[HN Gopher] Why GitHub won
___________________________________________________________________
Why GitHub won
Author : hardwaregeek
Score : 323 points
Date : 2024-09-09 16:27 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.gitbutler.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.gitbutler.com)
| LtWorf wrote:
| Github won because sourceforge was ruined already.
| heisenbit wrote:
| SF lost its way. My vague memory is that SF and also CollabNet
| were focusing on higher level functionality and while valuable
| neglected the basic code sharing growth/ease of use which is
| the rationale for all their existence. Too early into higher
| level functionality.
| simonw wrote:
| I clicked on this link thinking "timing and product quality", so
| I was satisfied to see that GitHub co-founder Scott Chacon
| credits it to "GitHub started at the right time" and "GitHub had
| good taste".
| SoftTalker wrote:
| git won because linux used git, and the vast majority of open-
| source code was written for linux. Simple as that. GitHub won
| because it made remote collaboration on a code base easier than
| anything else.
| bluGill wrote:
| I think that if github hadn't come out something other than
| git would have one. While git did have Linus behind it, the
| others were objectively better in some way and working on the
| areas they were objectively worse, and eventually the
| advantages would have got everyone to switch. However the
| others never had anything like github - even 20 years latter
| they still aren't trying (rumor is they are not dead)
| teqsun wrote:
| As a "younger" programmer it always shocks me how things like git
| were only created in 2005. It feels so ubiquitous and the way it
| functions has the "feeling" of something created in the 80s or
| 90s to me.
| vehemenz wrote:
| As an "older" programmer, I feel the opposite. Git became
| mainstream very recently, though admittedly it's been a good
| ten years or more. I sometimes think younger programmers'
| attitudes toward git are borderline cultish--git or GitHub is
| not required to do programming--it's just another tool. I half
| expected something would have replaced it by now.
| schacon wrote:
| Git's been around for almost 20 years now. I would say fairly
| dominant for 15 or so.
| keybored wrote:
| Git is overrated for a DVCS. But it's not overrated
| considering the old-school competition like SVN.
|
| The assumptions of SVN makes it feel like a dinosaur now.
| gmueckl wrote:
| I have to agree on the cult aspect. This is unfortunate
| because better tools exist already today, but lots of people
| refuse to even entertain that possibility.
| teqsun wrote:
| I feel about git how I presume vim users feel. Maybe there
| are better ways, but I've become so accustomed to how it
| works that I doubt I could easily switch to anything else.
| gmueckl wrote:
| All the more reason to look beyond your comfort zone now
| and then!
| golergka wrote:
| Already in 2010-2012 majority of projects I encountered were
| using git. Last time I saw an SVN-based project was in 2015,
| before I migrated it to git.
| eterm wrote:
| Subversion (svn) was absolutely fine before git. Before that,
| there was CVS but that really was painful.
|
| Svn gets a lot of hate for things it doesn't deserve, even this
| article talks about "checking out" and the difficulty of
| branching, but that doesn't track with subversion.
|
| Branching in subversion was just as easy as in git, it had
| shallow branches. You could branch largely without overhead,
| although unlike git it was a server-side operation. ( Imagine
| it like git branch with auto-push to remote).
|
| Most software also automatically checked out files as you
| modified them, and it was a local oepration, there wasn't any
| locking or contention on that. It was the older CVS/sourcesafe
| style version system that those.
|
| I still maintain that most workplaces with less than, say, 10
| devs, would be better off with subversion rather than git, if
| not for the fact that most the world now works on git.
|
| Subversion solves problems with less mental overhead than git,
| but it's not worth doing anything non-standard, because
| everyone now knows git and has learned to put up with the worse
| developer user experience, to the point where people will argue
| that git doesn't have bad UX, because they've internalised the
| pain.
|
| Before subversion there was CVS and Visual Source Safe. These
| are much older. These solved a problem of source control, but
| were based on the concept of locking and modifying files.
|
| You'd "checkout" a file, which would lock the file for
| modification of all other users. It was a bit like using a
| global locking file repository but with a change history.
|
| It was as painful as you might imagine. You'd need to know how
| to fix the issue where someone would go on holiday having
| checked out a critical file: https://support.microsoft.com/en-
| us/topic/5d5fa596-eb9c-d2b5...
|
| Or more routinely, you'd get someone angrily asking who had
| such-and-such file checked out.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| CVS was absolutely not oriented around locking files.
|
| It was about merge and conflict resolution like SVN or Git.
|
| VSS was oriented around locking. And also broke all the time.
| Oh, and also lost data... And oh, it was also the expensive
| one used by everybody that kept saying "you get what you
| pay".
| fanf2 wrote:
| Subversion didn't get working merge support until years after
| git. Like CVS it basically required trunk-based development.
| Feature branches were not supported. You needed a separate
| checkout for any work in progress. You could not checkpoint
| your work with a commit before updating to the latest head.
| Every update is a forced rebase. It sucked.
| aplusbi wrote:
| Branching in Subversion was fine, but merging was quite
| painful (at least at the time I was using it, around
| 2008ish). From my recollection, SVN didn't try to figure out
| the base commit for a merge - you had to do that manually. I
| remember having a document keeping track of when I branched
| so that I could merge in commits later.
|
| And even if I was using it wrong or SVN improved merging
| later the fact was that common practice at the time was to
| just commit everything to the main branch, which is a worse
| (IMO) workflow than the feature-branch workflow common in
| git.
|
| But you're right, SVN was largely fine and it was better than
| what preceded it and better than many of its peers.
|
| Edit: Forgot to mention - one of the biggest benefits to git,
| at least early on, was the ability to use it locally with no
| server. Prior to git all my personal projects did not use
| version control because setting up VC was painful. Once git
| came around it was trivial to use version control for
| everything.
| cruffle_duffle wrote:
| Subversion was great up until your working directory somehow
| got corrupted. Then you'd be in some kind of personal hell
| cleaning it up.
|
| And honestly, it was always a pain in the ass setting up "the
| server". Unlike with git you needed a server / service
| running 24/7 upon which to check your code into. Which was
| always a pain in the ass at home... needed to keep some
| stupid subversion service running somewhere. And you'd have
| to go back into that service and remember how to create new
| projects every time you got a wild hair up your ass and
| wanted to create a new thing.
|
| Git you just do "git init" and boom, you have a whole
| complete version control system all to yourself with no
| external dependency whatsoever.
|
| That being said, TortiseSVN was the best GUI for version
| control ever.
| HerrMonnezza wrote:
| One thing that Git and the other DVCS's massively improved
| over Subversion is that commits are local, and you only need
| to talk to a remote endpoint when you push/pull. In
| Subversion, every commit would require uploading changes to
| the repository server, which encouraged larger commits (to
| amortize the overhead).
| keybored wrote:
| I never had the time (thankfully) to get good at Subversion.
| But now that I've "internalised [the pain]" of a DVCS I could
| never go back to a centralized VCS. Interacting with a server
| just to check the log? Either promiscuously share everything
| I do with the server _or_ layer some kind of second-order VCS
| on top of Subversion just to get the privilege of local and
| private-to-me development? Perish the thought.
| ndiddy wrote:
| SVN is fine as long as you don't have multiple people editing
| the same file in the same time. In that case, generally one
| person gets his work overwritten. Committing on SVN is
| basically the equivalent of "git push --force".
| DannyBee wrote:
| Actually, Google Code was never trying to win.
|
| It was simply trying to prevent SF from becoming a shitty
| monoculture that hurt everyone, which it was when Google Code
| launched. Google was 100% consistent on this from the day it
| launched to the day it folded. It was not trying to make money,
| or whatever
|
| I was there, working on it, when it was 4 of us :)
|
| So to write all these funny things about taste or what not, is
| totally besides the point.
|
| We folded it up because we achieved the goal we sought at the
| time, and didn't see a reason to continue.
|
| People could get a good experience with the competition that now
| existed, and we would have just ended up cannibalizing the
| market.
|
| So we chose to exit, and worked with Github/bitbucket/others to
| provide migration tools.
|
| All of this would have been easy to find out simply by asking,
| but it appears nobody bothers to actually ask other people things
| anymore, and I guess that doesn't make as good a story as "we
| totally destroyed them because they had no taste, so they up and
| folded".
| schacon wrote:
| I'm not sure what "SF" means in this context. San Francisco? I
| can't figure out what you want to say Google Code was for
| exactly. If Google launches a major project, I find it hard to
| believe that it's just for fun.
| kemayo wrote:
| Sourceforge.
| ipsi wrote:
| SourceForge, probably.
| blktiger wrote:
| It's short for Source Forge which is still around technically
| but a shadow of its former self.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| It was early example of the "enshittification" phenomenon.
| It was a particular bad example of advertising and other
| spammy distractions because sites for developers have the
| lowest CPM of anything except maybe anime fan sites.
|
| It is super hard to break through a two-sided market but it
| is possible when a competitor has given up entirely on
| competition, which might have happened in the SourceForge
| case because the money situation was so dire they couldn't
| afford to invest in it.
| eric-hu wrote:
| Didn't they also start packaging malware into binary
| downloads?
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Yep.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| By then they were already desperate from the previous
| enshittification.
| 3eb7988a1663 wrote:
| ...lowest CPM of anything except maybe anime fan sites.
|
| I am not in ads, so could you expand on this? Why are
| anime sites low value vs other niche? I would naively
| expect that anime has huge numbers of <20 year old fans
| who are more prone to advertising merchandise.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| They pirate or already subscribe to Crunchroll. Many
| sites are nowhere near brand safe (one reason Danbooru is
| as good as it is that is not even brand safe for porn
| ads.) Some of them buy figurines, but they already know
| where to get them. Good smile would rather invest in
| 4chan than buy ads on western anime sites. I have no idea
| what it is like in Japan.
|
| I am skeptical of claims that "advertisers want to target
| young people because they have a lifetime of consumption
| ahead of them". Maybe that is true of Proctor and Gamble
| (who expect to still be selling Dawn and Tide 50 years
| from now) but few advertisers are thinking ahead more
| than one quarter, if that --- particularly in the
| internet age where an ad click can be tracked to a
| transaction.
|
| People today will say all the ads on TV target oldsters
| because only oldsters watch TV but circa 2000 there was
| no streaming and watching TV made me think "I want to die
| before I get old" because there were so many ads for
| drugs and embarrassing health conditions and personal
| injury lawyers and relatively little for things you would
| spend your own money on because not a lot of people in
| the audience have money to spend particularly after
| paying the cable bill.
| giantrobot wrote:
| A small SourceForge retrospective for those not around at
| the time:
|
| This post's overview of contributing to Open Source is
| largely correct. You'd get the source tarball for a
| project, make some changes, and then e-mail the
| author/maintainer witch a patch. Despite the post's claim
| Open Source existed long before 1998.
|
| Rarely did Internet randos have any access to a project's
| VCS. A lot of "projects" (really just a program written
| by a single person) didn't even have meaningful VCS,
| running CVS or RVS were skills unto themselves. There was
| also the issue that a lot of Open Source was written by
| students and hosted on school servers or an old Linux box
| in a dorm.
|
| SourceForge came along riding the first Internet bubble.
| They let a lot of small FOSS projects go legit by giving
| them a project homepage without a .edu domain or tilde in
| it. They also got a managed VCS (CVS at first then
| Subversion later) and contact e-Mail addresses, forums,
| and other bits that made the lives of Linux distro and
| BSD ports maintainers much easier. They also had a number
| of mirror sites which enabled a level of high
| availability most projects could never have had
| previously.
|
| Then SourceForge's enshitification began as bubble money
| ran out. The free tier of features was decreased and then
| they started bundling AdWare into Windows installers.
| SourceForge would literally repackage a Windows installer
| to install the FOSS application _and_ some bullshit
| AdWare, IIRC a browser toolbar was a major one.
|
| As the officially upstream source for FOSS projects
| bundled for package managers the AdWare wasn't much of a
| problem. But SourceForge was the distribution channel for
| a significant amount of Windows FOSS apps like VLC,
| MirandaIM, and a bunch of P2P apps which were impacted by
| the AdWare bundling at various points.
|
| A GitHub founder patting themselves on the back for the
| success of GitHub is sort of funny because GitHub
| followed a similar track to SourceForge but got bought by
| Microsoft instead of a company coasting on VC money. I
| can easily imagine a world where an independent GitHub
| enshittified had they not been bought by a money
| fountain.
| jakub_g wrote:
| > GitHub followed a similar track to SourceForge
|
| Can you provide an example?
