Lord of the Files: How GitHub Tamed Free Software (And More) | Hacker News Reader

Lord of the Files: How GitHub Tamed Free Software (And More)

wired.com

242 pointsjurre66 comments

Ryan Blair, a technologist with the New York State Senate, thinks it could even give citizens a way to fork the law — proposing their own amendments to elected officials. A tool like GitHub could also make it easier for constituents to track and even voice their opinions on changes to complex legal code. “When you really think about it, a bill is a branch of the law,” he says. “I’m just in love with the idea of a constituent being able to send their state senator a pull request.”

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I find this quote fascinating. This would be fantastic if it actually gained traction. It would democratize the process of actually writing a bill. People could actually vote for/against sections for inclusion.

Funny we were just discussing law texts analysis with a friend, I even replicated a bit of French Civilian Code revisions on github for further analysis.

I wonder how much will technology close the gap between society and its actual constituents.

Docracy (basically GitHub for legal documents) is going to do exactly that at the next legal hackathon http://legalhackathon.blipclinic.org/

The question is how do we incentivize politicians to start using this. This will not gain any traction if meetings and discussions are held in secret (like ACTA).

Maybe as a start, we can just track what has changed throughout the different revisions of ACTA. Maybe this is something you could do as part of your hackathon.

I'm picking ACTA as it's something that is relatively current and at the forefront of people's minds right now.

One way is to push it through something like Code For America who could then bring it to interested city governments.

http://codeforamerica.org/

It would democratize the process of actually writing a bill. People could actually vote for/against sections for inclusion.

This might be true. Why does everyone seem to assume that it would be a good thing?

It may not be a good thing, but it offers advantages currently unavailable in our current system--a way for citizens to shoot down piggybacked laws.

The flip side is that large, money backed entities could also use FUD to manipulate citizens into shooting down clauses in bills.

Heed the flip side.

Imagine in your mind some special interest groups. Powerful special interest groups. The most powerful special interest groups. Are you imagining, e.g., the permanent civil service, academics, scientists, Medicare and Social Security recipients, and homeowners? Probably not. And yet, there they are. One of the greatest tricks of the most powerful interest groups has been to convince the world that, Keyser Söze–like, they don't even exist. And, unfortunately, you can't give citizens the power to eliminate pork without unleashing these hungry pigs upon the trough.

Source-controlled legislation would also provide a cryptographically-secure audit trail to track shady, late-night amendments.

What I find fascinating is "a technologist with the New York State Senate" - what does this guy do? Advise state senators on tech matters?

They have a small IT department that has developed some pretty interesting tools, most of which are open-source. They had a very progressive CIO who had APIs created to access legislative data, etc.

Really useful stuff if you need to know what the legislature is up to.

http://www.nysenate.gov/open

I've got to say, I thought that quote was pretty awesome myself. A great concept! The public's input on a law -- who would have thought, huh?

Now if they could implement it successfully.

There's a Quora answer about couching the lawmaking process in software development terms. You might find it interesting:

http://www.quora.com/What-can-lawmakers-learn-from-computer-...

One github user already put the Utah state legal code on github. All commits are attributed to him, but it's fascinating watching the wording change commit by commit.

His README proposes a similar law patching idea.

https://github.com/divegeek/utahcode

It would be amazing to have members of Congress who understood forks and pull requests. Given the recent SOPA/DNS fiasco, I'd say we have another 30 - 50 years.

Gah, why would they use a bar chart for the "Getting Into Github" diagram and then not stick to anything resembling a consistent x-axis - at first it looked like it might be exponential, but it's not even that. The bar sizes are nearly meaningless, because different segments of them are to wildly different scales. All it actually conveys is "this one is more than this one".

Is it just me or are there a lot of errors in this article? Scott Chabon?

I wonder if they intentionally did that so people would fork the article and fix it.

Could be! The article itself is open source, too:

https://github.com/WiredEnterprise/Lord-of-the-Files

I wish all technical books did this.

The gold standard might be the way Mark Pilgrim wrote Dive Into HTML5.

"... I wish all technical books did this. ..."

Why limit this to technical articles? Why not any written document? The key point, non-tech editors and writers are not going to use the clumsy tools github provides. They might use an editor that hides the mechanics of github.

That is amazing. 17 outstanding pull requests =)

I think so, I'm keeping an eye on https://github.com/WiredEnterprise/Lord-of-the-Files/pulls to see if they're getting merged. Pretty cool they hosted it there!

Yup, they're commenting on the incoming pull requests and looks like they will be accepting some. Curious to see if the original article will be updated with them!

Noticed a few too. Like the fact that Scott Chacon wrote a book on Pro Git, not GitHub itself (maybe that's in the works).

They have things completely backwards. Github didn't make coding more decentralized, Git did. Github made it more centralized, though in a mostly non-binding way thanks to Git.

Oh my god:

> GitHub.com is best thought of as Facebook for geeks

Really?

I spend a lot of time on Github and it's very fun, I think that's what Facebook is for non-hackers.

Yes. Including countless memes in comments and pull requests.

Unfortunately, the most infamous example of that (Bumblebee's 'rm -rf /usr/' mistake) seems to have been removed:

> https://github.com/MrMEEE/bumblebee/commit/a047be85247755cdb...

Fortunately...

I wrote a comment under it, and since that day my mailbox was flooded with notifications about other replies for months to come. I think about doing some analytics on them; say, plot the number of comments per day over time - I'd expect to see something like e^(1/x) - 1.

You should do that - though I doubt it'd be an exponential decay. You're going to get a series of bumps every time a post about it pops up on HN (or similar site), and those bumps will probably be positively correlated with one another (note how top posts on HN are oftentimes top posts on related subreddits on Reddit, for example).

