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Comment by ants_everywhere | Hacker News Reader

People have been voluntarily letting Microsoft host their code for years now.

And before that they posted their open source code to a centralized site that wasn't open source.

This is one of those things where of course it was going to happen. GitHub was VC funded, they were going to either exit to a big company or try to become one.

Eventually the bill was going to come due and everyone knew this. You can choose to rely on VC subsidized services but the risk is you are still dependent on them when they switch things up.

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If I remember initially GitHub (before MS) was free for open source and pay for everyone else. It wasn’t an entirely new idea (source forge?) but it use git which was rising in popularity.

I think GitHub added the “pull request” as a really useful add on to git and that really made it take off.

Oddly I used selfhosted git at an academic institution. I liked it because it was set up to use “hooks” https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Customizing-Git-Git-Hooks after check ins. This became much harder when we were pushed off to a commercial host ( gitlab a git hub competitor)

> I think GitHub added the “pull request” as a really useful add on to git and that really made it take off.

Personally, I remember the initial selling point of GitHub being that it was more "social" than any other forges at the time, since we were all wrapped up in the Web 2.0 hype and what not. I think they pushed that on their landing page back in the day too.

It was basically Twitter but redone specifically for developers, and focus on code rather than random thoughts.

Honestly that sounds kinda neat and I guess you can see traces of that idea today: I have a million unread GitHub notifications about things I don’t care about

> If I remember initially GitHub (before MS) was free for open source and pay for everyone else

When I started using it, public repositories were free, and private repositories needed a paid account.

The ToS did not require public repos to be open source, only permission for basic operations like fork (the button which clones, not creating derivative works) and download was required.

> I think GitHub added the “pull request” as a really useful add on to git and that really made it take off.

I'm pretty sure the term "pull request" existed before GitHub. (Meaning writing an email saying "I have changes in my copy of repo that I want you to merge into the main repo".) But GitHub put an UI around it, and they may've been the first to do that.

Can confirm. Pull request is something Linus talks about in the early days of git before he even acknowledged the existence of GitHub.

> I think GitHub added the “pull request” as a really useful add on to git and that really made it take off.

Negative. The only thing GitHub added to the parlance is "forks" which are essentially like namespaced branches in the same repo.

The use of "fork" predates GitHub as well https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fork_(software_development)

Yeah, it's an older term but forking in that sense is a pretty big deal. GitHub fork is just a button press and can be done basically automatically when you are interested in a repo.

Ah okay I see what you mean

How about an issue tracker that reacts to commit messages and pull requests?

Yeah, for me the most "magical" bit was when you pushed something to your fork and it would prompt you to make a pull request for it.

> I think GitHub added the “pull request” as a really useful add on to git and that really made it take off.

For the sake of correctness, the concept of pull requests was not introduced by Github. It already existed in git in the form of the 'request-pull' subcommand. The fundamental workflow is the same. You send the project maintainer a message requesting a pull of your changes from your own online clone repo. The difference is that the message was in the form of an email. Code reviews could be conducted using mails/mailing lists too.

This is not the same as sending patches by email. But considering how people hate emails, I can see why it didn't catch on. However, Torvalds considered this implementation to be superior to Github's and once complained about the latter on Github itself [1].

[1] https://github.com/torvalds/linux/pull/17#issuecomment-56546...

I am stunned by the fact at a 13+years old comment can be dug out, just like this, and presented as a valid argyment in a conversation.

How some people, like you sir, are able to recall such minute events, is amazing.

> How some people, like you sir, are able to recall such minute events, is amazing.

Oh! That's easy. I forgot that it is 13+ years old! XD

Added later: Your comment made me look up more details about it. It was a widely discussed comment at the time. The HN discussion about it is as interesting as the comment itself [1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3960876

I still don't get the line wrapping hangup. Doesn't every modern text editor have an option to auto wrap existing text? Why should I manually limit text to an arbitrary 72 character width between newlines?

Didn't sourceforge used to be the most friendly open source place then they did something which I forget which got them binned. I think the problem with Github is the low barrier to entry for another open source hosting entity if the typical MICROS~1 action of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish were practiced on GH.

Yep. Sourceforge started injecting ads and malware into (at least) installers that devs made available on the site.

They started shipping installers with de-facto-malware, but at a time when they were already on a downward slope. It was many years after "sourceforge was the default place to host FOSS".

SorgeForge started injecting adware into binaries distributed via their platform. They had been on a downward trajectory for a while, but after they started doing that they fell of a cliff.

I worked for a company that used the on-prem version of their forge back in the 00s, I remember liking it alot. It felt novel, cool and useful to have fully interlinked bug tracking, version control, documentation, project management and release management.

Wasn't GitHub initially bootstrapped?

