It's interesting to hear this. If you were on HN the past week, it might have seemed from all the front page articles that GitHub was about to implode due to an an exodus to GitLab.
At first it was hosted on http://peterburk.free.fr, my parents' ISP. That was fine until I no longer lived with them, and I can't trust that it'll always be available. Also, I wanted a .com subdomain instead of a .fr domain.
So in 2011, I moved to http://peterburk.appspot.com on Google App Engine. No problem, until I moved to China in 2013. All Google services are blocked there, including my page. So I migrated to http://peter-burk.rhcloud.com (Red Hat OpenShift). I didn't like the mandatory dash in the subdomain, so I also set up http://peterburk.tumblr.com to redirect. RHCloud supported PHP, so I could finally run WordPress.
Then RHCloud changed to being paid-only, so in 2015 I moved to https://peterburk.github.com and couldn't use PHP again. Now I code everything in client-side JavaScript and static HTML. More recently, Github removed the .com subdomain service, so my Chinese-learning side project is https://pingtype.github.io and that confuses some users. If something happens to Github, I might try to hop to heroku, but http://peterburk.herokuapp.com is pretty long to type.
What do other people do for ad-free hosting? I think most sites pay for AWS, but I can't have a credit card because I'm a foreigner. The design of my site is very basic, because I've had to re-write it 4 times already, typically every 2 years. I choose technologies based on the platform features, so I did know all about GAE, but now I'm more familiar with Git. My loyalty isn't to the code management tool (this is for side projects, not a business that would need collaboration with colleagues), I just move to wherever is free/not blocked by China/has an easy-to-remember domain name.
By your own domain a $5/month VPS and host your apps just the way you like it.
Just 10 years ago, geeks like us used to take pride in buying domain and creating a personal presence with one's domain name. Don't people do that anymore?
I find this trend of looking for free hosting services a bit disturbing. Because you know the cliche that when you are not paying for a service, you are the product.
Even if you do not want to buy a $5/month VPS, please buy the domain. Costs less than $1/month (more like $10/year) and point the domain to your favorite free hosting service with CNAME entries. GitHub and Heroku support such custom domains with CNAME entries.
https://www.gnome.org/news/2018/05/gnome-moves-to-gitlab-2/
ok. so they weren't on github. GOSH!
Nat was a cofounder in the same way that Jeb Bush was a US president. Connected to one perhaps but not one himself.
That being said, it's way too early to tell how this will evolve trust-wise. Microsoft has a tremendous deficit of trust in the open source community. Younger folks probably don't realize how deep it runs; most of my friends and colleagues who were involved in FOSS in the late 1990s and early 00s wouldn't touch anything with Microsoft on it with a ten-foot pole -- not just because of prejudice, but because fool me once etc etc.. And I wasn't thrilled about hosting code on someone else's computer before, either, but now I'm even less thrilled about hosting it on Microsoft's computer.
Now I don't think about them much at all. I'm not thrilled that they now own a vital part of the OSS world, but I'm optimistic their overall irrelevance to my life will persist.
Also: Gitlab also has to exit one day. The only question is who buys them.
Source: Gitlab guy in one of the many, many, many Gitlab or Github threads recently.
Meanwhile, the biggest player (by far) in the market just abandoned dreams of an IPO. Gitlab is a distant third place in that market, and has a revenue model that is best described as “like Github, but cheaper.”
IPOs are only viable if you have a business capable of supporting them.
Aha, I thought I may find you on this thread, once again pushing the same line.
I personally decided to move my stuff out of GitHub, but it will take me a week or so to know where exactly as I'm still analyzing various options. And after migrating, I don't think I will close my account (even when I really distrust Microsoft) simply because too many libre software projects are currently using GitHub.
It's going to take a while for me to move out of Github.
I have a lot there over years and scripts that use Github.
Also Gitlab's import is failing on some repos.
It's also suddenly pushed me in a place where I have to suddenly find an alternative.
It's going to take some time.
But the real value of GH was "social coding" - open public access to open public projects.
That's going to fragment, even if GL takes over. And that will be a loss.
The real problem is the lack of open public server infrastructure. In the same way that everyone has access to a browser, everyone should have access to a private server, which is secure-by-default, controllably networked, super easy to set up with a selection of server apps that include social, commerce, payments, and public/private sharing of various kinds, and cheap to run.
The centralised consumer internet - where servers are far beyond the skill level of most users and can be a nightmare to set up and administer, even for professionals - is one of the reasons we have giant predators like MS and Facebook.
We can only guesstimate with the data we have.
That is, as long as Facebook is able to identify and track an individual, they can make money even if the user never spends much time on Facebook.
So, stock price is not an indicator of Facebook usage.
So I don't care really care how many leave, in fact that's a clever distraction. I care about who is leaving.
The number of repos that were imported to Gitlab via their GitHub importer had crosses 100K on Tuesday if my memory serves me right. GitHub has 75M repos, I believe. For now, the migration has been potentially significant, but too early to tell.
Overall, I’m sure there’s something to glean from places like HN and some parts of Reddit, and other similar places. What exactly you can take away, I’m not sure about yet.
There was a front-page article of some survey that was saying something like 40% of people were going to or already did delete Facebook. Not a correct number of course.
Based on... what exactly? That's a big claim to make without any data.
I imagine how hard it must be for organizations to do the same.
I don't even know what that means; it's so vague and lacking in detail as to be useless. Of course "people care about things in situations". but we're talking about _what_ they care about, and that depends on the situation. For example: "are Nazi's bad?". I don't need to see hard numbers to believe that the answer from most people will be "yes". "Is MS buying GitHub bad"? That's a whole other story. The vocal minority often doesn't represent the majority in things like this.
I think it's pretty clear that most people in fact _don't_ care about the things the-dude cares about. Privacy, lock in, using services provided by "evil" companies... these are things a tiny fraction of people care about. You know how I know that? All of these companies you don't like are _insanely_ successful.
>It's interesting to hear this. If you were on HN the past week, it might have seemed from all the front page articles that GitHub was about to implode due to an an exodus to Gitlab.
and the-dude said:
>I think most people mirrored instead of closing. Spin.
You changed that to
>I think most people (who migrated away from GitHub) mirrored instead of closing. Spin.
Maybe that's what the-dude meant, I don't know. The implication is also that a significant number of users migrated and mirrored, and we have no idea if that's the case. That is my point. You can assume that many who migrated would have mirrored, that's reasonable, but it's not reasonable to assume that a significant number of people are migrating away from GH due to the acquisition, which is absolutely what the-dude was implying.
I can see the source of confusion though; I did quote the "most people" bit and didn't touch specifically on the above until just now.
Source: I work for GitLab.
I guess they count as mirrored.
Also remember that many of these writers are the same people who claim they are boycotting the latest company that slighted them as a way to make a statement.
Like the people who are so vocally not buying a phone without their beloved jack plug. Surprisingly the manufacturers aren’t really feeling their sting.
Most (semi-)serious projects make use of this, which makes migration harder.
(I'm expecting that this has been done and I'll be deluged with links...)
And yeah, that's a nice sentiment. But it doesn't require anything of you. What happens when that person _needs_ something. A house, a loan, a ride, etc. "Being there" is well and good. But it's the secular version of "thoughts and prayers".
If nodejs, google, and other big names/organizations decides to leave, then I think it is time for Microsoft to worry.
The first hint of Microsoft and GitHub was around 6 pm EDT/11 pm UTC on Sunday.
And like others are saying. Even if that is the case, it isn’t a huge number with context of Github’s size.