Hacker News Reader

Startups requiring compliance documentation from GitHub were forced to upgrade to GH Enterprise. Many competitors provide this for free or a fraction of the price. An industry based on an open source language will naturally have a race to the bottom in terms of price.

GitHub's CLI is a move to get people off the open source solution by obfuscation.

View on HN

> GitHub's CLI is a move to get people off the open source solution by obfuscation.

The "hub" project they have (which I haven't heard of anyone using) is like that yes.

The CLI is not https://github.com/cli/cli From their own docs: "While both tools bring GitHub to the terminal, hub behaves as a proxy to git and gh is a standalone tool."

The CLI is itself open source. Surely it can't be a huge barrier for competing software (GitLab, Gitea, etc) to implement its API.

How can you say that? It's definitely a significant barrier.

"Open source" is often used to appear more "friendly" to outsiders. Something can be open source and still be used to lock people into a particular environment. Case in point: Chromium, Android, etc.

It's still an open point of contention whether an API can be copyrighted. There's obvious benefits to GitHub to encourage the use of a 'gh' command over the 'git' command.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com