Yes, there was a couple of years we all believed GitHub would eventually turn into a open platform made by and for FOSS, but then they took on VC investments after some years and the dream went into hiding again.

> we all believed GitHub would eventually turn into a open platform made by and for FOSS

I really don't remember it like this at all. I do remember looking for actually open source forges and choosing Gitorious, which was then bought and shutdown by GitLab (and projects were offered to be seamlessly migrated, which worked well, and somehow we ended up being hosted on an open core platform, but that's another story).

GitHub always looked like the closed platform the whole open source world somehow elected to trust for their code hosting despite being proprietary, and then there was this FOMO where if you weren't on GitHub, your open source software would not find contributors, which still seems to be going strong btw.

I understand their was hope that GitHub would be open sourced, but I don't think there was any reason to believe it would happen.

> I understand their was hope that GitHub would be open sourced, but I don't think there was any reason to believe it would happen.

Yeah, I don't think me myself had good reasons beyond "They seem like the good guys who won't sell out", but I was also way younger and more naive at that point (it was like 15 years ago after all).

I think I mostly just drank the cool-aid of what you mentioned as "if you weren't on GitHub, your open source software would not find contributors". There was a lot of "We love Open Source and Open Source loves us" from GitHub that I guess was confusing to a young formative mind who wanted it to become like the projects they wanted to host. This hope was especially fueled when they started open sourcing parts of GitHub, like the Gollum stuff for rendering the wikis.

Fair enough, obviously!

I suspect many people were in a similar situation.

I'm not being flippant or contrary. What does "bootstrapped" mean in this context? I feel like I've never really understood it as a metaphor.

It means they paid for their expenses with their revenue, as opposed to venture capitalist investments.

Thank you very much!

It refers to pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps.

I have been paying them a monthly fee for private repositories for as long as I can remember.

Private repositories have been free for… 10 years?

I told you it had been a long time!

It looks like private repos started being free in 2019.

https://github.blog/news-insights/product-news/new-year-new-...

Even though you are right, that misses the point terribly.

It's like using Instagram or Facebook. It's not at all a matter of individual choice when all your friends are on one single platform.

Sure you can host your code anywhere, but by not using GitHub you are potentially missing out on a very vibrant community.

It's all Microsoft to blame. It bought the medium and took an entire community hostage in the process just for the sake of profit.

While Microsoft is certainly to blame, GP is also right that the problem wouldn’t exist if people hadn’t continued en masse to have their code hosted on a centralized proprietary and (since 2012) VC-funded platform in the first place.

As an aside, I don’t really see GitHub as a whole as a community. It’s a go-to place with network effects, but network effects doesn’t by itself imply “community”.

Yeah, I said that first thing. It's right but it misses the point.

Being VC backed isn't a deciding factor for adopting a forge. It's the community that drives adoption.

> I don’t really see GitHub as a whole as a community.

It's basically a social network on top of a source code forge. You have a profile that is individually identifiable, you can open issues and contribute to discussions on pull requests. All this can be tracked back to every individual while they collaborate and make connections while they contribute to each other. How is this not a community?

> Being VC backed isn't a deciding factor for adopting a forge. It's the community that drives adoption.

OP is arguing that VC should be a deciding factor. The “community” wouldn’t exist if people had made that a deciding factor.

A social network is not a community. It may contain many communities. GitHub has communities around projects. But GitHub as a whole isn’t a community.

Ah yes, we agree. GH itself enables many communities to emerge but it itself isn't a community.

People will respond to incentives. They had an incentive to host their code in a place that easily let them do things that were extremely high friction before.

People aren't morally reprehensible because they prefer convenience over hardship. People like using easy things, and they like making money. This means that people will make easy things so other people will give them money. If you don't like it, make easy things that work the way you like them, run them ethically, and don't sell them to anyone.

> People will respond to incentives....People aren't morally reprehensible because they prefer convenience over hardship

To clarify my point isn't that anyone is morally reprehensible. My point is that using a free VC-backed service is like selling an implied option. You don't know when they're going to invoke the option, but eventually they will. And often it will be when you've gotten used to the income from selling the option.

It's not a question of morality or judgment, it's just meant to be a description of what the game we're playing is.

> If you don't like it, make easy things that work the way you like them, run them ethically, and don't sell them to anyone.

I'm trying to

Sure, but nobody knows this. Everyone just thinks that things will be as they are now. I don't think the average developer knows what enshittification is, but Doctorow really nailed that one.

> It bought the medium and took an entire community hostage in the process just for the sake of profit.

Counterpoint is that is what companies are supposed to do. They are made to make money, the end. The only hope against this for humans is regulation, and that has fallen off the face of the earth. It’s like humans are doomed to repeat the late 19th and early 20th century era over and over.

"Yes, the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders!"

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