunately, I don't think Google will bother. They already shutdown Google Code when they couldn't use it to increase ad revenue, so hopefully they'll leave GitHub alone.
They even let you add your own analytics key
I understand that people would be annoyed by a forced switch, github has a working issue tracker, wiki, and not to mention the awesome github pages. But, I just think loosing them is not that dramatic.
But when people say that GitHub has better UI, they're more talking about the clean menus and intuitive UI. Some of it might just be getting used to one design over another. Although, BitBucket to me has always felt too cluttered.
The opening/home page of Github is still better though. What really got people into Gitlab was the self hosting. Github has depended on selling their enterprise version. I was at a talk where Wanstrath said something to the effects of their expensive enterprise version that only people with money to spend need. .. (Years after I left my job at a state university ... they bought a license. -_- I hated how they paid for a lot of stuff they didn't need).
Even though Gitlab may lack in some UI elements, it's more than good enough and it doesn't hinder work. I'm at a shop that still uses the community edition too.
Gitlab and Bitbucket really cut into Github's model. There are more clones out there now too. If you really want a self-hosted Github like UI, there's Gogs too.
Github's UI makes sense. I can find anything in the blink of an eye and it's blazing fast. The team I'm currently working with is completely fed up with Gitlab.
The Gitlab UI is /fine/, but the speed is what gets me. On github, even if I have thousands of commits, the UI is instantaneous. If I click on something, the load time is less than a second for me. So I switched to Github and paid for the private repositories. I absolutely didn't mind paying for this since Github is so fast for me and seems to be adding pretty cool new features (code review enhancements on PR, for example).
I still have one of my repositories on GitLab and it's still slow when I do things like browse commits, view source files, etc.
It's not just Gitlab though. Bitbucket is pretty slow for me as well, though not as slow as Gitlab. I would guess that Github's caching algorithms are much better than either of those two to really make pages seem snappy.
There's only so much you can solve by throwing more hardware/money at the problem. We have reached a point where we are wasting too much of this, so adding more won't help much.
> (or put some devs on fixing their backend)
We have plenty of people working on the problem, and for quite a while now. We're also hiring more developers to help us out with this:
https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/merge_requests?scope...
https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/merge_requests/...
https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/25421/
There's also this old (and closed) issue which contains a lot of information: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/operations/issues/42
As for the interface, we're working on improving the design of the product and have just hired a UX Researcher to help with that. Would be happy to hear any specifics you have to offer.
I do file bugs against GitLab every now and then, but I haven't done so for this one because I assume that there's an existing item on file for this (and I don't care to look for it) and that this is all part of the the longstanding, "Yeah, we really need to work on our frontend story, especially for mobile."
The end result is that just don't keep GitLab tabs open. Which is a little obnoxious, given the well-known issues with how slow GitLab is to complete requests.
The GitHub ecosystem will be the biggest hurdle for GitLab to overcome. (Disclosure - I work at ZenHub)
citation needed
Copied:
(Just found this thread; sorry for the late reply!)
if we postulate that moving all of bevry's projects to gitlab creates a snowball of other projects and communities doing the same I disagree. When a field is as dominated by one player as OSS development is dominated by GitHub, it is extremely hard to break that hold.
For example: Facebook dominates social media. Within Facebook, there are several organizations, many of which are reasonably sized, and which do good work. Now…suppose one of those organizations left Facebook for a more benevolent social network. Or even two or three of them. Do you really believe this would create a “snowball effect”, resulting in a mass exodus from Facebook to the more-benevolent social network?
Of course not. Everybody knows that Facebook is quite possibly the sleaziest, least trustworthy company on the Web. (If you disagree, I’d feel confident that you’d concede that it is in the top five such companies, at the very least.) And, in fact, people have tried to create trustworthy, privacy-respecting alternatives to Facebook (like Diaspora, Friendica, and Tent).
Diaspora launched in 2010. Although its decentralized nature makes it harder to get concrete numbers for its user base, the best I could find puts the number around 380K. After four years.
Four.
Why? Well, it’s not because people prefer to have their privacy invaded, and it’s not because people like one central company to amass dangerous amounts of personal information to sell to advertisers (and god knows who else!). It’s because people are on Facebook. It has all the social capital, and—from the standpoint of where people choose to put their time in—that is more important than ideology, decentralization, technological advantage, and privacy.
I dislike this intensely, but it’s true.
For a while, people were pretty angry at Twitter (even though it is a more ethical company than Facebook, by orders of magnitude). So, some people tried to get a “snowball effect” rolling for their alternative, Identica.
At 1.5 million users, it’s been a more successful “benevolent alternative” to Twitter than Diaspora was to Facebook. But that’s still less than 1% of Twitters 241 million users (source).
