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This explains so much about modern media, news, and story-telling. It's easier to make up a plausible narrative that supports your story than simply admitting you don't know.

You can see how as the article develops, they go from being "uncertain what made GitHub succeed" to definitively being sure about why it succeeded. It doesn't surprise me that details were glossed over as the story rose to the ultimate crescendo of "GitHub dominates".

This is how a good tale is spun and the people lap it up. What's a good tale without a bit of embellishment? (said every bard since antiquity)

You think you can ask google and get an honest reply?

I think you just got an honest reply from 'DannyBee.

To be a bit more generous: I think from Scott Chacon's point of view, "They had no taste and we beat them in the market" is a fair way to hold the elephant. Lacking the Google-internal perspective, it's a reasonable conclusion from the signal he has. I don't get the sense from this post that he's trying to publish a doctoral thesis on the historical situation in the industry; he's providing some primary-source testimony from his point of view.

I guess i'm going to disagree with you.

He's not just providing primary source testimony from his point of view, he's trying to pretend he has primary source testmony on what others were doing as well.

If he left out the parts where he has no data (or said i don't know), it would have IMHO been a better post, and actually primary source testimony.

You also don't run into the Gell-Mann amnesia problem this way.

To each their own, of course.

I'd imagine that if you can say "I don't know why x happened" then you can also save some breath and say nothing at all, and there are billions of folks doing that right now.

Putting out a general inquiry of "why did x happen?" also has a lot of stigma attached to it in RTFM, LMGTFY internet culture. The result will not be a cloud of other people interested in the answer upvoting the question to make it visible to folk who might actually know. Snide comebacks notwithstanding the question will languish forgotten in a dusty corner of whichever forum it was asked within.

But bold assertions based on plausible conjecture? That can earn upvotes, drive engagement, draw ad clicks, and sometimes even prompt corrections from actual experts.

Certainly not an ideal situation but this does appear to be where we're at.

Scott Chacon had absolutely zero obligation to reach out to you.

No more than a movie critic has an obligation to speak with the director before printing their review. He is comparing/contrasting GitHub with Google Code, the product you released. That is all.

As for his claims, I don't even see how the linked article significantly contradicts what you yourself have said about the genesis and goals of Google Code.

You claim that the purpose of Google Code was mainly just to break the SourceForge monoculture. In other words, it wasn't a product intended to be a polished worldbeater. Not something great. Not the next Gmail. Just something functional. A monoculture-preventer.

Okay.

(I am a software engineer as well, so I understand that even this level of creation involves many thousands of engineer-hours of blood, sweat, and tears. Not a knock.)

So yeah, it doesn't sound like you created Google Code with "taste" which the linked article seems to be using as shorthand for "lots of product passion and UX polish."

While the tone of the linked article seems a little more aggressive than it needs to be it... seems correct, based on what you've said?

He had an obligation not to assert as fact things he didn't know to be facts. I'm not going to high-horse it; it's a character fault I share, and I think we all do at times. But at the same time, you can't flip it around on the person who knew he was wrong, and publicly cleared the air. Chacon was wrong about something. That's his problem, his fault, nobody else's.

Specifically, what "facts" did Chacon get wrong?

From the article I'm going to quote Google Code mentions.

There are other assertions about Google's internal adoption of Git, but these seem to be backed up by e.g. the email he screenshotted.

   Furthermore, the players (Sourceforge, Google 
   Code, etc) who eventually did care, after seeing 
   Git and GitHub rising in popularity, simply had 
   no taste.

This is a subjective and opinionated statement, for sure. It doesn't seem like an assertion of fact to me.

    In 2011, both Google Code and BitBucket added Git 
    support, which I’ll mark as the year that the nail 
    was in the Mercurial coffin.

First part fact, second part clearly opinion.

    Just 4 years later, in 2015, Google Code just 
    completely gave up and shut it’s service down. In the 
    email they sent out, they basically said “just move to 
    GitHub”.

What is non-factual here? He screencaps the email.

    So, Why Not Google Code?

This section is really about what Github achieved, no direct Google Code assertions.

    The original article is correct, the other 
    hosts focused on distribution and revenue streams. 
    We cared about developers.

Well, this is a speculation that (according to one Google Code member) is not correct - "DannyBee" claims they just wanted to avoid a SourceForge monoculture.

Is this really the point of contention?

I read the article in the context of "a guy who worked at Github talking about his experience at Github, which unavoidably will also mention externalities like the competition" and not at all in the context of "hey! this is the inside scoop on google! I got facts about Google's inner workings!"

I just don't think there's a reasonable assumption that this should have been like, a rigorously fact-checked statement.

Expecting a personal blog to adhere to the standards of some other kind of publishing is misguided and unrealistic. This is clearly a personal account and I'm just baffled that anybody would confuse a personal account like this with capital-j Journalism.

This probably reads as pedantry (if anybody actually reads this post) but it's really, an honest attempt to understand.

Yeah but you said "nobody bothers to actually ask other people things anymore" and I don't think it's reasonable to expect someone to ask about this when the probability of getting an answer is so low.