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I agree w/ the analysis in the article and yours. "Good
| taste" for them must have been influenced by "let's not
| be SourceForge".
|
| Part of the enshittification story is the tragedy of the
| non-profitable site that has a large user base. Here is a
| recent example
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41463734
|
| Potentially investments in a site could have huge
| leverage because of the existing user base.
|
| I (and most of my team) lost our jobs at one of the most
| well-loved open accessing publishing sites in the world
| because of a complex chain of events that was rooted in
| the site not having a sustainable funding source despite
| the fact that it was fantastically cheap to run if you
| divided the budget by the number of daily users.
| Fortunately they figured it all out and the site is still
| here and if you work in physics, math or cs you probably
| used it today.
|
| Still it was painful to see "new shiny" projects that had
| 4x the funding but 1% the user count at most, or to
| estimate we could save users $500M a year with a $500k
| budget.
|
| Thus you can overthrow SourceForge but cannot overthrow
| something profitable and terrible such as Facebook,
| Match.com or the "blob" of review sites that dominate
| Google, see
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41488857
| philipkglass wrote:
| There is still some code hosted on SourceForge that has no
| other public source. This is unsettling because I don't
| know how long SourceForge will continue operating and
| Wayback Machine captures of SF pages don't include
| tarballs. Download backups yourself whenever you find
| something like this.
|
| I'm contributing to someone's software that started as an
| academic project. The current version is on GitHub with
| history back to 2014 but early releases back to 2008 (from
| before the author started using version control) are on SF
| in the form release_1.0.tgz, release_1.1.tgz, etc. I
| stumbled on these old versions this weekend while looking
| for related material. Once I decompressed them I found that
| they contained notes and old code that really helps to
| understand the current project's evolution and structure.
| LegionMammal978 wrote:
| Yeah, what especially irks me with SourceForge is the
| common habit of projects regularly deleting all outdated
| releases (due to some per-project size limit? or just not
| to clutter up the list?). In old projects with messy
| releases, it can be very hard to piece together exactly
| which revisions went into a version "x.y.z" that everyone
| else depended on, except by actually looking into the
| released files. If those files don't get archived
| anywhere, they just get lost to the ether. (At least,
| short of a manhunt for anyone with the files in an
| ancient backup at the bottom of the sea.)
| cruffle_duffle wrote:
| "shadow of its former self"
|
| Was there ever a point in time where it wasn't something
| that basically sucked? For some reason there are still some
| widely used ham radio packages that are hosted on
| sourceforge and it annoys me greatly. When you click the
| big green "Download" for the project you get.... .... a dll
| file. Why? Because the actual release artifact is some
| other zip file and for some reason it doesn't deserve the
| "Big Green Download" button.
|
| SF has always been this bad. Their core data model just
| doesn't jive with how people actually interact with open
| source projects.
|
| ... and for that matter didn't they stir up some
| controversy a long while ago for tampering with project
| artifacts and adding extra "stuff" in them? (spyware /
| nagware / **ware?)
| toast0 wrote:
| > Was there ever a point in time where it wasn't
| something that basically sucked?
|
| Yeah, when it launched it was cool and hip. Free public
| CVS server to host your open source cool project was
| cool. Probably went downhill as the ad market fell apart
| post dot-com, and the only way to get revenue was big
| green download buttons.
| wafflemaker wrote:
| This post replied to a post talking about Source Forge. Had
| the same problem :)
| schacon wrote:
| I now realize that it's SourceForge. :)
| breck wrote:
| I thought he was talking about SpaceForce. Wait until we
| get to 2050, SpaceForce develops a really shitty
| monoculture. That's why I came back.
| tsm wrote:
| SF is SourceForge, which at the time effectively had a
| monopoly (and also sucked)
| tadfisher wrote:
| It still sucks, but it sucked then too.
| DannyBee wrote:
| I miss mitch hedberg
| noitpmeder wrote:
| SourceForge
| crop_rotation wrote:
| I think it means SourceForge.
| nine_k wrote:
| The fact that letters "SF" may need explanation in a context
| of code hosting and building says how thoroughly the job has
| been done. A number of good alternatives exist, there's no
| monoculture (even though some market domination is definitely
| in place, but now by a mysterious GH).
| digging wrote:
| > A number of good alternatives exist, there's no
| monoculture
|
| That doesn't sound true to me at all, except maybe in some
| very small niches. I've used Bitbucket at exactly one job;
| I've found Codeberg, but no project I've used was actually
| hosted there; and literally everything else I see or use is
| on Github.
| sangnoir wrote:
| A decent number of larger open source projects self-host.
| nine_k wrote:
| GitLab is relatively more widely represented, but of the
| projects I encounter, about 2-3% are on GitLab. I
| encountered projects on Codeberg, too, and even on sr.ht.
|
| A bunch of larger projects have a mirror on GitHub for
| easier access.
|
| BTW there's launchpad.net which is often overlooked, bit
| it's vital for Ubuntu-specific projects.
|
| At paid day jobs, I had to use BitBucket at least twice,
| and I miss better code review tools, like Phabricator.
|
| GitHub definitely dominates the market, partly due to the
| network effects, but I don't think they have a lot of
| moat. If something goes badly enough wrong there, there
| will be plenty of viable alternatives with an easy to
| trivial migration path.
| boredtofears wrote:
| I've used bitbucket at almost every job I've had. I
| suspect it's usage is much higher for private companies
| than people realize - if you've already bought into
| Atlassian for JIRA or Confluence it makes bitbucket an
| obvious selection.
| ikety wrote:
| Why is that? Jira github integration is nice and simple.
| boredtofears wrote:
| Why wouldn't it be? Simpler to use first party
| integration and have centralized user management.
| Bitbucket works just fine.
| consteval wrote:
| Bitbucket is also just good - legitimately. I prefer the
| UI for a lot of stuff.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| It reminds me of how Stackoverflow won so successfully that
| to even know about the old "expert sex change" joke is to
| thoroughly date oneself in modern conversation.
| Brian_K_White wrote:
| Earlier today I said that "what your github stars say
| about you" site was slashdotted. No one reacted so maybe
| I'll write about it on my LJ.
| shawabawa3 wrote:
| It's a bit of a cop out to say "we were never trying to win"
|
| If you were never trying to win, that's a product failure
|
| You should have been trying to win, you should have built a
| strong competitor to GitHub and you shouldn't have let it rot
| until it was shut down
|
| The world would have been a better place if Google code tried
| to be as good as GitHub
| ulbu wrote:
| > If you were never trying to win, that's a product failure.
|
| what?
| sanderjd wrote:
| Different groups of people have different goals. Not every
| group of people has "winning" a market as their primary goal.
| DannyBee wrote:
| > It's a bit of a cop out to say "we were never trying to
| win"
|
| It's literally not? We had a goal from the beginning - create
| enough competition to either force SF to become better (at
| that time it was infinite ads and malware), or that someone
| else wins.
|
| > You should have been trying to win, you should have built a
| strong competitor to GitHub and you shouldn't have let it rot
| until it was shut down
|
| That's your goal, not mine (or at the time, Google). Feel
| free to do it!
|
| You don't like what we had as a goal - that's okay. It
| doesn't mean we either failed, or had the wrong goal. We just
| had one you don't happen to like.
|
| > The world would have been a better place if Google code
| tried to be as good as GitHub
|
| One of the things to ask before you either start something or
| keep doing something is "who actually wants you to win?" If
| the answer is "nobody", it might not make any sense to do.
|
| It's not obvious in 2016 anyone would have wanted us to win.
| By then, Google had lived long enough to see itself become a
| villain. There was reasonable competition in the space.
|
| I don't believe we would have really served people well to
| keep going.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| It was similar with Chrome. Internet Explorer was the
| monoculture browser and stagnating. Google had things they
| wanted to do on the web but needed better browsers. The
| original goal was to introduce competition in the browser
| space so that all browsers would get better. They may have
| changed goals along the way, but that was the original stated
| goal. In the end they killed IE and now they are the
| monoculture outside of Safari.
| BSDobelix wrote:
| So wait, you tried to prevent SF to become a "shitty
| monoculture"?
|
| First: That sounds completely not like Google
|
| Second: Now you have GH as the "shitty monoculture" (owner is
| MS and erases your license for Co-pilot)
|
| Third: >>We folded it up because we achieved the goal we sought
| at the time, and didn't see a reason to continue.
|
| Yeah ok that sounds like Google, try's to enter another market
| just to hurt them then folds ;)
| remexre wrote:
| For a comparison on the scale of harm from the monoculture,
| recall that SourceForge was bundling malware with downloads,
| and still has a full page of ads when you download from it.
|
| If I recall correctly, SVN was also more popular than Git at
| the time, so migrating hosts was a lot more painful than
| now...
| BSDobelix wrote:
| And then you force people to change from google code to
| something else just to prove a point since people then
| where unable to setup svn server ;)
|
| Even today you find death links from google code repos.
| bluGill wrote:
| SVN's model is what everyone is using. Sure you git, but
| almost nobody is using the distributed parts - they all
| sync to a central sever (github). SVN just could get user
| management, or merges right - those should be solvable
| problems but somehow were not. (I don't know enough about
| SVN to speculate on why they didn't)
| DannyBee wrote:
| This was 2006 Google, which did stuff semi-altruistically all
| the time.
|
| At that point, SF was serving malware and stuff. It was
| really not a great time.
|
| Github became a monoculture years later when others folded.
| Google code was shut down in 2016. Github wasn't quite a
| monoculture then.
|
| I also said, back in 2014, that it might be necessary to do
| something like google code again in 5-10 years:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8605689
|
| 10 years later, here we are i guess :)
|
| Though i think what i said then still holds - Github is not
| anywhere near as bad or unreliable as SF was.
| BSDobelix wrote:
| SF served "malware" in 2013 NOT 2006:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SourceForge#Adware_controvers
| y
|
| After slashdot was purchased from condenast (i think?)
| naniwaduni wrote:
| They had a bad name for the download pages being ad-
| infested even before they bundled the malware in the
| installers.
|
| (And yes, fake download buttons on a site serving binary
| downloads went exactly where you'd expect.)
