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Comment by teddyh | Hacker News Reader

They did it again. GitHub “stealing” the Git release announcement, contributing to the Git/GitHub confusion.

Comments from the last time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28207168

For those who don’t know: GitHub is owned by Microsoft, a historical (and current) adversary of all things not Microsoft, particularly Linux¹. Git, the tool, is not made by GitHub; GitHub is a web service which is using Git. Git, the tool, was originally made by the person who also originally made (and currently manages) Linux, and the purpose of Git was to manage the development of Linux itself.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_documents

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IMO GitHub posting these is fine since they're headlined "Highlights from Git 2.3x", but the last discussion incorrectly just said "Git 2.33", which is likely where the confusion came from. Hopefully this post will keep the distinction front-and-center.

If your name is GitHub and you announce a new release of Git, which your product GitHub uses extentively, and you do not explicitly and clearly mention that you do not have any role in making Git itself, then you are lying by omission; deliberately misinforming people who will naturally assume, given no information to the contrary, that GitHub are the makers of Git.

I think that most people are already under the misapprehension that Git and GitHub are the same thing. This style of deliberate confusion from GitHub must be seen to be by design. They are Microsoft; they do not get the benefit of the doubt.

> that you do not have any role in making Git itself

GitHub employs at least three full time git contributors, including the author of this blog post.

(Disclaimer: I am a GitHub employee who works on git-adjacent things)

> The open source Git project just released Git 2.34 with features and bug fixes from over 109 contributors, 29 of them new.

It's pretty clear they're talking about a separate project.

"you do not explicitly and clearly mention that you do not have any role in making Git itself, then you are lying by omission;"

Um - I thought Microsoft does have a big role - doesn't Johannes do the Git for Windows stuff and work at Microsoft, and Jeff work for github etc etc.

Do you really think that most people that use git and GitHub are under the misapprehension that Git and GitHub are the same thing?

Really? This seems just very much an anti Microsoft view, especially with that final sentence.

> Do you really think that most people that use git and GitHub are under the misapprehension that Git and GitHub are the same thing?

Yeah actually, a lot are. There are also a lot of GitHub users who don't know what git is at all.

I don't think this blog post is going to further misinform them though, they also don't read technical blog posts.

Actually my impression is that Microsoft is probably the largest corporate sponsor currently for git devs. They’re primarily focused on large mono repo support and ecosystem improvements that fit into their GitHub strategy. Overall, I’d characterize their Git involvement as positive.

Oh look, the obligatory "Micro$oft is evil" rhetoric based on decades old grievances and very little new evidence. So useful.

It's perfectly reasonable for a company, that uses the tool in its name, to have a blog post going over new features. I'm never amazed the distances people will go to distort a boring blog post into some issue or another based on splitting hairs.

> […] based on decades old grievances and very little new evidence.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29288052

> […] based on decades old grievances and very little new evidence.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29251210

> very little new evidence

Off topic, but there was that dotnetfederation overreach shenanigans

Or all the telemetry enabled in Windows and then making local accounts more difficult, although once you sign in to a Microsoft account to download some broken app from their app store then they start uploading all your app launches and activity anyhow.

And repeatedly trying to trick or force us to use Edge and probably a few others.

Are these decisions we don't agree with? Sure. Evil? No. At least not 1999 Microsoft evil. I can find just as many bad decisions from every other major tech company.

For the record, I actually did give Edge Chromium a spin and I was a bit impressed. The Deals feature creeps me out, but I can browse the reddit homepage without an ad blocker and it's actually a smooth experience.

Not being cartoonishly evil should be a low bar to pass?

Edge is probably nice, forcing users to use it is not.

One should think they'd learned after being forced to advertise other browsers for a couple of years?

I don't like Microsoft, but you can't blame microsoft for the fact that apparently the git project never made a proper webpage. Obviously that means people will try to find information about git elsewhere.

Isn’t [1] the official git home page? I don’t follow your comment.

[1] https://git-scm.com/

Said website was originally created for Git by GitHub employees, so presumably that site is also incredibly offensive to those who don't like the blog post.

Has git published their own release announcement like this for people to read?

It's in the repo: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/git/git/master/Documentati...

[edit: in fact it's linked from GitHub's blog post, at the bottom, and it's included in the announcement email: https://lore.kernel.org/git/xmqq8rxpgwki.fsf@gitster.g/]

The official release announcement from the git project is also in the very first sentence of the very first paragraph of the github post.

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