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Comment by bad_user | Hacker News Reader

So I’m kind of depressed about this. I loved GitHub enough that I paid for a subscription without needing it and have all of my public work on it and my investment in OSS is quite significant.

People saying that it is easy to migrate don’t know what they are talking about. GitHub isn’t just Git hosting, but a social network of open source developers and projects. You can’t migrate stars, issues with comments and the history of PRs, all linked to the profiles of their authors.

And sure you can self-host GitLab, I pushed for it at my previous employer and works great for on premises deployments, but it’s not the same for OSS if the community you care about isn’t there.

That said I am glad to see Nat Friedman as the new CEO. This gives me some hope for its future.

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  > People saying that it is easy to migrate don’t know what they are
  > talking about. GitHub isn’t just Git hosting, but a social network
  > of open source developers and projects. You can’t migrate stars,
  > issues with comments and the history of PRs, all linked to the
  > profiles of their authors.

Every single for-profit company works their ass off to build a "moat" around their business and to create switching costs, even if they boast that you can "just take your data and leave."

It is not an accident that it is difficult for non-trivial projects to "just leave GitHub." That is by design, it is part of how it grew to become the 800 pound gorilla, and it is part of why Microsoft bought them.

He made it pretty clear that there wasn't a moat that he needed to forge but rather the missing the community, that's not really something that anyone could build a tool to transfer...

communities are moats too

Indeed. And while it might seem that pointing this out is setting impossibly high standards, companies encourage communities for soley this reason. It's debatable weather the advantage of companies pushing community is worth this cost, but its something to consider.

Maybe even one of the strongest moats that exists because it doesn't feel like a cage... until it does.

Absolutely, as people who try to leave Facebook discover. It's easy to download your data from Facebook. Not so easy to keep in touch with people who have moved "keeping in touch" to Facebook groups and messenger.

While you certainly cannot migrate the community, I recently learned how comprehensive the import tools are for gitlab. They will import PRs, wikis and a bunch of the metadata from Github and even try to link it all up to Gitlab accounts if the same public e-mail addresses are used by your contributors on the two services. No affiliation, and I don't even use the site today, but I would certainly consider recommending it to open source projects I am involved with in the future.

One should consider the alternatives. It’s not like Github was going to be run like Wikipedia. It was going to be a Google/Oracle/Amazon/Apple/Microsoft purchase, and to be honest Microsoft is the least scary in that bunch.

GitHub wikis are a git repository of markdown files, easy to move. Pages are markdown too AFAIK but issues are difficult to move. That always bothered me. I've got some customers with accounts on Bitbucket and GitHub. They manage their issues there. For the others I use a self hosted Redmine server.

You make a good point about the just-move-to-Git[whatever] being the entrenched social aspect of many repos! I can't imagine if, say the day comes when developers flee GH en-masse, it will be at all easy to retain the discussion history behind repos.

Why not just scrape the site? I don’t see what the problem is.

There is an API https://developer.github.com/v3/issues/

It could be not trivial to map those data into the new destination, especially if they don't have an API too.

This is how to programmatically create a new issue on GitLab https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/api/issues.html#new-issue and in Bitbucket https://developer.atlassian.com/bitbucket/api/2/reference/re...

Gitlab already support this, no need to go with home grown bit banging.

https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/import/github.html

Why would you migrate? We haven't seen anything yet.

People should at least formulate and exit strategy. It would be wrong to do otherwise[0].

[0] I firmly believe in preparedness.

>People saying that it is easy to migrate don’t know what they are talking about.

You're right in a lot of ways.

A personal detail is that I've developed a bad habit of searching "github <project name>" when I need to find something. As if any project worth its salt is on github.

I'm changing that habit, I even started sharing my projects between github and gitlab over a year ago.

It's the network effect that you can't move.

Very true. It would be awesome to see Gitlab or somebody else make this possible somehow.

You can self-host Github too. It's called Github Enterprise.

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