| BSDobelix wrote:
| >fake download buttons
|
| Yes and today Ad-Sense (Google) took the Crown from being
| then biggest Scam AD's deploy-er.
|
| And really i don't think that's true before they where
| sold, ad's sure, scam/malware stuff? I don't think
| so...at least i cant remember.
| DannyBee wrote:
| I mean, that's just when they did it fairly deliberately.
| Regardless, I think you would be hard pressed to argue SF
| was a great hosting environment when Google Code
| launched, which was the point.
| BSDobelix wrote:
| >hard pressed to argue SF was a great hosting environment
| when Google Code launched
|
| But SF had FTP, Websites, SVN hosting and i think even a
| WIKI, so you can hardly compare it with Google-Code...and
| hey at least they opensource'd their "forge":
|
| https://allura.apache.org/
|
| IDK i don't have such bad memory's about SF, even today
| you serve big files over SF because of GH limits.
| ndiddy wrote:
| SourceForge was originally open source, but they later
| closed it. GNU Savannah (https://savannah.gnu.org/) runs
| on a fork of the last open version of SourceForge.
| BSDobelix wrote:
| >SourceForge was originally open source
|
| True after slashdot got buy'd, they also served malware
| AFTER the takeover (2013), and now look at that year:
|
| Allura graduated from incubation with the Apache Software
| Foundation in March >>2013
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Allura
|
| Google-Code was in 2006 right?
| jiveturkey wrote:
| I do wish there were enough incentive to have a strong
| commercial gerrit offering. There are some very good ideas
| in gerrit, and it would have strong differentiation vs
| github-styled offerings.
|
| Not just because I like gerrit, but because the github
| monoculture is wearing on me.
| defen wrote:
| Incidentally, this is why I don't use any Google products other
| than search. It's never clear to me which ones are real
| products that are trying to win and make money, and which ones
| are just fun side projects that a multibillion dollar
| corporation is doing out of the goodness of their hearts, but
| could get shut down at any time.
| bitpush wrote:
| Business strategy is more than just launch product, make
| money. Companies operate in a dynamic space, and if you play
| any game (basketball, chess ..) you know that moving forward
| at all cost is _not_ how you play the game. Sometimes you
| side-step, sometimes you take a step back, sometimes you
| sacrifice your piece.
|
| If you expect you team to just go-go-go, you might something
| in the short term but you'll fail miserably in long-term.
| chrisandchris wrote:
| That is totally fine, but Google is a case where they go
| into new business units and fairly often kill those units
| quite soon.
|
| It's not like they're doing cereals and now they're doing
| other cereals, so you can fall back to their previous
| cereals. You always have to find a new supplier, or then
| just start buying bread.
| adamc wrote:
| Yeah, there are so many examples. It's one of the reasons
| I was unwilling to jump on board Google Stadia... I kept
| thinking "let's wait and see how it does". Particularly
| since you had to buy non-transferable game licenses.
|
| And, of course, they shut it down. At this point, Google
| is going to have to be in a space for at least 5 years
| and clearly be highly successful before I would even
| think about using them.
| magicalist wrote:
| Eh, when it happened the world was ready. It felt like a
| different internet back then, and it was pretty great for a
| company to say that everyone was already on github anyways,
| so let's all go there (Microsoft followed almost the exact
| same timeline with Codeplex, and really who cares).
|
| More Google style would be shortly after shutting down Google
| Code starting up a new code hosting project, migrating
| several times to always slightly incompatible frontends
| requiring developer changes, shutting down the project, and
| shortly afterwards starting up a new code hosting project...
| 0x1ch wrote:
| Every project by Google I was willing to jump platforms for,
| they killed. So outside of email, maps, and search, sometimes
| voice, they have nothing left that is worth investing time
| into. It will disappear within a couple years or less.
| sureIy wrote:
| Voice? Could easily fold and be sold to Sprint. I'm
| honestly surprised (and thankful) it's been working for 15+
| years. Completely out of Google character. I hope they
| forgot about it running on a server under someone's desk in
| the basement just below a red stapler.
| inanutshellus wrote:
| Presumably because it's still providing value. It was
| originally about mass collecting voice data so they could
| train their speech-to-text capabilities with various
| dialects.
|
| Dialects are always in flux and there are plenty of
| languages out there they haven't conquered, so ... I'd
| guess they're just leaving it running to detect new
| speech or languages or dialets or ... personal data
| gathering or... ?
| 0x1ch wrote:
| Man, they collected a lot of prank calls from my younger-
| self lol.
| glenstein wrote:
| Same here. I'm equal parts glad and puzzled that it
| hasn't been killed. I genuinely don't know what I would
| replace it with.
| delichon wrote:
| I used it since a few years before Google bought
| GrandCentral in '07. A couple of years ago I moved to
| voip.ms as part of my de-googling and am happy with it.
| There are oodles of such providers.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Does Sprint even exist anymore
| bobthepanda wrote:
| no, Sprint was folded into T-mobile.
|
| The only reason that merger was even allowed to happen
| was because it was extremely clear that Sprint would not
| have been a going concern into the next year if it would
| stay independent.
| saurik wrote:
| Hush now, don't remind them of it!! ;P
|
| In all seriousness, though: if I were a user of Google
| Voice, I'd be seriously concerned that they would shut it
| down in a way that caused me to lose access to my phone
| number (even if only indirectly, as happened recently
| with their divesture of Google Domains or whatever their
| registrar was called)... you are much braver than I ;P.
| no_wizard wrote:
| Fiber is also still running, somehow. I don't think they're
| expanding much if at all but I'm shocked it hasn't been
| sold off.
|
| Frankly, I'm just as shocked they didn't go full throttle
| with it either, because talk about a data selling gold mine
| with all that traffic
|
| While I'm on that subject, it could have been a real
| opportunity for them to push fiber + YouTube TV as a
| package. Google isn't good at making original content but
| at some point they have made a software + services play
| that makes such a package more palatable and user friendly,
| imagine subscribing to a YouTube channel and it becomes a
| channel as part of the TV app for instance. A lot of people
| watch channels like this as it is.
| cymor wrote:
| They've been expanding again, and are now offering 8gbps
| in my area. I've been very happy with it, and I'm still
| only paying $70/month.
| manmal wrote:
| That's absolutely amazing. Besides hosting at home, do
| you feel any difference vs say a 1gbps line? Surely most
| servers won't saturate this when downloading or browsing?
| kstrauser wrote:
| Our ISP (Sonic) offers 10Gb uncapped for $50/mo.
|
| I don't feel any difference over our previous 1G service,
| other than it _never_ lags, even if multiple kids are
| streaming video and I have a backup running. The biggest
| difference is that it 's half the price of the 1G service
| that ran over AT&T's fiber.
| runevault wrote:
| Google Fiber is actually working on expanding to where I
| live, I keep getting ads on Youtube for it.
| otteromkram wrote:
| Search?
|
| DuckDuckGo is great for most purposes.
|
| The best product Google has is Maps. That's about it.
| Dwedit wrote:
| DuckDuckGo is literally Bing but with location-based ads
| added to the bottom of your search results.
| Retric wrote:
| When did that change? I haven't tested it in a while, but
| in the past DuckDuckGo indexed some stuff that wasn't on
| Bing.
|
| I've been using Google and Duck on different kinds of
| searches these days, because neither is universally
| better but I might try Bing again.
|
| Edit: NM, Bings UI is still annoying. It slides stuff in
| from the side when you scroll down.
| richardlblair wrote:
| Unrelated to the thread - do you use any email providers with
| a custom domain? If so, would you suggest them? Who are they?
| softfalcon wrote:
| Fastmail has been solid for the last several years. I would
| recommend it.
| queuebert wrote:
| Fastmail is just about perfect. Feels like email 30 years
| ago but with a spam filter.
| datadrivenangel wrote:
| Also a happy fastmail paying customer. The aliases are
| really good.
| dasil003 wrote:
| Fastmail
| jampekka wrote:
| You can also use gmail with a custom domain. Helps with not
| being locked in to Google, doesn't of course help in them
| selling your data.
|
| E.g. https://juri.dev/notes/email-routing-gmail-cloudflare/
| homebrewer wrote:
| If you need something cheap and are willing to deal with a
| tiny company, have a look at <https://purelymail.com>. I've
| been happy with them for two years, never had any problems
| with delivery, and they support infinite domains/aliases,
| and custom Sieve rules. But do not use it if you need
| 99.999999% SLAs or anything like that, because again --
| it's a one-man show.
| jacooper wrote:
| Proton mail
| pertique wrote:
| I agree with a lot of the other options, but I'd be remiss
| if I didn't mention one that isn't always obvious.
|
| With all the Big Corp asterisks, Microsoft Business Basic
| can be a pretty great deal at 6 USD/month. Solid
| reliability, aliases, (too many) config options, 1TB of
| OneDrive storage, cloud MS apps, etc.
| umbra07 wrote:
| i really, really like purelymail. great pricing, good
| customer service, reliability, and documentation.
|
| other popular options are fastmail, migadu, and mxroute.
| lbotos wrote:
| I've used Fast Mail, liked it a lot, but I think at the
| time the pricing wasn't the best.
|
| I then used some other platform that was quite "old school"
| that is recommended here. The Mail Admin was very
| opinionated which lead to some mail being blocked. That
| wasn't cool.
|
| I'm now with Migadu on the cheapest plan and it's been
| fine. Had a few outages here and there, but otherwise
| solid.
|
| I'd happily rec Fastmail or Migadu.
| kstrauser wrote:
| Apple hosts custom domains at no extra charge if you have
| iCloud+. I've used it for a couple years now to host my
| family's domain and a couple of hobby ones for myself.
| n_plus_1_acc wrote:
| uberspace because of SSH access
| dgellow wrote:
| That's the big question mark I have for Flutter. Looks like a
| pretty nice platform from the outside, but I cannot see
| Google NOT killing it
| saghm wrote:
| I assumed Flutter is open source; if they fix kill it off,
| is there a reason to not to expect the community to fork
| and maintain it? Presumably they'd have to rebrand it
| without Google giving permission for the name, but that
| alone doesn't seem like enough to stop it from existing in
| some form.
| clhodapp wrote:
| The base ROI of Flutter to Google isn't all that clear
| because it's relatively complex to maintain. Worse, it
| requires maintaining Dart, which appears to be a dead-end
| language in terms of adoption.
|
| If Flutter and Dart were donated to the community, they
| would most likely slowly die because no one outside of
| Google gets enough benefit from them to justify
| maintaining an entire programming language.
| nox101 wrote:
| It's worse. Flutter actually works against google's own
| interests. Webpages that render text in a canvas are not
| as easily indexable as webpages that emit html. It's
| funny too because the same is true for sites made with
| flutter. They aren't SEO friendly
|
| You could suggest using AI to OCR the canvas but even
| that would be subpar because most sites that use HTML
| provide multiple screens worth of info but sites that
| render to a canvas render only what's visible. The rest
| of the data is internal. You'd not only need the AI to
| successfully OCR the text, you'd need it to interact with
| the page get it to render what's not currently displayed.
| kyrra wrote:
| Googler, opinions are my own.
|
| You have to look at what teams at Google are using Flutter.
| Any dev tool Google officially releases tends to be funded
| by some product that actually likes/uses it.
|
| Current list from https://flutter.dev/showcase: GPay,
| Earth, Ads (this is a big one), and others.
|
| There are a lot of teams using it, which is why it's still
| getting so much support. If you see Google apps moving away
| from it, then it's time to start looking for an
| alternative.
|
| It's also why AngularDart still exists and is getting
| updated. There are large projects that use it, so they will
| keep supporting it.
| runevault wrote:
| The fact Pay and Ads both use, along with Youtube Create
| even, is a pretty good sign because if they have a non-
| trivial codebase of flutter/dart app(s) then killing it
| would impact all those teams who are doing important
| work. I've debated trying flutter/dart a few times and
| this makes me feel more willing to try it.
| jiveturkey wrote:
| mentioning the sunset of a google products, in general, in
| any thread about some specific google product, is a kind of
| godwin's law.
|
| because of ordering by vote, we can't see how quickly it
| happened in this case. in godwin's law the likelihood
| increases by length of discussion, implying a slow/linear
| kind of probability, but for google product sunset i would
| argue that the likelihood ramps up very aggressively from the
| start.
|
| i hereby dub this `jiveturkey's law`.
|
| like godwin's law, the subthread becomes a distraction.
| unlike godwin's law, the sunset distraction is always a
| legitimate point. it's just that it has become tired.
| grues-dinner wrote:
| > fun side projects that a multibillion dollar corporation is
| doing out of the goodness of their hearts
|
| Back then it felt like it was actually just possible that
| they just were that cool. Noughties Google was really
| something compared to the staid, implacable incumbents. 15GB
| (with a G!) of email storage that would grow forever! Google
| Earth! YouTube! Live long enough to see yourself become the
| villain indeed.
