Deprecating the GitHub Developer Program | Hacker News Reader

Deprecating the GitHub Developer Program

developer.github.com

95 pointsingve52 comments

Hi all, this is Shanku Niyogi. I run the Product team at GitHub. I sincerely apologize for this post. We screwed up. This post was made in error, and we are retracting it. We are always looking to improve our programs for developers, and are working on improvements. But this is not the way to make changes. And it is NOT a goal to end our program. Sorry for the confusion.

How could this happen?

We are better than this.

It's 2019, for pete's sake and other empty management-type neologisms!

If possible, it might be helpful to share a little detail on how it happened. You can imagine that it did happens signals at the very least that someone with power/influence got this post out there in the first place.

That is a very reasonable ask. I'll be doing a post-mortem, and talking to all the individuals involved - and will do a followup post on it on the same blog. Please stay tuned. And, again, our sincere apologies.

They've agreed to deprecate the program but once the post was out and got terrible feedback, they realized that deprecating a developer program is not the best idea for something like GitHub, let alone announcing it as such. So instead of admitting they've made a mistake in deprecating the program, they're blaming the messenger and pretending it never happened. They went as far as getting the archive.org pages blacklisted/hidden apparently, which shows somewhat clearly the mindset involved.

What part of it was in error? Are there no plans to deprecate the program? Or was this just released early?

If there would be no plans to deprecate the program, why the blog post would have been written?

I will do a follow-up post on this, once I've learned more. Please stay tuned.

There must be quite a story behind this - will you be putting up a post-mortem ? (Post mortems of business "outages" are usually more instructional)

Yes. We will. Please stay tuned.

Very relieved to hear this, thank you for clarifying. A lot of us would've been very disappointed to see this program go.

Speculating a bit, I am guessing it was something like this that happened?

1) You are planning to take down the GitHub Developer Program (not the regular API as many in this thread are mistakenly thinking, but just the part where you provide enterprise licenses to developers to test their integrations on GitHub Enterprise)

2) You are potentially bringing back a way for developers to get enterprise licenses in a better way in the future(?)

3) This post was written in anticipation of that inevitability, but poorly communicated the two key points above and perhaps was published early by accident

Otherwise if the program really isn't intended to go away at all, I would be surprised this post was written in the first place

As an FYI, I have heard from a moderator that enough flags will move a post back a couple hundred places so that it is effectively buried. So aside from upvoting this comment for visibility, flagging the submission may help to prevent further disinformation.

Phew!

Disappointed the link now 404s. You could have at least put up a placeholder page saying it's being rewritten. As it stands this only confuses your stance further.

Yeah. Or they would have written Developers, Developers, developers. I mean it's just a GIF link.

I'm confused? What is just a GIF link? Are you saying the original link is just a GIF? I can't confirm that (Wayback Machine doesn't have it indexed) but that sounds unlikely from the tone of the comments.

Parent is suggesting to post a gif of Steve Ballmer of Microsoft screaming "Developers, developers, developers" because MS owns GitHub now, and that was a widely derided moment in Microsoft's history.

Thanks! To young for the reference

Correct.

GitHub appears to be slowly but surely ensuring anyone who extends their ecosystem is either acquired by GitHub or extinguished -- something I am pretty sure everyone who works in the space has known for a long time.

It is no coincidence that many of the companies that have used this developer program: Pull Panda, Dependabot and others like Semmle, Spectrum, etc. have been acquired by them. It starts looking a lot like going in the trajectory of an Apple App Store-esque developer platform in terms of lockdown to me.

I know GitLab isn't perfect, but I truly appreciate their openness[1] and willingness to partner with others in this space that are trying to improve developer tooling. If we want better developer tools, we need open platforms for those tools to exist.

[1] https://about.gitlab.com/partners/integrate/

Disclaimer: I work in the space (@ Sourcegraph) but the words/thoughts here are my own, I'm not a corporate shill (I hope) :)

Love Sourcegraph, by the way. Can’t say how many times I’ve used it instead of GitHub’s anemic search.

> It starts looking a lot like going in the trajectory of an Apple App Store-esque developer platform in terms of lockdown to me.

Worse than that, it looks like Twitter's pattern of acquiring successful businesses using their API, before significantly locking down access.

How is https://about.gitlab.com/partners/integrate/ materially different from https://developer.github.com/marketplace/ ?

Not trolling, just curious why you think one is open and one is not when they both provide ways to get a stamp of approval when you write apps to a public API.

is the second link not the thing they just announced the shutdown of? Unless i'm missing something, the big material differnce between gitlab's developer program and github's developer program is that gitlab's version isn't deprecated.

If you want to test your integration with GitLab Enterprise, they will give you a development license for free because they understand you are contributing positively to their ecosystem: https://about.gitlab.com/partners/integrate/#requesting-ee-d...

