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Comment by firloop | Hacker News Reader

This is pure speculation, but it seems that GitHub's ownership by Microsoft causes them to be significantly more strict with the types of content that they are comfortable hosting. Expect this to continue as they expand up and down the stack; once their npm acquisition closes you'll see this there too.

I think this should be a wake-up call to anyone staking their open source project on GitHub — if I let someone from a US sanctioned country contribute to my repo will I be banned? Hopefully mindshare moves to alternatives in due time.

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This seems peculiar since Rob Eisenberg (author of that tweet and lead of Aurelia) works for Microsoft.

...and from what I understand, they actually use it on some of their sites.

Sounds like a mistake.

Makes sense if you think of them as separate companies (which is how they are run)

https://nouhailler.tumblr.com/image/21516226342

Maybe >5 years ago, culture has changed under Satya :)

well, that helps explain the CEO's responsiveness in sorting it out

GitLab is fantastic, but GitHub has the most eyeballs and best discoverability features. As long as that remains true, GitHub will remain a better place to launch an open source product than alternatives.

You can use any old git repo as your main source, and "dump" every commit into github for visibility. Any issues and pull request into the github site are replied by an automatic answer to use some other site.

... which diminishes the likelihood volunteers will join your project, because now they have to go learn another site.

Is it really a thing, to have to learn another site?

If you know the basic functionality of Github, do you really have to learn to use similar functionality of Gitlab, Gitea, etc? Is it not enough to be familiar with the concepts?

well, the UI is different, so you have to learn to use that... the concepts can be quite similar, but execution, isn't

Sure, but the difference isn't that big.

Just like when people were switching from the blue e to firefox/chrome: these were different browsers, with different UI, but the concept of browsing the internet was the same. So in the end, the different UI didn't matter.

Having to set up a new account, complete with a new username and password, is by itself sufficient to drive away a staggering amount of adoption / conversions according to several UX studies.

Gitea supports "log in with GitHub" if the site-owner has enabled it; and the UI is immediately familiar.

Now you've got me wondering whether you can still "Log in with GitHub" if your GitHub account is Iranian, or whether that gets disabled too.

Not a bad idea. But I haven’t seen it work in practice with strong usability. The fact of the matter is, if you ask developers where they discovered software, “GitHub” would rank higher than GitLab.

This is due not only to higher traffic numbers, but also more features revolving around discoverability. GitLab could build those features too, but it’s difficult to overcome the network effect driving GitHub’s momentum. It’s especially hard because even the people who did migrate to GitLab mostly did so for the free private projects and CI. It’s unlikely many will move public repositories to GitLab now that GitHub nears feature parity in CI.

> But I haven’t seen it work in practice with strong usability.

The Linux kernel does this (with a mailing list, no less!). I agree with the main thrust of your post and I suppose strong usability is arguable but I thought it would be good to throw out a (very) notable example regardless.

You’re right, strong usability is arguable. Very arguable.

But you’ve got a good point that they make it work. It’s certainly possible. (And obviously Linux is an exceptional example, let’s not forget it shares a creator with git.)

For my GitLab repos (where I maintain source/workflow) I use the mirror functionality to automatically push any and all all commits to GitHub. I configure the GitHub mirror with a link to the official repo and disable issues.

Unfortunately, you can’t outright disable GitHub’s pull requests. I’ve seen plenty of orphaned PRs on repos that do tracking/review elsewhere and people just don’t read (or actively ignore) the provided contributor guidelines.

looks like you can use Actions for that:

https://github.com/marketplace/actions/close-pull-request

Interesting. I haven't looked at Actions at all yet but this is nifty. Previously I had seen people write their own GitHub bots to handle this sort of thing.

Worth noting, it’s also possible (and quite easy) to do this vice versa. When you want a private fork of a public repo on github, it can be useful to mirror it to a private repository on GitLab. GL will keep all commits up to date for you.

(Ironically, there is nothing comparable on GitHub’s platform. You cannot make a fork that keeps itself up to date, for example.)

Here is how to do it: https://gist.github.com/milesrichardson/b00e2623e5f4427ec192...

Very interesting use case for the mirroring feature. It really is super helpful and powerful. Though currently pull mirrors show as activity contributions, so if you mirror a large, active project your commit activity graph will go through the roof (if you care about that sort of thing).