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| Google's leadership made their intentions clear with the
| purchase of the much reviled DoubleClick in 2007. They
| didn't become villains; it was always all about the money,
| just like everyone else.
| grues-dinner wrote:
| I think at least at first it was genuinely not
| villainous. The founders, I think, did mean it with
| "Don't Be Evil". After all, the crash hadn't happened,
| rates weren't zero yet, no one had smartphones, social
| media wasn't a word and the now-familiar all-pervasive
| Silicon Valley financialisation MBA cancer was yet to
| come. The realisation that "all the data" wasn't _just_
| about search index data and book scans did clearly hit
| (or, if that was the plan since 1998, surface) by the mid
| 00s.
|
| Double Click was the year after Google Code. They had a
| good few years of being considered cool and, well, Not
| Evil. Google Earth was 2001, Gmail, Scholar and Books was
| 2004, Reader and Gtalk (RIP x 2) 2005, Patents in 2006
| and dropping 1.65 billion plus (which sounds trivial now
| that everyone and their mum's are worth billions for
| whatever app, but not then) on YouTube that year, even
| though it was only a year old. Mad times. The search
| engine itself was of course revolutionary and peerless.
| And you could use it on your WAP phone until something
| called the "iPhone" happened.
|
| For those of us who were young and, yes, naive, and who
| weren't paying attention in the first dot com crash in
| those newspapers adults read while we played (8 year olds
| in the 90s rarely using IRC to get the lowdown on Silicon
| Valley secrets), it seemed like it was possibly a new
| age. "Going public" in 2004 wasn't yet another obvious
| "oh here we go again" moments, because they were among
| the first in the generation.
|
| Chrome and Android was 2008, and I remember first hearing
| around then the phrase "Google Mothership". Though I
| never stopped using Firefox (and Opera, i don't remember
| when I switched to Firefox), Chrome was undeniably a
| technical coup at the time, and being cool and shiny and
| actually good at being a browser, while kicking that evil
| Microsoft in the teeth helped.
| iteratethis wrote:
| As for real products, at Google's current size it has become
| near impossible to launch new ones worth their time.
|
| Google currently has a quarterly revenue of $70-80B.
|
| Imagine an internal team launches a new product to collect
| $100M in quarterly revenue. An earth-shattering success for
| any entrepreneur.
|
| For Google...it doesn't even move the needle. Does nothing
| for stock, it's not strategic, and may become a liability
| later on.
|
| You would need to launch a multi-billion new sub business for
| it to be of any interest to Google, which is impossibly hard.
| nextos wrote:
| This is why they should go full conglomerate and spin off
| companies all the time.
|
| Otherwise, with those expectations, it's impossible to
| build something good and impactful.
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| ... which is the reason why many large corporations acquire
| products: only once they are big enough, they are relevant.
|
| Issue for Google: They have to be carful for Anti-Trust not
| blocking the acquisition for some reason.
| sixo wrote:
| a simple heuristic: does it make Google a boatload of money?
| if yes, it's safe
| rubinelli wrote:
| Anything besides ads, GCP, and Apps in that bucket?
| meiraleal wrote:
| > Actually, Google Code was never trying to win. >
| It was simply trying to prevent SF from becoming a shitty
| monoculture that hurt everyone
|
| Being an insider of Google might make one be completely out-of-
| touch of reality. Google Video was trying to prevent Youtube
| from becoming a shitty monoculture that hurt everyone, too?
| This one clearly failed then.
| BSDobelix wrote:
| >Google Video was created to prevent Youtube from becoming a
| shitty monoculture, too?
|
| Like Google+ and all the other attempts:
|
| https://killedbygoogle.com/
|
| Google is actually the good guy to prevent monopolies, we
| just don't understand them ;)
| JohnBooty wrote:
| All of this would have been easy to find out simply by asking
|
| I'm not a journalist, but in an ideal scenario, how would
| somebody have known that you were one of the key members of the
| project?
|
| It's not like Google (or anybody else) makes this easy to know.
| And call me jaded, but something tells me official Google PR
| channels would not have been really helpful for this.
|
| And also - are most engineers in your sort of position even
| free to remark on such projects w.r.t. NDAs, etc?
| SoftTalker wrote:
| The way it used to work is that tech journalists (or sports
| journalists, or any other type) had contacts in the industry.
| If those people were not directly involved, they probably
| could at least suggest someone else who might know. Leads
| were followed up, and eventually the writer got the story.
|
| I'm not sure how it works now, cynically I would suggest that
| the writer asks an LLM to write the story, gets a rehash of
| Wikipedia and other sources, and they maybe makes some
| attempts at firsthand verification.
| DannyBee wrote:
| "I'm not a journalist, but in an ideal scenario, how would
| somebody have known that you were one of the key members of
| the project?"
|
| It's not about asking _me_ , it's about not asserting things
| you don't know.
|
| Instead of saying "people did x for y reason" when you have
| literally no data on x or y, you could say "I don't know why
| x happened, i only know about z". Or if it's super important
| you try to put something there, beforehand, you could say
| "hey does anyone know why x happened? I'm working on a blog
| post and want to get it right".
|
| Then, someone like me who saw it could happily email you or
| whatever and say "hey, here's the real story on x".
|
| Or not, in which case you can leave it at "i don't know".
|
| The right answer is not to just assert random things you make
| up in your head and force people to correct you. I'm aware of
| the old adage of basically "just put wrong stuff out there
| and someone will correct you", but i generally think that's
| super poor form when it's about *other people or things and
| their motivations". I care less when it's about "why is the
| sky blue".
|
| In this case, it also happens that there are plenty of on-
| record interviews and other things where what i said, was
| said back in the day.
|
| So a little spleunking would have told them the answer
| anyway.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| 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.
| DannyBee wrote:
| 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.
| softfalcon wrote:
| 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)
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| > The right answer is not to just assert random things you
| make up in your head and force people to correct you...
| super poor form
|
| Tough cookie, he succeeded via provocation. The norms you
| are advocating for as an alternative boil down to, "Google
| decides."
|
| Are those polite norms even worthy? You are speaking your
| truth on a semi-anonymous social media forum! It has really
| touched a nerve for you. The moderators here delight in the
| mildly miffed author responding to comment after comment.
| This is the opposite of however your "on-record interviews"
| were formatted before this little blog post - they weren't
| notable at all, they're still not notable, and here you are
| setting your record straight. It's great!
| burnished wrote:
| Really letting your opinion on Google dictate the rest of
| your response here huh?
| wendyshu wrote:
| 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.
| dlisboa wrote:
| Maybe a cofounder of GitHub has the reach and network to ask
| for the e-mail of someone who worked on the Google Code team.
| A journalist might not, that's true.
|
| Just flat out saying they had no taste in product
| development, however, is a bit of trash talking for no
| reason.
| mattnewton wrote:
| Journalists are supposed to investigate not speculate because
| finding an email is too hard
| jaredklewis wrote:
| Well, finding, vetting, and getting comments from sources is
| like half of journalism. If you can't or won't do that,
| whatever you are doing is probably not journalism. It's just
| an editorial, think-piece, or whatever.
| hintymad wrote:
| > It was simply trying to prevent SF from becoming a shitty
| monoculture that hurt everyone
|
| Initially I thought SF means San Francisco, and I thought "Wow,
| what kind of monoculture can be prevented by Google Code", and
| then I realized that SF meant Source Forge.
| jonathanyc wrote:
| > It was not trying to make money, or whatever
|
| If Google Code succeeded, it's hard to imagine that Google
| would not have tried to monetize it someday.
|
| This also reminds me of Google's (also initial) position on
| Chrome vis-a-vis Firefox: create a product "not trying to make
| money, or whatever" but just to limit the market share of a
| competitor.
|
| The less flattering term for this in the context of
| anticompetitive behavior is "dumping":
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_policy)
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| It seems highly likely that a successful Google Code would be
| used as an onramp to Google Cloud. IOW, indirect monetization
| so it likely would still have a generous free component.
| DannyBee wrote:
| "If Google Code succeeded, it's hard to imagine that Google
| would not have tried to monetize it someday."
|
| Google code did succeed in that sense. It had hundreds of
| thousands of 30-day active projects, and some insane market
| share of developers.
|
| I don't honestly remember if it was even shrinking when we
| decided to stop taking in new projects.
|
| I doubt we would have monetized it directly (IE sell an
| enterprise version) - the entire market for development tools
| is fairly small.
|
| In 2022 it was ~5 billion dollars, and future estimates keep
| getting revised downwards :).
|
| CAGR has been about 10-14% in practice, sometimes less.
|
| I don't remember if it's still true, but most of that 5
| billion dollars was going to Atlassian (80% at one point).
|
| Now, if you project backwards to 2006, and compare it to
| other markets google could be competing in, you can imagine
| even if you got 100% of this segment it would not have
| actually made you a ton directly.
|
| Indirectly, eh, my guess is you still make more off the
| goodwill than most other things.
|
| It's actually fairly rare to make any significant money at
| development tools directly.
|
| Nowadays, the main source even seems to be trying to sell AI
| and productivity, rather than tools.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| The only real tragedy here is that Google really did have best-
| of-industry semantic search integrated into their code
| searching tools, something that nobody has been able to
| replicate.
|
| GitHub is great, but it's absolute _ass_ for search. To the
| point where for any nontrivial question I have to pull down the
| repo and use command-line tooling on it.
| dmoy wrote:
| Do you mean the non-semantic indexing, which covered most of
| Google Code? Like grep-style supporting, but no real semantic
| data?
|
| Or are you talking about the few repos that had semantic
| indexing via Kythe (chromium, android, etc)? We never got
| that working for generic random open repos, primarily because
| it requires so much integration with the build system. A
| series of three or four separate people on Kythe tried
| various experimentation for cheaply-enough hooking Kythe into
| arbitrary open repos, but we all failed.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| I'm talking about Kythe, and learning that it ran into
| issues generalizing it for non-Google-controlled APIs
| explains a lot of the history I thought I knew!
