Comment by zo1 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zo1 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

>"The actual reason is because GitHub let coders cleanly publish code portfolios, and GitHub happened to use Git as the underlying technology to enable that,"

Is this guy genuinely suggesting that people fell in "love" with distributed version control solely because of GitHub? I don't feel old enough to be telling this author to get off my lawn. I mean, GitHub is great and all, but it does not represent the sum whole of all the commits in this world.

Granted, does anyone know the timelines of when DVCS took off (as opposed to launched)? Mercurial and Git were both released a good 3 years before GitHub was launched.

Okay, I looked up more about DVCS. Wikipedia article's history section on it:

History

Closed source DVCS systems such as Sun WorkShop TeamWare were widely used in enterprise settings in the 1990s and inspired BitKeeper (1998), one of the first open systems. BitKeeper went on to serve in the early development of the Linux kernel.

First generation open-source DVCS systems include Arch and Monotone. The second generation was initiated by the arrival of Darcs, followed by a host of others.

When the publishers of BitKeeper decided in 2005 to restrict the program's licensing,[5] free alternatives Bazaar, Git, and Mercurial followed not long after.

> Is this guy genuinely suggesting that people fell in "love" with distributed version control solely because of GitHub?

The author suggests that the "tipping point" for Git adoption vs e.g. Mercurial was when Github made open source development a much more gameable, visibly social activity. Prior to that, every OSS project had a web page, a mailing list, a Sourceforge or code.google.com repo, etc. But no single use ID existed for developers across all of those little islands of identity and conversation. Github changed all of that.

Coming from the scientific Python community, I can absolutely attest to the huge long email threads as projects decided whether they were going to stick with SVN+Trac or Mercurial+Bitbucket or Git+Github. (This was before Bitbucket supported git.) In the end, all of them ended up going to Github because of the social stickiness, even though its ticket and tracking system is really primitive compared to what even Trac was able to do.

I had the misfortune to have used Arch around 2005-2007. That was an excruciating experience. Updates that would take over an hour.

I think both of you are respectively overestimating and underestimating the significance of GitHub.

Are there a lot of projects that use Git without a hosting intermediary because of genuine advantages? Yes, absolutely. Plenty of core infrastructure and applications, many of which significantly predate Git or GitHub.

Is there a growing subculture of people who essentially equate Git with GitHub and end up completely subverting the "D" in DVCS, incurring unnecessary downtime and who pretend Git/GitHub are the be-all-end-all? Also yes, with circles such as those of HN being overrepresented with "GitHub is your resume" rhetoric and various startups or hip SaaS having GitHub be their single point of failure.

Being the #1 software hosting site in the world does have an effect on demographics, at the end of the day. By now Git and GitHub have an essential, if controversial relationship.

Back when I followed the long discussions about introducing git at the ASF (now live at git.apache.org) several git proponents said that git without github is pointless to them. I was quite surprised how adamant some people were about that. Before then I never thought of github as a sort of GUI for git, just as... one service for repository storage out of many, I guess?

The ASF has a strict policy of self-hosting. So git repos are now mirrored to github from ASF intrastructure, for the github fans who initially suggested the reverse (ignoring obvious problems such as ASF having no influence over what happens at github).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com