Linus Torvalds now on GitHub | Hacker News Reader

Linus Torvalds now on GitHub

github.com

324 pointsolliesaunders71 comments

It'd've been advantageous to see this go on a purely open service like Gitorious instead. They often provide similar features as GitHub and could definitely use the exposure of Linus's account.

I use and enjoy GitHub, so this definitely isn't a personal gripe, I'd just like to see the competition in that space heat up a bit, and there'd be bonus points if we could simultaneously promote a completely open platform.

The problem with Github being completely open source is that no one would pay for the service part of it, which is the only way it can exist.

I don't understand your point. Surely people do pay for hosted storage, even when the code is available?

Sure, except that storage is a commodity which you need to get pretty large scale to turn a decent profit, code is fairly light on on space. Github is able to charge a very large premium on it because of the unique service that they supply.

GitHub is certainly overpriced for its private plans, but I don't think releasing the source would destroy their profitability. Once the ball gets rolling on something like GitHub, network effects play a major role in its continued usage and popularity. Good support and constant evolution of the platform also encourage users to pay for your hosted service even if the code is available elsewhere. GitHub's features like pull requests, profiles, and expected presence on resumes as the de-facto standard "git hub" (har, har, har), and overall convenience would continue to promote usage of github.com.

Github's widest margins are obviously at the high end business plans, and businesses would run an internal github in a second if it was OSS. There goes Github FI as well. It would cripple them, the only way they can possible host all open source projects at no charge is because they are subsidized by the big fish.

Some businesses would, but many would not. Running internal services has a cost too.

More likely though other providers would spring up and undercut their pricing but not invest in development.

I'm not sure I buy the network effects argument. It makes sense for repositories for open projects, but for private repositories I don't see where network effects come into play.

Convenience comes into play so you only have to deal with one interface to manage all your projects.

Looked at from the point of view of for-pay hosted storage, Github is astoundingly expensive. I have 94 megabytes of git repositories at work. Github would want $100/month to host that.

If their software was all available and open source, I could host their software and my repositories on an $11/month Rackspace virtual machine, and still have about 7 gigabytes left over (or more realistically just stick it on a vhost on some machine I've already got on the internet and host it essentially for free).

This is the brilliance of Github. They have found a way to sell storage at several orders of magnitude over the going rate--all because they have coupled it with some attractive proprietary software. Their value is entirely in that proprietary software.

I have 94 megabytes of git repositories at work. Github would want $100/month to host that.

Huh? My $7/month plan comes with 600+MB of storage, and my job's $50/month plan comes with 6GB. Where are you getting these numbers?

Number of repos.

Number of private repos. You can have an unlimited number of public repos with any plan.

Also: Number of private repositories that have their _root_ in your account. You can fork private projects between users with access to the root repos and not have them count against you limit.

Github pricing is by number of repositories. I have 37 repositories. That requires the "Gold" plan, which is $100/month.

Disk space is a soft limit. Hard limits are repos. I find it hard to beleive your company can't spend $100 on offloading to a managed resource such as GitHub.

I find it hard to beleive your company can't spend $100 on offloading to a managed resource such as GitHub.

Oh, we can. We just haven't needed to yet.

You can do that with Gitorious and many other web front-end for git and/or other vcs (if you need a web front end at all, which is not really clear, and git-web is sufficient if you just need an easy way to link to some commits or file in your source tree).

What would be nice on these open source web front-end for git is decentralized pull/merge requests, I don't know if there is one which does that yet (like you can follow someone with another Status.net install on identi.ca for instance, you could issue pull/merge requests from any "nodes"). Also, this would kind of make a lot of sense for a dvcs.

They're not selling storage. They're selling an interface.

Some time back I asked myself the same question as I am fine paying for the storage, usage but when it becomes a number of X ( repositories, collaborators) it gets somewhat annoying. So, 6-8 months ago I set out to host my own git server and liked gitorious for its fancy front end and ease of setting up keys and adding collaborators with diff rights, all good and was able to get it running in 90 mins or so. My real problems started on day 2 when it wasn't functioning the way I liked it to, some troubleshooting and found that stomp server exited for unknown reason so the message queue was not working, checked logs and restarted it. I kept having those problems abruptly and every time I had to ssh and restart the stompserver or the git-poller. I think it all depends on how u perceive cost, in my case it was much more than 11$/month coz of the num of hrs lost in maintaining and worrying about it and sometimes it didnt work for hrs when i was not in front of computer. It was then I chose to submit to github plans though I'd still like if I was being charged for usage (any kind) rather than number of X. So I think, like they say TCO was justified.

Gitorious exists just fine doing that, they make money off support and consulting, same way most other FOSS projects that make money do it.

http://gitorious.com/

Which is why they charge insanely exorbitant prices for simple git hosting.

$7/mo is exorbitant? Even the biggest plan at $200 is essentially nothing for a small company. I have my complaints about github, but "exorbitant" isn't even close. They're a bargain.

Their interface is not 'simple'. They don't sell 'simple git hosting'. That's making the same mistake that people make when they think they can code Reddit in a weekend.

Can you explain what exactly is closed with github that is open with gitorious? (I confess lack of familiarity with both)

Gitorious's web front-end is entirely open source (but a huge pain to setup) but Github's web front-end is proprietary (although they open source many of their backend libraries).

It's not that big of a pain to set up. It took me just under 2 hours to get it all set up and functioning on Ubuntu Server.

That's a lot longer than it takes to sign up for Github.

Your comparison is not fair. Signing up for Gitorious takes the same time as signing up for GitHub (maybe even less since it supports OpenID, I don't know if GitHub does).

GitHub doesn't support OpenID for registration or login (or if they do, it's hidden away somewhere).