| dmoy wrote:
| Yea we never had it for even all Google controlled repos,
| just the ones that would work with us to get compilation
| units from their build system.
|
| I was the last one to try (and fail) at getting arbitrary
| repos to extract and index in Kythe. We never found a
| good solution to get the set of particular insanity that
| is Kythe extraction working with random repos, each with
| their own separate insane build configs.
| setheron wrote:
| Isn't it working here: https://cs.opensource.google/bazel/b
| azel/+/master:src/main/s...
|
| I remember there were docs how to onboard a repo to that
| list.
| jerjerjer wrote:
| New GitHub full text search [1] is amazing. It is so good
| that for me it often replaces StackOverflow - I just use it
| to see how some API function is being used. Especially useful
| if you're searching for an example with a specific argument
| value.
|
| [1] https://cs.github.com/
| jiveturkey wrote:
| have you used google's internal code search though? the
| link you posted is amazing in its performance, for sure.
| but once you are in some repo and doing what most of us
| call "code search", github drops off in utility vs google's
| internal tooling pretty quickly.
|
| i'm only remarking on this because of the context in the
| parent you are replying to, whom i agree with. local
| tooling is better than what github provides. as a
| standalone comment i would simply upvote you.
| rty32 wrote:
| Chances are that a random stranger on the Internet has
| not used Google's _internal_ code search. Even if that
| person has, it would be useful to provide the context for
| others to understand.
| dmoy wrote:
| They're talking about Kythe
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Kythe
|
| https://youtu.be/VYI3ji8aSM0?si=D3Z3FIsB8wa7MTE6
|
| Think jump-to-def and listing cross references working
| with c++ aliases, across generated code boundaries, etc.
| upcoming-sesame wrote:
| Why is this not the default?
| NoahKAndrews wrote:
| I believe it is nowadays. For a while it was in beta.
| skybrian wrote:
| I don't see a contradiction; it's all part of the story.
|
| Understanding your (Google's) motivations explains why Google
| Code didn't improve as much. It doesn't contradict that Github
| had better UI, or their explanation of their motivation to
| build a better UI.
| franciscop wrote:
| There's a typo in the subtitle and just below this it's quoting
| the controversial/sensationalist content creator t3dotgg. While
| it's a very interesting topic, these things remove a lot of
| credibility to the rest of the article, plus now seeing your
| comment, I'm flagging it since it seems a very low quality one.
| osmsucks wrote:
| > Actually, Google Code was never trying to win.
|
| Herein lies the tragedy. Google could've offered, even sold,
| its internal development experience (code hosting, indexing and
| searching, code reviews, build farms, etc...) which is and was
| amazing, but it decided that it wasn't worth doing and let
| GitHub eat its lunch.
| hanwenn wrote:
| Developer infrastructure at google reported into cloud from
| 2013 to 2019, and we (i was there) tried to do exactly that:
| building products for gcp customers based on our experience
| with building interval developer tools. It was largely a
| disaster. The one product I was involved with (git hosting
| and code review) had to build an MVP product to attract entry
| level GCP customers, but also keep our service running for
| large existing internal customers, who were servicing
| billion+ users and continuously growing their load. When
| Thomas Kurian took over GCP, he put all the dev products on
| ice and moved the internal tooling group out of cloud.
| svnt wrote:
| I had this theory that generations raised on the internet and
| exposed to it from birth would be the most humble generations
| ever, because we all look for ways to be uniquely valuable, and
| it became nearly impossible to be egotistical when faced with
| the entirety of even just a mature youtube platform.
|
| Instead what we got was higher degrees of selective attention,
| and very elaborate and obscure flip-cup tricks.
| Jyaif wrote:
| > We folded it up because we achieved the goal we sought at the
| time, and didn't see a reason to continue.
|
| In 2018, MS bought Github for 7B.
|
| Google Code started to be shutdown mid-2015. In 2015 it wasn't
| clear yet that it would be valuable for Google to host the
| world's code?
| rty32 wrote:
| Well, it is hard/very distasteful to put ads on a source code
| hosting website, so this likely isn't aligned with Google's
| interest. No, I am not joking.
| Brian_K_White wrote:
| You sound like you're proud of this work and this plan and this
| sequence of events.
|
| code.google going away, without the excuse that google itself
| was going away, after I had started to rely on it and link to
| it in docs and scripts all over the place, is what taught me to
| never depend on google for anything.
|
| If google had said "The purpose of this service is an academic
| goal of Googles, not to serve users needs. This service will be
| shut off as soon as Googles academic purpose is met." I would
| not have used it.
|
| But Google did not say that. Google presented the service as a
| service whos purpose was to be useful to users. And only
| because of that, we used it.
|
| Do you see the essential problem here? Effectively, Google
| harnessed users for it's own purposes without their consent by
| means of deception. The free-ness of the service that the users
| received doesn't even count as a fair trade in a transaction
| because the transaction was based on one party misinforming the
| other.
|
| So thanks for all your work making the world a better place.
| procrastitron wrote:
| > code.google going away, without the excuse that google
| itself was going away, after I had started to rely on it and
| link to it in docs and scripts all over the place
|
| It didn't go away, though. It got archived and that archive
| is still up and running today. Those links you put all over
| the place should still be working.
|
| > If google had said "The purpose of this service is an
| academic goal of Googles, not to serve users needs. This
| service will be shut off as soon as Googles academic purpose
| is met." I would not have used it.
|
| That's not an accurate representation of what DannyBee said.
| Moreover, what DannyBee _did_ say is in line with what Google
| itself said was its goal when the service launched:
| https://support.google.com/code/answer/56511
|
| "One of our goals is to encourage healthy, productive open
| source communities. Developers can always benefit from more
| choices in project hosting."
|
| > Effectively, Google harnessed users for it's own purposes
| without their consent by means of deception.
|
| This does not appear to be a good faith argument.
|
| None of what DannyBee said in their comment aligns with that
| interpretation. Neither does that interpretation line up with
| Google's publicly stated goals when they launched Google
| Code.
| sergiotapia wrote:
| I still miss Codeplex from microsoft ;) it was a really beautiful
| website
| AnotherGoodName wrote:
| Well Sourceforge literally bundled malware for a while. So
| everyone had to move.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31110206
|
| This articles about the open source distribution side but I will
| also point out that the number of developers who don't realise
| your remote GitHub repo can be located on any machine with an ssh
| connection and nothing more is surprising. As in people use
| private GitHub repos thinking that's THE way you work with git.
| If GitHub was just for open source hosting I suspect they'd have
| trouble monetising like sourceforge clearly did which led to
| scammy attempts to make money. But they always had this huge
| usage of private GitHub repos supporting the rest. This must have
| helped a lot imho.
| schacon wrote:
| This is not my recollection, at least at the time. I remember
| meeting with one of the SourceForge founders and being a little
| star struck. SourceForge was a huge deal at the time and we
| totally felt like we were the underdogs in that arena. Perhaps
| later they got more desperate, but in 2008, SourceForge was the
| 900lb gorilla.
| AnotherGoodName wrote:
| 2013 is when the binaries had malware included although even
| in 2008 they were guilty of having 5 download buttons due to
| excessive and unpoliced inline advertising with only one of
| those buttons being the holy grail that linked to the
| download you actually wanted. Choose wisely.
| kstrauser wrote:
| Who is "we"?
| schacon wrote:
| Sorry, "we" is GitHub. I'm the author of the article and
| one of the GH cofounders.
| kstrauser wrote:
| Oh! Heh, that makes sense now.
| relaxing wrote:
| Well damn. So much for the "Github had better taste"
| thesis.
|
| Still, Sourceforge was a terrible user experience. Github
| was a breathe of fresh air.
| michaelt wrote:
| To help our recollections, let's look at Sourceforge's browse
| page, from back in 2008: https://web.archive.org/web/20081118
| 033645/http://sourceforg...
|
| They did indeed host quite a lot of stuff, and it was
| undeniably popular as a place to get your binaries hosted
| free of charge.
|
| But at the same time, is it being used as a source code
| repository? A lot of those projects don't show the CVS/SVN
| features. And sourceforge never hosted the biggest and most
| established projects, Linux and Gnu and PHP and Java and Qt
| and Perl and Python were all doing their own thing. And
| pretty much every project visible on that page had its own
| separate website, very few projects hosted on sourceforge
| exclusively.
| relaxing wrote:
| No, you'd upload source tarballs. Live public access to VCS
| wasn't a thing for most projects.
| giantrobot wrote:
| SourceForge was the upstream source of truth for a huge
| percentage of small apps bundled by various distros (and
| BSD ports etc). Even when the upstream maintainers just
| uploaded the latest tarball to SF and didn't use their
| hosted VCS, just the hosting was a major boon to all of the
| tiny teams and individual maintainers of FOSS projects.
| zargon wrote:
| > your remote GitHub repo can be located on any machine
|
| It's such a an easy mistake to say that you did it while
| explaining you don't need GitHub for git repos. :)
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > If GitHub was just for open source hosting I suspect they'd
| have trouble monetising like sourceforge clearly did
|
| It made it harder to monetize, but it enabled Source Forge to
| use a huge amount of voluntarily-given bandwidth and saved them
| a fortune at a time bandwidth was crazy-expensive.
|
| Bandwidth costs were one of the reasons something like GitHub
| didn't appear earlier, and suddenly popped-up a lot of times
| out of nowhere.
| arp242 wrote:
| > Sourceforge literally bundled malware for a while. So
| everyone had to move.
|
| This was _after_ SourceForge hugely declined in popularity.
|
| The correct sequence of events is:
|
| 1. SourceForge massively declined in popularity,
|
| 2. and then in a desperate attempt to extract cash they started
| bundling malware.
|
| Not the other way around.
|
| All of this had little to no effect on the migration away from
| SourceForge, which was already well underway in 2013 when the
| first controversy started. It _may_ have expedited thing
| somewhat, but not even sure about that. See for example [1]
| from 2011, which shows GitHub is already beating SourceForge by
| quite a margin. I found that article because it 's used as a
| citation for _" In response to the DevShare adware, many users
| and projects migrated to GitHub"_ on Wikipedia, which is simple
| flat-out wrong - that DevShare incident didn't happen until
| 2013 (I have removed that from the Wikipedia page now).
|
| It's baffles me how people keep getting the sequence of events
| wrong on HN.
|
| The reason is simple that SourceForge is just not very good and
| never was very good. Part of that is because of the ad-driven
| business model, part of that is that many features were just
| not done very well. Who actually used the SourceForge issue
| tracker or VCS browser? Almost no one, because it's crap.
|
| [1]: https://redmonk.com/sogrady/2011/06/02/blackduck-webinar/
| throwaway5752 wrote:
| _I professionally used RCS, CVS, Subversion and Perforce before
| Git came along. Hell, I was actually in a company that FTP 'd
| it's PHP files directly to the production server._
|
| People in the field less than 20 years might not appreciate the
| magnitude of this change (though, adding my two cents to the
| author's article, branching in p4 was fine). People may have also
| dealt with ClearCase (vobs!) or Microsoft Visual SourceSafe.
|
| Git did as much for software development velocity as any other
| development in recent history.
