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Comment by dustinmoris | Hacker News Reader

> Ultimately, my job is to make GitHub better for you.

Who asked you to make GitHub better though? It's pretty darn good already. I fear that the new CEO will try to make things better when they are already good. I'm really scared that GitHub will end up like Azure DevOps, perhaps get merged or shut down entirely when they feel they have feature parity. Currently there is no great GitHub alternative IMHO and for selfish reasons I wish Microsoft could just leave it. The most I am scared is to wake up one day and see the most ugly "Metro" UX applied to GitHub.

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> Currently there is no great GitHub alternative

GitLab is decent, with an open source core that can be installed on premise — I introduced it for a former employer and they are still very happy with it.

https://gitlab.com/

All isn't perfect and I'm still on GitHub due to the network effects, but you do have alternatives.

Hello, Community Advocate from GitLab here! I'm happy to hear that your former employer is happy with our product!

If you have more feedback on the things that could be better, we would love to hear more!

I'm using it for a couple personal projects and am very happy with it so far, for what that's worth.

It's not about an alternative -- heck, `apt install git` is the way everyone is already self-hosting git (you can push and pull from anything like Dropbox/Drive/OneDrive to an NFS mount). It's about the community that is GitHub.

Since the news broke I've been hosting a Gitea instance and while that works fine, I cannot go a day without using Github for things like pulling other people's code, creating issues, etc.

There are some prominent projects on GitLab already. Also once the apple gets rotten, people will move. Remember SourceForge?

Seriously it only takes a bunch of high profile projects and people to drive a migration.

In other words Microsoft has to play nice.

Microsoft is pushing some invasive stuff in Windows 10 but they totally get away with it. I don't believe that the only way to stay in business is to play nice, at least not in the short term that managers can oversee and will base their decisions on.

SourceForge is from before my time. When Github was still small, I was still being brainwashed by school's free Windows and discount Office licenses and school educating us in using Microsoft Office. From my current point of view, though, SourceForge was never as big as Github is now. Almost every development company pulls code from Github, either in an automated fashion to pull in updates, or casually as they need random things that are published there. I don't think that was ever the case with SF.

GitHub will operate independently as a community, platform, and business. This means that GitHub will retain its developer-first values, distinctive spirit, and open extensibility. We will always support developers in their choice of any language, license, tool, platform, or cloud.

GitHub will retain its product philosophy. We love GitHub because of the deep care and thoughtfulness that goes into every facet of the developer’s experience. I understand and respect this, and know that we will continue to build tasteful, snappy, polished tools that developers love.

Never in the history of acquisitions of that profile has the buyer ever given a different message than "we won't touch anything".

Of course they will make big changes two years later down the line. You don't buy something if you have no plans for it.

> Never in the history of acquisitions of that profile has the buyer ever given a different message than "we won't touch anything".

Well, _technically_ I worked for one where it functioned in a hands-off way. The big difference was, the parent company was a holding company specialising in a certain industry, and us functioning differently from their other properties was the whole point.

In this case, I expect things to go the What's App way: it's going to be long and slow, but MS will eat it eventually.

> Who asked you to make GitHub better though?

Microsoft, his employer and the owner of GitHub.

And every person that has ever used GitHub ever, that wants things to improve instead of remaining static. Just in the past few months Github has released a lot of cool stuff, before this was even completed. Github has changed a lot over the years, and that's a good thing. No one wants something that never improves.

Your statements sounds a little confused. Everything stagnates, suffer from miss-direction, or just become irrelevant. Someone in an earlier post mentioned sourceforge for example. we just have to hope that this acquisition doesn't make it happen anytime soon.

I'd be more worried for the folks at Microsoft that work in competing spaces. :)

I have slowly moved most of my projects to GitLab. The UX is a little different, but you also get unlimited private repositories for individuals and organizations.

Thanks for sharing this! I'd love to hear if you have more feedback on how is GitLab's UX different. Particularly, what do you think GitLab could do better here?

Not OP, but is there a way to preview Markdown when writing up your project's Wiki as you are typing?

Alongside this, is there also a way to change the order of Wiki Pages?

The wiki edit screen has a Markdown preview tab https://www.dropbox.com/s/ouq7mwgazyyv6nc/Screenshot%202018-... but it disables typing.

I think you can override the default index of pages with a custom one.

> unlimited private repositories for individuals and organizations.

This was my draw to it as well.

Gitlab is a smaller company with a smaller userbase. You could argue they are a much more obvious takeover target for the Oracle / IBM / Google's wanting to compete more with Microsoft to own the developer experience.

Why GitLab over Bitbucket?

Haven't used gitlab but have used bitbucket server. It is trash compared to GitHub. Seriously feels like clunky stone age molasses.

What's wrong with Azure Devops? I'm genuinely curious, because it looks like it might do a great job at replacing an Atlassian catastrophe.

Probably 2/3 of my day job is implementing Azure Devops for our internal and client applications - personally I really like it although it certainly has a learning curve and some things are non-intuitive. But everyone I've talked to who has used it in a professional context more than once (e.g. not tried it once and given up) is more-or-less very happy with the quality and reliability.

If you're good with Powershell it's also extremely easy to write your own build and/or release steps which is a huge plus.

For us, a few weeks ago Azure DevOps randomly stopped processing GitHub webhooks, so merge commits didn't trigger builds anymore (and we're not the only ones, see https://developercommunity.visualstudio.com/content/problem/...). A fix for this issue still isn't deployed.

Just a few days ago the service connection to Azure suddenly stopped working with "401 CouldNotFetchAccessTokenForAzureStatusCode" which appeared when deploying to Azure AppService. We had to recreate the service connection to get it working again.

Recently we also wanted to move our Android builds to Azure DevOps but in the end the documentation was so confusing that we just used Bitrise instead.

It does not work unless Github is open to the internet. For example, Github Enterprise behind a VPN will not be able to use Azure Devops. Crazy but true.

Isn't Azure Devops just Visual Studio Team Services rebranded which is just hosted TFS?

How hard is to bring TFS in house?

At work we are moving from VSTS to Jira :( sucks. It’s soooooo sloweeee compared to VSTS... luckily we can move our repos to GitHub.

A fair point, but I, for one, will give him a chance.

> Who asked you to make GitHub better though? It's pretty darn good already.

It is? Because it takes my home feed ~5 seconds to load. Totally unacceptable.

Blame elasticsearch for that :)

But shouldn't a company the size of GitHub fix elastisearch in that case?

I blame poor product management and engineering. It's not even cached between page loads if nothing has changed (which is 99% of the time I load the page).

Well, if github is using elasticsearch, then it's fair to blame them too.

It is. I run Github Enterprise (their on-premise version that comes in a Debian VM) and ES re-indexing has caused a few problems.

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