> GitHub has the most eyeballs

You're being downvoted for a true statement.

There is a lot of GitLab zealousness at HN. Please don't downvote simply because you disagree over product favoritism and outlook. Offer a refutation.

Comments like this break the site guidelines. Would you mind reviewing them? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

One reason we ask users not to go on about downvotes is that users frequently come along and add corrective upvotes, but comments like this don't garbage-collect themselves. They start as off-topic and end by being off-topic and false.

Thanks, understood.

Note that Gitlab hosts on Google Cloud, which blocks all traffic from sanctioned countries on a network level. No IP packages from US sanctioned countries reach any service hosted on Google Cloud, including OpenSource gitlab repos.

Yep. Sum it all up, and the easiest way to not be disadvantaged on the Internet is to not be in a sanctioned country.

Which is, well, rather the point of the sanctions.

No, the point of sanctions is to hurt the leaders of a country, not their citizens. That's why sanctions are applied to specific goods and not across the board.

Nobody should depend on GitHub, especially after it was taken over by Microsoft. If you have any repository on GH, create similar accounts on competing sites such as bitbucket. Also consider services hosted in other countries, since it seems that local political prejudices and propaganda are starting to creep out on the science and technology arena.

Better yet, self host. Post RSS feeds.

Absolutely agree with this, and if Gitlab's hardware requirements seem a little expensive, I can highly recommend Gitea[0]. It runs very happily on a $5 Digital Ocean droplet. It doesn't have all the bells and whistles, but for my basic needs, and presumably as a panic backup, it's a great bit of software.

[0]https://gitea.io/en-us/

Pull requests and collaboration would be a bit more complicated, I guess. But as long as "Log in with ..." works to quickly create an account, it may be ok.

"local political prejudices and propaganda" is a fascinating way to interpret "The US list of sanctioned countries."

It's local to the US and it's prejudice and propaganda, so...?

I think I'd need a citation on why "prejudice and propaganda" applies here. The US doesn't turn to sanctions flippantly (it's not in the US's economic interests, in general, to take a trading partner off the table).

I probably wouldn't use language quite that strong, but the view from outside the US is definitely quite different.

The US withdrawl from the Iran nuclear agreement was more a result of changes in the US than of changes in Iran. Barack Obama brokered the deal and he stated his clear opposition to Donald Trump's decision to end it. (https://facebook.com/barackobama/posts/10155854913976749)

The European Union was also a party to the Iran nuclear deal, and they thought so poorly of the resumption of US sanctions on Iran that they passed a law making it illegal for European companies to comply. (https://dw.com/en/eu-to-reactivate-blocking-statute-against-...)

What other company was better suited to take over? Google? FB? Amazon? None of them... MS is the only company I would trust at this point.

Note: This is the company that is acquiring NPM. Which now also is going to have to deal with the messy reality of us sanctions, if they'd been dodging them before. Prior to this it wouldn't have been entirely beyond the pale for NPM to move ownership to another country if it proved to onerous. The threshold for "too onerous" is likely to be significantly higher at Microsoft / Github.

Yes, these trade sanctions will definitely cause these issues--if they operate a business or do any dealings with businesses in countries which are embargo'd they will lose their ability to sell their product internationally, since Microsoft also fulfills defense contracts it probably makes these obligations even stronger, though I am not a lawyer.

I think at this point Fossil is looking really really good.

> Microsoft causes them to be significantly more strict with the types of content that they are comfortable hosting

The law as written doesn't allow subjective decision based on what they're comfortable with.

Unsubstantiated speculation that is simply confirmation bias of what you want to be true without evidence.

Microsoft lets Github run independently https://www.businessinsider.com/github-coo-microsoft-azure-e...

There's independently and independently. MS is on the hook for violations of US sanctions by any of its subsidiaries and constituent organizations; one can assume the legal team keeps an eye on Github's operations even if the main operations team allows for independent goals and direction of work.

This is true, and not only for US regulation-related reasons. They also removed multiple political writings about people criticising their authoritarian governments as well as games with sexually explicit content (but no images).

> This is pure speculation

> Expect this to continue

I'm not expecting anything to continue based on "pure speculation."

That's why i push my git to both github and gitlab simultaneously. Git makes this easy to do, there is no reason to not use both.

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