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Comment by alexmchale | Hacker News Reader

I do worry about GitHub on some levels. I'm an avid user and I love it --- but there's the part of me that's really worried about it being the only real option for hosting. Would the community leave GitHub if their policies changed and it was less of an awesome place to work with your code, or would we feel trapped because it's still what everyone uses?

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We base our entire business around making GitHub an awesome place to work with code. Our users, our revenue, our reputation is all centered around this. There's really no future in which we would move away from that.

In terms of exporting your data: we have a fully featured api (http://develop.github.com) in addition to features like our Wikis which preserve all history and content in a git repository you can clone down. We'll always try and make this better, but you should be able to export any data you wish right now.

Absolutely! I really didn't mean the post to be anything remotely disparaging of GitHub. More of a skepticism of any central place with as much steam as GH has. The original article on this post just emphasizes this -- the guy is hesitant to contribute to projects that aren't on GitHub. When a majority of people feel that way, we're somewhat at the mercy of our benevolent dictators.

Note: I'm a paying and satisfied customer of GitHub!

I hate sourceforge with a passion because the experience is so bad. In many ways, GitHub's success is sourceforge's failure. If GitHub starts to suck (doesnt look like it will any time soon) then we'll all shift to the NBT in networked source control.

Sometimes I worry that a significant portion of "git enthusiasts" have no idea what distributed VC means.

Can you explain and elaborate on what they don't get what distributed VC means?

That comment is in response to the parent comment's worry of "being trapped". By definition, Distributed Version Control solves the "being trapped problem" by being distributed.

Well sure, git's standardized, you can always take your repo and go home, I think the parent was more concerned about history relating to bugs, comments, documentation, discussion, etc.

How easy is it to get information out of GitHub? Not just the repositories -- cloning a git repo is easy -- but the issues, wiki pages, and so on. If that's made as easy as possible, then escaping from GitHub-gone-wild shouldn't be too hard.

That in itself should provide an incentive for GitHub to avoid alienating its users. It's like bringing an umbrella so it won't rain, in a world where such things actually worked.

The wiki pages are just another Git repo; you can just clone it and get a full copy. Pages simply turn into files containing Markdown markup (teehee).

Not sure about the issues or other things, though.

Issues are accessible via the API: http://develop.github.com/p/issues.html

So that's how the Cappuccino guys made their slick issue tracker GUI:

http://githubissues.heroku.com/

A git-based wiki? My respect for the GitHub guys continues to grow.

The code behind the Git-based wiki is also open source so you can view and edit your wiki locally via a nice web interface, and build your own tools using the API: http://github.com/github/gollum

Well, I'm not much concerned about the technical difficulties, as they're few. I'm also not envisioning any time in the future when I quit using GitHub. It's a fantastic piece of software written by people I respect. However, I've learned to be skeptical and cautious when there's one thing that everyone is using (Google, Facebook). I LOVE YOU GITHUB DON'T PUNISH ME!!! :-)

Did I say overlords? I meant protectors.

You're definitely not alone in feeling that way. I'm sure someone will try to create some sort of 'Diaspora for GitHub' project at some point.

Diaspora is on GitHub. :)

"for", not "on". maybe "of" would have been more clear.

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