GitLab may have more merit going for it than GitHub, but that’s not enough. Moving everything to GitLab will:
Cost a lot of time and effort to migrate the codebase Cost a lot of time and effort for existing developers to readjust their workflows and learn the differences of GitLab Most important of all, it will reduce the visibility of every last project to a small percentage of the current size. And don’t think that linking to the new location will help. The alternative social networking sites I mentioned above had massive campaigns, many of which were prominently featured in tech magazines and blogs with millions of viewers. Linking from a popular old location to an unpopular new location does not work like forwarding e-mail; traffic won’t simply follow the link and continue the same behavior at GitLib like nothing’s changed. Perhaps a few individuals might…but you’ll still lose far, far more contributors in the end.
And what happens to open source projects that cease to be developed? They die. And the communities that once breathed life into them die, as well.
I cannot protest this idea strongly enough. If you move to GitLab, perhaps you can keep the company’s core developers active enough to keep the projects alive. Perhaps you might even find some short-term success in convincing a few contributors to keep working on your projects.
And if you move to GitLab…I really, really hope that they do. But I think that moving to GitLab will do as much good for your repositories as moving them to a private server for bevry employees only. Slightly better than that, perhaps…but not by much.
I would love to be proven wrong about what I’ve written here. But I don’t think that I am.
Please: reconsider this. Not just for the company, and not just for the good of your software, but for your extended community.
I believe that what is good for your extended community is also good for your software, and your company, too.
Please reconsider.
We appreciate open source projects moving to GitLab.com and we're seeing more and more of that. But it does reduce the visibility of the project so people should take your warning into account. Our focus right now is making GitLab.com more performant for the people that do use it.
"Cost a lot of time and effort to migrate the codebase" => hopefully we solved that, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13189475 that says "GitLab has a migration feature that "just works". Was painless here"
Also, it seems some people are really scared of changes and would do anything to keep the status quo.
the Git repository data (GitLab 7.7+)
the issues (GitLab 7.7+)
the pull requests (GitLab 8.4+)
the wiki pages (GitLab 8.4+)
the milestones (GitLab 8.7+)
the labels (GitLab 8.7+)
the release note descriptions (GitLab 8.12+)
the references to pull requests and issues are preserved (GitLab 8.7+)
https://docs.gitlab.com/ce/workflow/importing/import_project...
It's a git web interface written in Go and is much more friendly on a VPS with small amounts of memory.
In my experience, both are lightning fast compared to GitHub over the internet.
P.S. to put a bit more effort into my post: I really do wonder if the discoverability problem of a decentralized web can be better solved for things like social networks, code sharing, etc.
The only downside is that for a toy project, you have to spend money and resources on it.
Only half-kidding. So many big and small projects are using GitHub as their primary repository and sometimes their only homepage. And there's all those benefits of it being something of a social network as well, and an issue tracker and so on.
I'm sure something else would take its place, but it would take a while before it gets as much momentum.
4 years ago I thought that my GitHub account will get more important, the identity will matter but is that really the case? I don't see the typical network effects and behavior of a social network.
I think all there's is the perception of GitHub being the default choice. That's powerful but far less powerful than truly increased value for me as an user because of the size of the network, you being an user too (eg. Twitter or Uber).
Many people have warned that using these added-value features makes you dependent on GitHub (Linus Torvalds has a kernel mirror on GitHub, but for this reason refuses to use its other features). Migrating all that metadata is hard (is it even possible?).
I'm sure most of these could be re-imported into an alternative service through its API, even if with some loss of fidelity.
(for others: he's also the creator of git-annex, an out-of-band file storage extension to git, and for a long time was the maintainer of critical parts of Debian's ecosystem. He likes to live in a yurt: http://joeyh.name/yurt/)
Disclaimer: I work at GitLab.
That said, we don't use issues, the wiki, etc.
In these roles, GitHub is of tremendous value and not immediately replaceable.
That being said, I think it's inaccurate to characterize the people using GitHub as a CDN uniformly as "cheapskates". Many are just open source developers, often of limited means, trying to expose their work to the largest audience possible.
When you just start your project you may use github as your CDN and hope no one notices, but when you are as big as homebrew using someones elses resources like this is a pretty bad practice.
There are obviously alternatives but the Github UI just makes it so easy to work with others.
https://docs.gitlab.com/ce/workflow/importing/import_project...
What purge? I'm personally aware of some projects which are still on SourceForge which haven't been touched in >10 years. If there was a purge, it must have been limited to projects with no activity whatsoever.
There are also more than one set of laws, and they're not all compatible with each other, which is why efforts are being made to provide a unified set of laws.