| kstrauser wrote:
| That's all true for me, too, although I hadn't used p4. I
| resisted Git for a little while because I didn't see the
| massive appeal of a distributed system in an office with a
| central server. CVS... _worked_. SVN was a much more pleasant
| "faster horse". And then I made myself try Git for a week to
| see the fuss was all about and my eyes were opened.
|
| Git is not perfect. There are other products that did/do some
| things better, or at least more conveniently. But Git was miles
| ahead of anything else at the time that I could use for free,
| and after I tasted it, I never wanted to go back to anything
| else.
| throwaway5752 wrote:
| I was a late adopter, also, and git is definitely not
| perfect. Mercurial did some things better, and at the time,
| notably, the forest extension. Git's flexibility is a two
| edged sword and the history rewrite footguns should be harder
| to use. Git does comes close enough to solving a fundamental
| problem it will be very, very durable, though. As long as it
| is used for linux kernel development I expect it continue to
| be the dominant dvcs.
| physicsguy wrote:
| God I hated ClearCase, did a migration from it in 2016(!) for a
| project that had been around since the late 80s. People were
| really resistant to moving but once it was done were like "Oh
| wow, it's really fast to create a branch, this means we don't
| have to have one branch for three months!"
| seveibar wrote:
| This article reinforces a lot of my biases around early bets.
| Taste is so so important, everyone looks at you weird when you
| say you're betting on "niche, tasteful solution" (git) instead of
| "common, gross solution" (SVN). Github bet on Git and made
| tasteful choices, and that was a huge propellant for them.
|
| I feel the same way about tscircuit (my current startup), it's a
| weird bet to create circuit boards with web technologies, nobody
| really does it, but the ergonomics _feel better_, and I just have
| to trust my taste!
| nprateem wrote:
| It's just survivorship bias. If HH hadn't won no one would be
| trying to reverse justify their success.
|
| This bet worked, the mercurial ones didn't.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| I would argue that hg was more tasetful than git at the time
| github began. The one thing git had going for it was that the
| most common operations were absurdly fast from the beginning,
| while hg took a bit of time to catch up.
| seveibar wrote:
| I agree with this take, I think hg could have overtaken git
| for a while, but git catered a bit better to the OS
| communities and hg catered a bit more to big companies from a
| DX perspective. Maybe in this case, the important thing is
| knowing that your partners/technologies are aligned with your
| vision of the future- git has been more open-source first (I
| would argue)
| digging wrote:
| Not sure what is even meant by "taste" here; what I see _over
| and over_ is that convenience wins, where winning is defined as
| widespread use.
| rustyminnow wrote:
| The article uses "taste" pretty broadly compared to many
| folks in the comments. First mention is about the site being
| pretty. But later he says "We had taste. We cared about the
| experience" which more aligns with your perspective of
| convenience.
| devnull3 wrote:
| The rise of github also coincided with enshitification of
| sourceforge.net. SF although was not git based at that time but
| it had the mindshare of lot of open source projects and it went
| complete downhill.
|
| So, a downfall of a potential alternative was also a factor IMO.
|
| Edit: after I commented I realized that SF was already mentioned
| in other comment
| schacon wrote:
| I would argue that SF was always pretty shitty, because it
| focused entirely on advertising. I remember Chris giving a talk
| comparing the signup process of GitHub and SourceForge. SF had
| like 8 fields and GitHub had 2. This was because SF wanted to
| know ad demographic info - where did you hear about us, etc.
| GitHub just wanted a name and a password. But this was the
| difference in everything - SF cared about advertisers, not
| developers. GitHub never thought about what anyone other than
| the developers using the product wanted.
| devnull3 wrote:
| Agree but my point is when you see a new and better rival
| then instead of pivoting SF became even worse and became
| malware-ised.
|
| Also SF was based on SVN. They failed to understand and
| capitalize on a better tech on the market i.e. git.
| schacon wrote:
| They actually did so very early.
|
| In early 2009 they added Git, Hg and Bzr support:
| https://arstechnica.com/information-
| technology/2009/03/sourc...
|
| That's less than a year after GitHub launched and was still
| very small.
| devnull3 wrote:
| I stand corrected! Thanks!
| hadlock wrote:
| Sourceforge was always awful to navigate. Because it was
| dependent on ad revenue, not subscriptions. It was trying to
| compete with consumer focused things like download.com
| (remember _that_ ?) where the end user just wanted a tarball of
| the executable, and the host was trying to make money selling
| ad space on the page where the download link was.
|
| The fact that end users could peek at the folder structure of
| the source code was a novelty at best
| max_ wrote:
| There is no real winners in business.
|
| Just people/products that are temporarily on top.
|
| SourceForge was probably "the winner" for some time.
|
| The same will be for GitHub.
|
| Someone just needs to build an actual superior product and
| provide a service that GitHub will not provide. Then build a
| sufficient audience.
|
| One such service is an end to end encrypted Git repo service.
|
| Some anarchists I know don't want everyone to know what they are
| working on.
|
| The same goes for algorithmic trading. I need strong guarantees
| that my code will not be used to train an LLM that will leak my
| edge.
|
| I am shocked a superior Git service to GitHub has not been built.
|
| I really liked source hut. But the custodian is abit arrogant
| (crypto projects for instance are banned)
| crop_rotation wrote:
| > One such service is an end to end encrypted Git repo service.
| Some anarchists I know don't want everyone to know what they
| are working on.
|
| I doubt there is a big enough market of anarchists for Github
| to even bother worrying.
|
| > One such service is an end to end encrypted Git repo service.
|
| There are so few people that need this, that they can just use
| client side tools and store all data that gets to remote
| servers encrypted
| Diti wrote:
| It's already feasible with Keybase (although I wouldn't trust
| them any more, because of the Zoom debacle).
| max_ wrote:
| >I doubt there is a big enough market of anarchists for
| Github to even bother worrying.
|
| A lot of people writing prorietory code bases would
| definitely use it.
|
| I don't think a founder wants the startup's codebase to leak
| via an LLM?
| nine_k wrote:
| A ton of proprietary code lives on GitHub, on closed paid
| repos. A lot of people reasonably think that GitHub's
| security chops are better than theirs.
|
| But if you care, there is a whole gamut of on-prem
| solutions, from running bare cgit to fluff like Gitea and
| GitLab.
|
| Lock up your central repo machine all you want, the code is
| still checked out to developers' laptops. For more
| security, don't allow that, and let your devs connect to a
| server with all necessary tools and access to the code, but
| without general internet access, for instance.
| duped wrote:
| I don't think founders care if parts or the entirety of the
| codebase leaks, it's not that valuable.
| kstrauser wrote:
| I wish something like Forgejo/Gitea had federated identities so
| that I could fork a project on the server you're hosting and
| submit a PR as easily as I can do that if you're hosting it on
| GitHub today. Everything you're asking for is available today
| in self-hosted services. I mean, consider that you don't even
| _need_ a Git server. You can swap code with your pals via SSH
| /email/whatever right now, today, without the rest of the world
| even knowing about it.
| max_ wrote:
| >Everything you're asking for is available today in self-
| hosted services
|
| There is a reason why people use hosted Git services it's not
| practical for everyone to "self host".
|
| We can run a self hosted Signal app for privacy. But it's
| neither convenient nor practical for everyone.
| kstrauser wrote:
| That's true, but if you have unusual requirements that make
| GitHub impractical, there are other options. Devs can
| update their origin to point at a shared SSH server and
| coordinate merges through email or Signal or anything else.
| I think that's a lot more practical than hoping GitHub adds
| something like end-to-end encryption, or worrying that they
| might train their LLMs against private code.
| Gualdrapo wrote:
| > Someone just needs to build an actual superior product and
| provide a service that [...] will not provide. Then build a
| sufficient audience.
|
| I wish this was true for social media and instant messaging
| platforms, operating systems...
| AnotherGoodName wrote:
| For an end to end encrypted git repo;
|
| git remote add origin ssh://user@host/srv/git/example
|
| Where the host is simply an ssh server you have access to.
| Encrypt the servers drive itself however you see fit. This is
| how git is traditionally used btw. GitHub is a third party to
| the git ecosystem and really there's little reason to use it
| for private repos. Just use ssh for the remote connection.
| Groxx wrote:
| Generally people mean "E2E Encrypted" as "the hosting service
| cannot see it". Git-over-SSH does not achieve this, it just
| encrypts in transit.
| faangguyindia wrote:
| If your code does not want edge leak, why is it on GitHub?
|
| Who trusts private repo off GitHub?
|
| Simply store encrypted files somewhere like Dropbox or cloud
| storage solutions.(Encrypt before you upload)
| conradkay wrote:
| Plenty of large companies. The risk is much higher that an
| individual's computer gets compromised, which often has a lot
| worse than just source code.
| imiric wrote:
| It's extremely difficult to unseat the leader with a superior
| product alone. Once sufficient traction is established, people
| will flock to where everyone else is, further cementing their
| position. It also requires monumental fumbles by the leader to
| actively push people away from the platform. Unfortunately for
| those who don't like GitHub, it's run by a company with
| limitless resources to pour into it, or to flatout buy out its
| competition. Microsoft has a lot of experience with this.
|
| > I really liked source hut.
|
| Sourcehut never has and likely never will be a serious
| competitor. Its UX and goals are entirely different, and it's
| directed towards a very niche audience unlike GH.
| cruffle_duffle wrote:
| It won't be another git service that replaces github. It will
| be something completely out of left field that replaces git and
| that method of code collaboration. There is only incremental
| improvements to be made to git. It will take a brand new
| hotness with a brand new way of doing things that shakes things
| up.
| imiric wrote:
| The celebrity of Linus definitely helped Git win, and GitHub
| likely benefited from that by the name alone. Many people today
| mistakenly equate Git and GitHub, and since GH did such a good
| job of being a friendly interface to Git, to many people it _is_
| Git. They did an early bet on Git alone, at a time when many of
| its competitors were supporting several VCSs. That early traction
| set the ball rolling, and now everyone developing in public
| pretty much has to be on it.
|
| Tangentially: it's a pretty sad state of affairs when the most
| popular OSS hosting service is not only proprietary, but owned by
| the company who was historically at opposite ends of the OSS
| movement. A cynic might say that they're at the extend phase of
| "embrace, extend, extinguish". Though "extinguish" might not be
| necessary if it can be replaced by "profit" instead.
| schacon wrote:
| I do go into Linux and Linus in the article in some depth, but
| even Linus credits the Ruby community to a degree with the
| explosion in popularity of Git, which is fairly clearly due in
| large part to GitHub. But, it's certainly a chicken/egg
| question.
|
| I would also argue that MS is nothing like the company that it
| was 30 years ago when that philosophy was a thing. The truth
| today is the via GitHub, Microsoft hosts the vast majority of
| the world's open source software, entirely for free.
| nine_k wrote:
| MS have realized that producing the right kind of important
| open-source software gives even more strength than producing
| closed-source software. Hence Typescript, VS Code, a few
| widespread language servers, etc.
| bluGill wrote:
| MS has long known developers were critical to their
| success. For a while they were worried that projects like
| Linux would take away their market, but it is now clearer
| to everyone where linux is going and so they don't have to
| worry as much. (so long as they are not stupid)
| nine_k wrote:
| They were smart enough to offer MS SQL Server for Linux,
| and to support (rather than oppose) Mono and Xamarin
| early enough.