It used to be the same case with GitHub Enterprise, they would give you a development license to test your integration. After this, you will need to purchase a GHE license which is $2,500/yr (you must first go through their sales team).

Basically, this shuts out people from developing integrations that can be sold to other enterprises from what I understand.

This is standard incumbent behaviour, it’s been happening forever. Any company that gets to a significant size or scale will behave in the same way, and that includes Sourcegraph, gitlab and anyone else.

That is just not true.

Many market dominating companies/products aim for the exact opposite: try to be "platform" instead of "product". For example Google Apps and Salesforce.

I dont know enough about Saleforce

But Google Apps is not a good exampe of "openess"

Google is historic about closing off Dev and API Access (See Nest product line), Removing Open protocol from services (i.e removing XMPP from Chat and Hangouts), and killing products that have more open API's replacing them with less open ones

But i wasn't talking about Google. I was talking about Google Apps. Your examples are about other divisions of Alphabet/Google...

...When you deal with the tech giants they are so large that different divisions commonly have totally different goals and ethos; some divisions are transparent and great to work with, others are pure nightmare.

None of the acquired companies were forced at gunpoint to sell to Github. Very few technology companies are created with the intention of being an ongoing profitable concern. If they are investor backed, almost by definition they are looking to be acquired. A statistical minuscule number of technology companies ever become profitable.

I would think almost every acquisition ever has been voluntary, among companies that aren't publicly traded. But we were talking about Github's/Microsoft's acquisition strategy. The companies being acquired don't drive that, even if they enable it.

Seems rather abrupt, and poorly written as far as output from Github goes. Anyone have inside gossip on whats going on? Smacks of some sort of internal dispute or a security/liability issue?

This is exactly why I prefer GitLab's "radical transparency" approach, for all its warts.

The post was deleted, here is a mirror:

https://web.archive.org/web/20191205225751/https://developer...

The post was declared false and retracted in an HN comment above.

"Hrm.

The Wayback Machine has not archived that URL."

The calendar view on archive.org shows the page was archived 6 times while active, but all of those copies seem to have been manually deleted from archive.org (or perhaps hidden/blacked out?), or something else weird is going on.

http://archive.is/1higF

Given the ongoing GitHub / ICE controversy which is ever prevalent on Twitter.. I have to wonder. Is there a viable alternative for open source projects with enough of a network?

I see people who are very outspoken on the subject that are maintainers of projects on GitHub.

Seems rather hypocritical, but maybe there isn't a better option.

Sourcehut: https://sr.ht

Savannah: https://savannah.nongnu.org/

GitLab: https://www.gitlab.com

BitBucket: https://www.bitbucket.org

SourceForge: https://www.sourceforge.net

If you don't want to be on GitHub, you don't have to be. If you want to avoid a transitive dependency on GitHub, that might be difficult.

If you're looking for self-hosting options:

Gogs: https://gogs.io/

Gitea: https://gitea.io/

Also, Sourcehut, Savannah, and GitLab from the service offerings can be self-hosted.

These are literally off the top of my head, and based primarily on osmosis from browsing HN. I am sure there are many more.

Bitbucket can be self-hosted too. It's not open source, but the licence fees for self-hosted installs are very reasonable.

Thanks for letting me know. As I said, most of my knowledge of these is just osmosis from comments here.

I've used TFS, Visual Studio Online / Azure DevOps, GitHub, GitLab, and SourceHut. My knowledge of the others is purely from people like you. I appreciate it.

Sourcehut is one I especially enjoy using, and I really admire the grit + dedication of its developer[s]-- as I mentioned in a related thread a few weeks ago, I intend to migrate my personal projects to Sourcehut.

They even say that it has served many people very well, why shut it down then?

The only reason I can think of is that microsoft wants to provide these features themselves, maybe as a payed option?

It could either be competing products or a wish to re-work the policy terms to allow them to carve out some enterprise-contract type flexibility. My experience with Microsoft is that they are consummate enterprise account managers. They hold the hands of enterprise buyers and their sales teams seems to love to have special enterprise features/integrations.

My prediction is we will see a newly defined developer program with consumer tiers which will be the tip of an iceberg of enterprise-ready configuration below the surface.

For those worrying, this doesn't mean they're shutting down their API or locking it down. This was their partnership program for companies building on their API: https://web.archive.org/web/20190928071306/https://developer...

So developers will no longer be able to create integrations?

> GitHub Developer Program will no longer be accepting new applicants in preparation for new programs at GitHub.

Sounds like there will be different tiers. Maybe to generate revenue through those tiers? Or am I crazy and reading too much into it.

I use the Developer Program to create Personal Access Token pretty frequently, what will happen to that?

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