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Comment by rawrmaan | Hacker News Reader

I’m seeing a lot of hate in this thread. I think we tend to lose sight of the fact that things don’t just _happen_, people make them happen. GitHub has absolutely earned its dominance in my eyes, and although it may have shortcomings, I think it’s one of the most important inventions in the last ten yesrs, period.

When I look at the software I use to run my business, literally 100% of it is open source and has a community improving it and patching it on GitHub. There was simply not this level of open source enthusiasm and participation back in the Sourceforge “dark ages” (although even Sourceforge was hugely influential and a big step in software democratization if you compare it to what came before).

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There's a couple of comments complaining about features that are a little out of place. But I wouldn't call it "a lot" of hate.

I think it's mostly a response to ground the hyperbole a little. There's usually no need to do the marketing for an organisation with (arguably) a monopoly of mindshare already.

I think that's why people talk up the underdogs more when they're mentioned, because as users/consumers it's in our interests to have some competition.

I looked at this post when there were 6 comments. 5 of them were negative and the 6th was non-positive.

I didn't say they were positive, I said there were a couple of ones complaining about features, which was just moaning.

We're probably just disagreeing on what constitutes hate, I thought that they were mostly just mild criticism.

True, and "hater" doesn't necessarily mean "hatred". Sometimes it just means not being able to see the sunny side if your life depended on it. Doesn't mean you're all that negative, it just means you can't appreciate.

The author should rather be extending a loud "Thank you" to Linus Torvalds. While he didn't invent DVCS, he certainly mainstream'd it with git. Github would not have existed without Git.

Linus invented both Linux and Git. It's incredible what that man has accomplished in his life and how he's affected the software field and the world in general.

In my opinion, GitHub succeeded in spite of git, rather than because of git. I see beginner spend a lot of time on issues merging and rebasing. They simply would not continue (outside the hard core technical crowd) if it weren't for GitHub making the nice pull request screen and rendering markdown. They did a way better job than bitbucket did back in the day and here they are in top. Just my experience.

Yeah I agree with that. I guess we could extend the "Thank you"s down beyond Git to K&R and those before them. Because without C Git would not exist.

But Git's invention was recent enough, in the context of Github, that the real merits should be directed to Linus.

But yes, Github slapped a nice Rails webapp + UI on top of Git and basically changed how software collaboration worked. Pretty much overnight. Sourceforge, Bitbucket, and Launchpad were all a nightmare. Github changed all of that.

I've come to believe that the parable of the Bucket of Crabs perfectly describes the majority of self-espoused open-source advocates that you will meet online. To them, if you are at all successful, then you must have gained it through the exploitation of users. Apparently users are not willing participants in software or something, I don't know. But I've never seen a group of people tear each other down quite like this vocal group of open source "fundamentalists".

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