| JyB wrote:
| Thats actually interesting. Was there any concern at any point
| in the early days about supporting other VCS or being too
| focused on git?
| schacon wrote:
| There was concern actually. We debated a bit the concept of
| naming the company "GitHub", since "git" is baked into the
| company name. We worried a little about what happens when the
| next big VCS thing comes along, not knowing that it's going
| to be dominant for at least the next 20 years.
| BeetleB wrote:
| It really was because of Github, and not Linux. If Github had
| Mercurial support from the get go, I would expect both to be
| heavily used today.
| cyberax wrote:
| > Though "extinguish" might not be necessary if it can be
| replaced by "profit" instead.
|
| Let me bite: why is this bad?
| imiric wrote:
| I didn't say it was. If anything, it's preferable to
| "extinguish". :)
|
| Though a core philosophy behind the OSS movement is creating
| software for the benefit of humanity, instead of driven by
| financial reasons. Not that developers shouldn't profit from
| their work, but it's ironic that a large corporation who was
| historically strongly opposed to the movement is now a leader
| in it. It's understandable to question their motives if you
| remember the history, regardless of their image today.
| ldayley wrote:
| Thank you for sharing this, Scott! He mentions "Taste" throughout
| the post and this intangible quality makes all the difference in
| an early-stage winner-take-all market dominance race.
|
| In 2007 I was teaching myself programming and had just started
| using my first version control tools with Mercurial/Hg after
| reading Joel Spolky's blog post/love letter to Mercurial. A year
| or two later I'd go to user group meetups and hear many echo my
| praise for Hg but lamenting that all the cool projects were in
| GitHub (and not bitbucket). One by one nearly everyone migrated
| their projects over to git almost entirely because of the
| activity at GitHub. I even taught myself git using Scott's
| website and book at that point!
|
| "Product-market fit" is the MBA name for this now. As Scott
| elegantly states this is mostly knowing what problem you solve,
| for whom, and great timing, but it was the "flavor" of the site
| and community (combined with the clout of linux/android using
| git) that probably won the hearts and minds and really made it
| fit with this new market.
|
| Edit: It didn't hurt that this was all happening at the
| convergence of the transition to cloud computing (particularly
| Heroku/AWS), "Web 2.0"/public APIs, and a millennial generational
| wave in college/first jobs-- but that kinda gets covered in the
| "Timing, plus SourceForge sucked" points
| bluGill wrote:
| I still miss hg. I migrated to github years ago because github
| is a much better workflow, but I miss hg which can answer
| questions that git cannot.
| kccqzy wrote:
| I learned git first because it was already very popular when I
| decided to learn it. But when I later learned hg for fun, I
| realized how much of a better user experience it is:
|
| * After using hg which doesn't have the concept of an index, I
| realize I don't miss it and the user experience is better
| without it. Seriously, even thinking about it is unnecessary
| mental overhead.
|
| * As someone who modifies history a whole lot, `hg evolve` has
| superior usability over anything in git. The mere fact that it
| understands that one commit is the result of amending another
| commit is powerful. Git doesn't remember it, and I've used way
| too much `git rebase --onto` (which is a poorer substitute) to
| be satisfied with this kind of workflow.
|
| * Some people, including the author, say cheap branching is a
| great feature of git. But what's even better is to eliminate
| the need to create branches at all. I don't need to use
| bookmarks in hg and I like it that way.
|
| I sometimes imagine an alternate universe where the founders of
| GitHub decided instead to found HgHub. I think overall there
| might be a productivity increase for everyone because hg
| commands are still more user friendly and people would be stuck
| less often.
| tanepiper wrote:
| Around about that time, I was working on a Mercurial frontend
| https://github.com/tanepiper/hgfront - it was around the time
| GitHub was starting to pick up, and BitBucket also appeared
| around then (we spoke to the original developer at the time but
| nothing came of it). Funnily enough also a Gist-like tool that
| had inline commenting, forking and formatting
| (https://github.com/tanepiper/pastemonkey).
|
| I always wonder what would have happened if we had a dedicated
| team to make something of it, but in the end git won over hg
| anyway so likely a moot point.
|
| Edit: there's a low-quality video of the early interface we
| worked on - https://youtu.be/NARcsoPp4F8
| schacon wrote:
| Fun fact, I (original author), wrote the original version of
| Gist. That was my first project at GitHub. Gist #1 is my claim
| to fame: https://gist.github.com/schacon/1
| SenHeng wrote:
| I used both GitHub and BitBucket during the early days. There was
| no comparison. GitHub was simply nice to use. The UX was
| phenomenal for its time and made sense. BitBucket was horrible
| but my then employer wouldn't pay for hosting and GitHub didn't
| provide free private hosting.
|
| One of my biggest gripes was that switching back and forth
| between code view and editor mode would wipe whatever you had
| written. So you better had them in separate tabs. Also be sure
| not to press the backspace key outside a text window.
| tootie wrote:
| Idk, I loved BitBucket and I loved Mercurial. It was much
| easier to use and had native JIRA integration. I always thought
| (and still do) that github looks too cute and not very serious.
| ranger_danger wrote:
| https://sfconservancy.org/GiveUpGitHub/
| Bjorkbat wrote:
| The idea of Github having a unique "taste" advantage resonates
| with me a lot. I don't like the fact that Github is using my code
| to feed Microsoft's AI ambitions, but I dislike Bitbucket and
| Gitlab more simply on the grounds that they "don't look fun".
|
| It's tricky, because any serious Github competitor would
| implicitly have to compete by attracting the deep pockets of
| enterprise clients, who care little for "fun". Getting revenue
| from solo devs / small teams is an uphill battle, especially if
| you feel obliged to make your platform open source.
|
| Still, I wish someone would make a Github competitor that's fun
| and social.
| darby_nine wrote:
| sourcehut is always worth a mention, though I have never used
| it in a collaborative environment.
| wood-porch wrote:
| This. GitHub is a joy to use compared to its competitors. Using
| bitbucket at work is frustrating, and reminds me of a lot of
| Microsoft web interfaces, ironic, given that it's GitHub and
| not Bitbucket that is owned by them now
| bluGill wrote:
| You don't need enterprise clients. Projects like KDE self host
| and are enough to keep you around and getting new features if
| you can get them on board. Plus enterprises often look at their
| bottom line and ask if something else is a better value so if
| you are "free" some of them will switch to you.
| nerdix wrote:
| GitHub won because Git won. It was obvious by the late 00s that
| some DVCS was going to upend subversion (and more niche VCS like
| TFS). It ended up a two horse race between Git and Mercurial.
| GitHub bet on Git. Bitbucket bet on Mercurial.
|
| Git took the early lead and never looked back. And GitHub's
| competitors were too slow to embrace Git. So GitHub dominated
| developer mindshare.
|
| It seems strange now but there was a period of time during the
| late 00s and early 10s when developers were pretty passionate
| about their choice of DVCS.
| nine_k wrote:
| Not just that. They invented "pull requests" and offered
| (initially minimal) code review tools. This made contributing
| in the open.much easier, and making small contributions, vastly
| easier.
|
| _Something_ like git had to take over svn / cvs / rcs. It
| could be Perforce, it could be BitKeeper which apparently
| pioneered the approach. But it _had_ to be open-source, or at
| least free. Git won not just because it was technically
| superior; it also won because it was at the same time free
| software.
| fweimer wrote:
| Pull requests predate Git. The kernel developers used them in
| the Bitkeeper days: I exported this a patch
| and then imported onto a clone of Marcelo's tree, so
| it appears as a single cset where the changes that got un-
| done never happened. I've done some sanity tests on
| it, and will test it some more tomorrow. Take a look
| at it and let me know if I missed anything. When
| Andy is happy with it I'll leave it to him to re-issue a
| pull request from Marcelo.
|
| https://lore.kernel.org/linux-
| acpi/BF1FE1855350A0479097B3A0D...
|
| I do not know to what extent Bitkeeper had browser-based
| workflows. Moving cross-repository merges away from the
| command line may actually have been innovative, but of course
| of little interest to kernel developers.
| schacon wrote:
| That's interesting. I know BK had "pulls", but iirc it
| didn't have a "request-pull" command, so clearly the "pull"
| terminology came from BK and the "request" part came from
| how people talked about it in email.
|
| I actually just shot a video showing how BitKeeper was
| used. I'll post that and a blog post on our GitButler blog
| soon.
| bluGill wrote:
| Mercurial also supported pull requests. The unique thing
| about github was an easy central place to do them from and
| ensuring they didn't get lost. Once you have a github
| account you can fork a project make a change and pull
| request it in a few minutes. emailing a patch isn't hard,
| but with github you don't have to look up what address to
| email it to, if you just say open pull requests it
| typically goes to the right place the first time.
| irunmyownemail wrote:
| I remember we used a tool, I think it was Gerrit, before I'd
| heard of GitHub or Pull Requests. It worked with patches
| which is also how we used to share code, through email with
| patches. GitHub won because it had a cleaner UI and a likable
| name.
| dboreham wrote:
| Yes, article seems to miss this. I believe (at the time, and
| still) that git won because the cost to host the server side of
| it is orders of magnitude lower than the competitors (svn,
| perforce, etc). All those other revision control systems ended
| up with a big server cost that couldn't justify a free hosting
| service. Plus git provided a reasonable (but still not great)
| solution to "decentralized development", which none of the
| others attempted to do.
| schacon wrote:
| I'm curious how you come to this conclusion. GitHub has
| always had fairly insane hosting problem sets. When someone
| clones the Linux repo, that's like 5G in one go. The full
| clone issues and the problems of a few edge case repos create
| sometimes crazy hosting costs and scaling problems. Most
| centralized systems only have to deal with one working tree
| or one delta at a time. There is not much that goes over the
| wire in centralized systems in general, comparatively.
| bluGill wrote:
| Why didn't mercurial win then? There were almost a dozen
| other distributed version control systems built in those
| early days, most of which I cannot remember but all had the
| same distributed ideas behind them and should be been as easy
| to host (some easier).
| troutwine wrote:
| At my university, performance. The CS department was clued
| into Linux development but also the Haskell world so darcs
| use among students was high. Our underpowered lab machines
| and personal devices struggled with darcs for reasons I no
| longer remembered and a group of us made use of mercurial
| for an OS project and had a rough go of it as the patch
| sets got more and more convoluted. Back in those days the
| core was C but a lot of the logic was Python which
| struggled on the memory constrained devices available. Some
| one of us learned about git trying to get into Linux kernel
| work, told the rest of us and it was just comically fast,
| is my memory. I spent a tedious weekend converting all my
| projects to git and never looked back, myself.
|
| Some years later Facebook did a lot of work to improve the
| speed of mercurial but the ship had sailed. Interesting
| idea though.
| aseipp wrote:
| Multiple other distributed version control systems in the
| 2000s had support for easy hosting. Darcs was actually the
| best in this era, IMO, because it was far simpler than both
| Hg and Git -- a Darcs repository was just a directory, and it
| supported HTTP as the primary pull/patch sharing mechanic.
| So, you could just put any repository in any public directory
| on a web server and pull over HTTP. Done. This was working
| back in like 2006 as the primary method of use.
|
| In any case, the premise is still wrong because as mentioned
| elsewhere, the distribution of repository sizes and their
| compute requirements are not smooth or homogonous. The cost
| of hosting one popular mirror of the Linux kernel, or a
| project like Rails, for 1 year is equivalent to hosting
| 10,000 small projects for 100 years, in either SVN or Git.