Would be interesting to see, though - let me know if you do it.

Actually it's still there: https://github.com/MrMEEE/bumblebee-Old-and-abbandoned/commi... MrMEEE changed the repo's name.

I thought of this pull request thread first actually: https://github.com/drbrain/meme/pull/13

Must've missed that one somehow when it was popular.

What better way to describe to a less tech-savvy audience? It's "social coding" after all.

Yeah. Sounds particularly apt.

I think it's almost exactly the wrong impression to give.

Most people associate Facebook with hanging out with friends and general screwing around, and while there are is a certain amount of that, it happens distinctly in the context of doing work (used loosely), which is the main use case.

I guess you could try the angle of “imagine if you were able to do your job on Facebook with all your co-workers, but all the documents would also be visible to anyone else on Facebook so they could, if they chose, become your co-workers too”.

Yes, but for geeks, and especially geeks using GitHub, programming work is the equivalent of Facebook "fun".

But for everyone one else Facebook "fun" is a waste of time.

So now everyone who is NOT a geek and reads that article thinks github is where geeks go to waste time and be unproductive.

OK, better add this github to the corporate black list!

So now everyone who is NOT a geek and reads that article thinks github is where geeks go to waste time and be unproductive.

Well, considering that 90% on GitHub is crap (Sturgeon's law), they might be right.

While there are of course productive repos in it, also consider all the hobbyist repos, me-too repos, NIH repos, useless fork/pull repos, half-baked repos, circle-jerk fad concept/language of the month repos, etc. Those are quite analogous to Facebook, no?

Those are quite analogous to Facebook, no?

No. They would analogous to Facebook only if you are a professional web social marketer or something like that. Then Facebook would be to you like github is for programmers.

Still 90% crap, but still somewhat professionally useful crap. For everyone else Facebook is 100% unprofessional. (It may not strictly be a waste of time if you consider genuine keeping in touch with physically remote loved ones.)

"The old regime “makes it very hard to start radical new branches because you generally need to convince the people involved in the status quo up-front about their need to support that radical branch,” Torvalds says. “In contrast, Git makes it easy to just ‘do it’ without asking for permission, and then come back later and show the end result off — telling people ‘look what I did, and I have the numbers to show that my approach is much better.’”"

Substitute "business" for branch and "startup" for git.

Startups are git branching for the economy.

Interesting hearing about how they want to tackle the Microsoft ecosystem.

As someone who spent years in that ecosystem and recently left it for OSS, I'll be curious to see what kind of success they see and who they are targeting.

Phil Haack is one of the people who recently joined Github from MS developer tools division, with the aim to make the github experience better for those same devs.

He blogs, maybe you'll find more info on the subject there: http://haacked.com/archive/2011/12/07/hello-github.aspx

I wonder who the other person who joined Github from Microsoft was?

Yeah, I knew about Phil Haack but he's been pretty silent on what he's working on. Hoping to hear more soon.

I'm pretty sure the other person is Paul Betts. They are working on Github for Windows (i.e. a Windows version of what they've done with Github for Mac).

A quick google suggests that you're right. Thanks for that.

Related, I never really got the point of "Github for mac". Do we need a fat-client app when we already have a first-rate web app? What does it do/enable/make easy that github the website doesn't? A Mac or PC isn't a tiny phone screen with no keyboard, where native apps are more usable than websites.

I use TortoiseGit as well for the rest of the github experience, since I'm not a git master and I can pretend it's SVN with pull requests.

I was really quite surprised at the way this article was pitched. I'd expect to read this airy, hand-wavy level of detail in a news magazine, not Wired.

I actually find it entertaining and fun - specially the bits about history, how they found common vision etc. It was an interesting human take to subject that could be inherently jargon-laden and boring

Wow! Linus is using a Macbook Air!

Runs GNU/Linux on it too:

https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/1/14/4

It looks to me like he is using BIOS emulation on the mac, so he gets an IDE interface instead of using AHCI which I get on my efi-booted air.

What would be the advantage of that, other than devo/testing purposes?

He's literally complaining that apple's firmware does not init the hardware properly. If he's using the legacy BIOS boot, that's a fair assessment of that mode, but it's still not the standard way to boot the computer.

I remember reading about his hardware set up a few years ago and yes, he was using apple hardware.

It's almost certainly running linux though.

Well, in the picture I can clearly see a Gnome 3 desktop (with the default wallpaper).

For a while there he was running Linux on a PowerMac G5 tower as his primary desktop:

https://lkml.org/lkml/2004/2/12/13

Many open source OS projects have core developers on non-x86/amd64 platforms so as to find errors, x86isms, and other code quality issues reveled by fundamental differences in the underlying architectures.

the background is a gnome3 default though

Yeah, and in the past had a Mac G5 for his home desktop. He run Linux on that.

And before that, he used an iBook running OS X to write his autobiography on MS Word (he said so in an interview).

That's interesting. Pitty I couldn't find a quote in my brief search. I'll try to find that interview later.

The bit that really caught my attention was this: "(...) Torvalds, who briefly moved Linux kernel development to GitHub last September following a security breach at its old home."

I must have been away when that happened.

Quadrupling the number of employees in a year is damn impressive.

From 14, yes. From 1 it wouldn't be - so it's not just 'quadrupling' itself that's impressive here :)

I beg to differ. It is easy to quadruple the number of employees in a year, but hard to do that without sacrificing company culture.

I did a double-take at the title and am left wondering whether or not the one-letter difference between this and William Golding's Nobel Prize-winning "Lord of the Flies" is purposeful or not.

Uh, yes.

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