Why github Linus?

"[...] it was just the first one that came up when I googled for "git hosting". I've not tried any of the hosting places before, so it was a random choice."

(I don't know how to link a comment in google+, it's in https://plus.google.com/102150693225130002912/posts/PVZDD2N3... )

You can link to comments, but you have to go source-diving for the containing div's ID; it doesn't appear to be exposed in the interface anywhere:

https://plus.google.com/102150693225130002912/posts/PVZDD2N3...

Edit: I take it back. It's completely screwed. There's a # in the ID, and it though it works when you add the fragment to the URL in the address bar while you're viewing the page, visiting the link afresh makes it explode.

Nice work, chaps. :-|

Maybe that's why it's not exposed in the first place. :P

This seemed like an interesting challenge, so I ended up creating a bookmarklet that lets you link to a comment on a post url (not directly from the person's stream, however) by clicking on it.

https://gist.github.com/1193282

It also accounts for the height of the gbar and googleplus navbar, since linking directly to the anchor tag puts the comment directly at the top of the page, behind both of those fixed elements.

edit: example link to that comment: https://plus.google.com#102150693225130002912/posts/PVZDD2N3...

WHen I google "git hosting", the first hit is git.kernel.org, then two stack overflow posts, then Gitorious, then GitHub. I wonder what my account contains that makes Google think Gitorious is more important to me.

I'm sure the fact that you work for Gitorious' parent company has nothing to do with it ;-)

I wonder if Google actually knows that, or if it's something else that causes it.

For me Github is the third hit and Gitorious is not even on the first page.

You're seeing customised results. Try a fresh browser session with no cookies (Chrome's Incognito mode is invaluable for this - hit Cmd+Shift+N).

I'd just like to add that a search for "git hosting" on DDG ("duckgoing" if you will) yields, aside from the SO quick info box (which mentions Gitorious and Redmine), unfuddle.com is the first result, github doesn't show up until the fourth of fifth, and I haven't scrolled down to look for Gitorious. It does, however, show http://git-scm.com/tools as the second result, which includes a summary of the most popular hosters divided by categories.

I get github as the second.

you can also add &pws=0 to the url

I'm unfamiliar with Google's indexing algorithm, but it's also possible that the rank of the top pages has shuffled between when Linus googled it and now.

I am curious to know which one has contributed more to the open source scene. Github has released many non trivial code of its backend and popularized the use of git outside the Linux kernel.

In a way github has contributed more to open source, because they host more open source repositories. They act as a catalyst for open source.

The "torvalds" github account claims to have been created today. Did github have reserve that account name for Linus or did they boot a squatter? I see there dubious accounts registered for "linustorvalds", "billgates", and "stevejobs" but not "billg" or "sjobs".

btw stevejobs uploaded Windows 8 source code in 2009! Bill, you might want to give Steve a call. ;)

If you look towards the end of the comment thread on https://plus.google.com/102150693225130002912/posts/PVZDD2N3..., he created the account since kernel.org is down

/me puts on conspiracy hat

Github hacked kernel.org

Poor Linus will probably be flooded with patches and pull requests for every commit he makes.

On the other hand, he might very well spark some interesting things just by committing small stubs of his ideas.

And it has begun...

https://github.com/arkx/diveclog/commit/c800d93a83f18b1c2b18...

Why not fix all the typos if it's as easy as clicking 'edit file'? He has the option to merge it by clicking one button.

I just can't see the downside. He didn't want to merge it due to the lack of signed-off-by, but at least he knows there's a typo there now and can fix it or let it be if it doesn't bother him.

(For the record, this was not the first typo fix contributed, see https://github.com/torvalds/diveclog/pull/2 for something he already pulled in.)

The README file is great: https://github.com/torvalds/diveclog/blob/master/README

TL/DR: I've never used GTK before, I know my code sucks, but my little divelog program is better than anything else I could find, and if someone wants to fix my code they are welcome to do so.

About 'diveclog': https://plus.google.com/102150693225130002912/posts/PVZDD2N3...

Sorry for taking http://github.com/linus, Linus!

Congrats to the Github team for this. I'd say it's a pretty huge endorsement, regardless of whether Linus intended it that way or not.

Well, let's wait to see Linus's comments on how he feels about it. If he's unhappy, he'll write about it in public, scathing remarks.

like Zed Shaw? :)

Well, and knowing Linus, few months from today he will probably get frustrated by some limitation and write his own Git front end (that everyone will start using) and it will be a better front end

The question is which platform would Linus use for a web front end?

Hard to believe, but the sources compile cleanly on win32 (using mingw). And ... it actually works!

I put binaries up at http://patraulea.com/diveclog/diveclog-win32-110904.zip

I assume diveclog is for scuba diving?

Yes, it reads logs generated by dive computers.

Strictly, it reads Suunto logs converted by libdivecomputer to XML.

Ridiculous. Linus could have been working on a startup in his spare time and making millions. Instead he works on scuba diving.

HN, take this as an example of what not to do with your life.

Ridiculous. He doesn't want to be "making millions". He's well-of working on whatever he wants, be it business or recreation. For his personal philosophy, see the books "The Hacker Ethic and the Spirit of the Information Age" and "Just for Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary".

I assume that was a bit of dry humour there. If not, well then god help us all.

My apologies to ootachi if it was humour. The scary part is that there definitely are people who would judge others' lives like that.

It would be really cool if he puts his fun side project scripts up. I would enjoy seeing what he hacks on the side.

i bet he's working on a desktop environment; first the kernel, then git, now i heard that he's fed up with gnome and kde, so let's see.

He has nearly a thousand followers within a day of creating an account. Nice.

Hmm he seems to have left out the unit tests.

swoon

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