Google will aquire GitHub.com (prediction) | Hacker News Reader

Google will aquire GitHub.com (prediction)

9 pointspibefision11 comments

Google Code should be revamped. It's a great resource, but lately GitHub is a total change.

Google won't acquire GitHub because a) they're not for sale just now, and b) Google has a history of avoiding companies that don't share at least some of their underlying technologies. GitHub's Rails/EngineYard combo is probably enough to put GOOG's technical M&A team off the track. Plus, they would have no interest in Git internally, having built a ton of cool tools around their version of Perforce.

> Perforce

yeah but google code doesn't use perforce either... so it's possible (not saying likely). I tend to agree with the rails thing...

Actually, the two services are quite different. GitHub hosts git repositories and integrates with other services. Google Code hosts SVN repositories, but also includes bug-tracking, easy analytics, bandwidth, and downloads.

A more plausible thing for google would be to build a backend for git so they could store git objects, either on bigtable or on GFS. They need this to make the hook into their infrastructure. As soon as that backend is done, they don't need that much work to get a service akin to GitHub.

It doesn't really ring with me that they should want to acquire GitHub.

"Google Code should be revamped" is that the only reason you make this prediction?

As others have pointed out, Google could fairly easily add git support to Google Code. I think it would be nice to have both sites available. I don't like lighthouse, and so it's annoying to me that github doesn't have its own slick and sexy issue tracker built in.

But the politics of Rails mean that the github guys are unlikely to want to piss off the lighthouse guys by including even the simplest issue tracker.

LOL, I don't think the github guys are worried about pissing off the lighthouse guys. Hell, you can do issue tracking in git itself with Scott Chacon's awesome Ticgit (http://github.com/schacon/ticgit/tree/master). I would think it would take them a day to slap a web interface on that.

Instead, I think they don't WANT to do ticket tracking. That's not what github is about. It's a social network built around code. I don't think it's a business oriented project management site.

Good points, but how cool would it be to simply scan a project's open tickets and then fork it, hack away on one and submit a pull request. That's a far more cooperative spirit than simply forking someone's project for your own purposes.

Also, if someone is going to take the time to go through the code after forking, they might feel like fixing any bugs or handling a few new feature requests while they're at it, especially for small, informal projects.

So the only thing stopping you from this is that they are on 2 different domains? Why does that stop you?

I try to minimize the number of sites I set up accounts on, and there is no logical reason why github shouldn't have simple tickets, other than deference to lighthouse.

I would think EngineYard would buy them out way before Google would, seeing as they just got some big funding. Logical Awesome might be pretty happy having a kick-ass business that they control but then again money talks and...

I hope they do it.

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