Hacker News Reader

Comment by jcl | Hacker News Reader

I don't know... While the title might give that impression, the opening paragraph seems pretty up-front about distinguishing "the open source Git project" from GitHub ("here's our look..."). They don't even mention their not-insignificant contributions to the project, nor do they say things like "we added [x]", even though they legitimately might be able to in some cases.

And, given their line of work, it would be kind of surprising if the GitHub blog didn't cover recent Git developments.

View on HN

Out of curiosity, would you be surprised by:

- Git 2.17 is now available (gitlab.com)

- Git 2.17 is now available (bitbucket.com)

The point is, by publishing this kind of posts, Github is making you associate git with Github. Anecdote example: my university lecturer calls Github APIs "git APIs". While that might not be a bad thing, it blurs the boundary between an open source project and a company.

I can already imagine Github having influence on the direction of git project and becomes the de facto owner, and the impact on its competitors and the repository hosting industry. The equivalence would be Microsoft, instead of owning TypeScript, owns the ECMAScript specification.

I think GitHub has done a great job being a good steward of the git project. They welcomed us (GitLab) to events like git merge. Because they made git popular people are sometimes confused about the difference between git and GitHub. But GitHub has done a great job on not muddling the water themselves.

Okay. I guess if you say so then I was just being paranoid and overreacting.

I'm not saying that, just giving our point of view. BTW I still meet a lot of people that think GitHub is open source instead of them hosting open source.

Which was one of the top 3 reasons I chose to host my projects on GitLab instead of GitHub. Thank you for supporting OSS by being OSS yourself!

You're welcome. Thanks for using GitLab. BTW We refer to ourselves as an open core company since we also sell proprietary features.

>Out of curiosity, would you be surprised by

No, not at all.

>The point is, by publishing this kind of posts, Github is making you associate git with Github

Well, git IS associated with GitHub. It's the de facto #1 hosting service for Git repositories, eclipsing all others, and the #1 host of open source git repos. They're also major contributors to Git.

But regardless of all that, they host git repos. They literally work with people that use Git, day in, day out, and help them host their git managed code.

Of course they'll cover developments in Git. Who else would be more natural to cover them (aside something like "Git planet")? The GTK+ blog? The IEEE?

Try "Git 2.9 is out!": https://blog.bitbucket.org/2016/06/13/git-2-9/

FWIW, I'd expect any git hosting provider -- including gitlab.com and bitbucket.com -- to be similarly eager to evangelize new git releases, since an improvement to git is an improvement to the usability of their offerings. At the very least, encouraging users to upgrade to easier-to-use git versions could reduce support costs and customer churn.

I've had colleagues believe bitbucket is a replacement for git.

I had to explain there's a quite big difference between the two. I assume he had mixed up github with git and correctly deduced bitbucket is an alternative to github.

Also, I got way too excited over the git news to notice that it was github publishing ...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com