| The whole comparison is flawed unless this dynamic is taken
| into account. GitHub in 2024 still has to carve out special
| restrictions and exemptions for certain repositories because
| of this (the Chromium mirror for example gets extended size
| limits other repos can't have.)
|
| Git also lacked a lot of techniques to improve clones or repo
| sizes of big repos until fairly late in its life (shallow +
| partial clones) because 99% of the time their answer was
| "make more repositories", and the data model still just falls
| over fast once you start throwing nearly any raw binary data
| in a repository at any reasonable clip (not GiB, low hundreds
| of MiB, and it doesn't become totally unusable but degrades
| pretty badly). This is why "Git is really fast" is a bit of a
| loaded statement. It's very fast, _at some specific things_.
| It 's rather slow and inefficient at several others.
| BeetleB wrote:
| > GitHub won because Git won.
|
| Sorry, but Git won because Github won. Lots of people loved
| (and still use) Mercurial. It lacked the network effect because
| Github didn't support it.
|
| > GitHub bet on Git. Bitbucket bet on Mercurial.
|
| Bitbucket didn't lose because of Mercurial. They lost because
| Github had a better product (in terms of sharing code, etc). It
| also was neglected by Atlassian in 2010.
|
| > It seems strange now but there was a period of time during
| the late 00s and early 10s when developers were pretty
| passionate about their choice of DVCS.
|
| Sorry buddy, but there are still plenty of us Mercurial users.
| Maybe, just maybe, even dozens!
|
| (Seriously, I use Mercurial for all my projects).
| bornfreddy wrote:
| As someone who used both git and hg, I must say I'm sorry git
| won. Its chrome sucks (though less than it did) and the
| naming is confusing as hell. Still, if everyone uses git, and
| you have to use BitBucket for hosting instead of
| GitHub/Lab... Nah, not worth it. Kudos to you for sticking
| with it!
| BeetleB wrote:
| > Still, if everyone uses git, and you have to use
| BitBucket for hosting instead of GitHub/Lab
|
| Isn't this supporting my point? That a barrier to use
| mercurial was that people preferred Github over Bitbucket?
|
| > Kudos to you for sticking with it!
|
| It's simple a lot easier to use it vs Git! Kudos to whoever
| suffers through the latter!
| Izkata wrote:
| As someone who tried out both git and hg around 2012 with
| only svn experience, I found hg confusing and git easy to
| understand.
|
| Unfortunately it's been so long since then I don't remember
| exactly what it was that confused me. Something around how
| they handle branches.
| dewarrn1 wrote:
| Me, I picked Python and Mercurial for primary language and
| DVCS, respectively: one of those worked out really well. I
| still miss hg and have never really gotten the hang of git.
|
| Regarding Mercurial, would you happen to have recommendations
| for a GitHub/Bitbucket-like service that still works with hg?
| bsder wrote:
| > Regarding Mercurial, would you happen to have
| recommendations for a GitHub/Bitbucket-like service that
| still works with hg?
|
| Use "jujutsu" (jj).
|
| It's the goodness of Mercurial but works in the crappy
| world that Git has bestowed upon us.
|
| I made the switch from Mercurial because it's just getting
| too hard to fight the git monoculture. :(
| BeetleB wrote:
| If you just want an online repository, go with Sourcehut
| (https://sourcehut.org/)
| bsder wrote:
| > Git took the early lead and never looked back. And GitHub's
| competitors were too slow to embrace Git. So GitHub dominated
| developer mindshare.
|
| And Mercurial spent an enormous amount of effort going after
| Windows users and basically got absolutely nothing for it.
|
| In my opinion, this was what really hurt Mercurial. Nobody in
| Windows-land was going to use anything other than the official
| Microsoft garbage. Consequently, every ounce of effort spent on
| Windows was effort completely wasted that could have been spent
| competing with Git/Github.
| chx wrote:
| git won because of empty hype, bzr was far superior in basically
| every aspect. Much easier to program with either for plugins or
| to be embedded, much saner "hide your development commits" model
| with log levels, much saner command line interface. It's just
| better.
|
| It's not the first thing to be carried by hype instead of careful
| comparison.
| schacon wrote:
| I think PR and network effects of GitHub definitely played a
| role in the success of Git over other options like bzr, but you
| should also remember that bzr had tons of issues. It was
| slower, there was no index/staging area, there was no rebasing,
| etc. Mercurial was very good too, but while there were pluses
| and minuses with all of them, I think there was a _lot_ of
| careful comparison too. None of them were clearly and in all
| aspects better than the others.
| kstrauser wrote:
| That's simply untrue. Bzr was dog slow on repos with lots of
| history. It had lots of early users and support from hosting
| services like Launchpad, Savannah, and SourceForge. I'm certain
| that everyone didn't migrate to git because of hype. I mean,
| it's not credible to say the Emacs team stopped using it
| because it wasn't fashionable.
|
| There were lots of DVCS projects at the time, like arch, darcs,
| and dcvs. People were running all kinds of experiments to
| explore the Cambrian explosion of new ideas. Some of them did
| some things better than git, but git handled most of those
| things reasonably well and it was _fast_. We all mostly ended
| up on git because it was generally the better option. It earned
| the hype, but the hype followed the adoption, not vice versa.
| chx wrote:
| So in exchange for a little speed we are stuck with one of
| the most user hostile tools out there. That's not the deal I
| would have wanted to make. The interface is atrocious as some
| switches change completely what the command does -- this was
| partially acknowledged and fixed in git switch but there's so
| much more, it loses work _way_ too easily and some of the
| concepts are near impossible to grok. (I did learn git
| eventually but that doesn 't mean I like it. It's more of an
| uneasy truce than a friendship.)
| kstrauser wrote:
| It wasn't _a little speed_. Other options were many times
| slower. I just renamed a large subdir in a large project.
| `time git status` took 41ms. That kind of speed lets you
| add all sorts of interactivity that would be impractical if
| it were slower. For instance, my shell prompt shows whether
| the current directory is managed by Git, and if so, whether
| the status is clean. I would never tolerate my terminal
| being detectably slowed by such a thing. With git, it 's
| not.
|
| There are a thousand little ways where having tooling be
| fast enough is make-or-break: if it's not, people don't use
| it. Git is fast enough for all the most common operations.
| Other options were not.
| gsliepen wrote:
| Another big advantage of Git for sites like GitHub is that you
| are never putting your eggs into one basket. You have your local
| copy of all history in a project. GitHub is merely a mirror.
| Sure, some features have been sprinkled on top like pull requests
| and an issue tracker, but those are not the most critical part.
| If GitHub goes down you can move your whole Git history to
| another site like GitLab, sourcehut, or just self-host it, or you
| can even start doing it right now with minimal effort. This was
| never the case with CVS and Subversion.
| transpute wrote:
| _> we won because we started at the right time and we had taste._
|
| 2012, https://a16z.com/announcement/github/ We
| just invested $100M in GitHub. In addition to the eye-popping
| number, the investment breaks ground on two fronts: It's
| the largest investment we've ever made. It's the only
| outside investment GitHub has ever taken.
|
| 2018,
| https://web.archive.org/web/20180604134945/https://a16z.com/...
| Six years ago we invested an "eye-popping" $100 million into
| GitHub. This was not only a Series A investment and the first
| institutional money ever raised by the company, but it was also
| the largest single check we had ever written.. At the time, it
| had over 3 million Git repositories -- a nearly invincible
| position.. if I ever have to choose between a group of
| professional business managers or a talented group of passionate
| developers with amazing product-market fit like GitHub, I am
| investing in GitHub every time.
| schacon wrote:
| What is the point you're trying to make here?
| transpute wrote:
| Did $100M investment help Github to win, or had Github
| already won in 2012 with profitability and 3M git repos?
| schacon wrote:
| I would argue that GitHub already won in 2012. The
| investment helped us grow in a different way, but I don't
| think anyone involved in that deal would have said that we
| had almost any serious competitive threats at the time,
| which is to some degree why it was such a great deal.
| transpute wrote:
| Did the investment encourage corporate buyers to sign up
| for Github Enterprise, where corp developers were already
| using the free product?
| schacon wrote:
| That was certainly one of our internal arguments, that
| the institutional investment would be helpful for large
| company trust.
| mardifoufs wrote:
| Bitbucket got funded before GitHub did, and yet GitHub was
| still bigger before they got any investment.
| amtamt wrote:
| vi: 1976 GNU Emacs : 1984 BIND: 1986
|
| are (along with too many other projects) from way before Nov
| 1993, where "The Total Growth of Open Source" graph starts from
| 0.
| schacon wrote:
| It all depends on how you're counting. For one, "open source"
| was not a phrase before 1998, so there is some retrofitting of
| Free Software projects. But also, there isn't a registry, it's
| rather difficult to be more than approximate with this. The
| article is very specific about their methodology, I'm only
| using one graph as a general example.
| physicsguy wrote:
| Sourceforge was horrible to use. GitHub was widely used but it
| only really reached proper _dominance_ I think when it started
| offering free closed source repositories to people that weren 't
| paying them, which was what, 2014/2015 or so? Until then it was
| pretty common in my experience for people to use BitBucket for
| Git for private stuff.
| jarule wrote:
| _Why GitHub was started. To ease ass pain._
| keybored wrote:
| > Why GitHub Actually Won
|
| > How GitHub _actually_ became the dominant force it is today,
| from one of it's cofounders.
|
| > Being at the very center of phenomena like this can certainly
| leave you with blind spots, but unlike these youngsters, I was
| actually there. Hell, I wrote the book.
|
| Downvote all you want for being "non-substantive" but for some
| reason I can't voluntarily tolerate such a density of well-
| actually phrasing. It's grating.
|
| It also seems to be everywhere these days but maybe I'm too
| attuned to it.
| sunshowers wrote:
| > They never cared about the developer workflow.
|
| Man, given how terrible GitHub's developer workflow is in 2024...
| there is still no first-class support for stacked diffs,
| something that Phabricator had a decade ago and mailing list
| workflows have been doing for a very long time.
|
| I personally treat GH as a system that has to be hacked around
| with tools like spr [1], not a paragon of good developer
| workflows.
|
| [1] my fork with Jujutsu support:
| https://github.com/sunshowers/spr
| sirspacey wrote:
| I'm a little stunned by "taste" as the defining factor, but
| GitHub has certainly brought the industry a long way!
|
| Whenever I've asked for help using GitHub (usually because I'm
| getting back into coding) the dev helping me out stumbles,
| forgets, and is confused often. What's surprising is that's true
| no matter how senior they are.
|
| GitHub did a ton to smooth out dev workflows, for sure, but
| there's something almost intensely counter-intuitive about how it
| works and how easy it is to miss a step.
|
| I'd assume good product taste is reasonably indexed to "intuitive
| to use" but GitHub doesn't seem to achieve that bar.
|
| What's an example of GitHub's good taste that I'm missing?
| echelon wrote:
| Have you used SourceForge or SVN? Or sent a zip of files named
| "v23_backup_(copy).zip" to other engineers?
|
| Compared to everything that came before, Github may as well
| have been Nirvana.
| scelerat wrote:
| The ease of creating, deleting and merging branches and patches
| is what sold me on git over subversion (which itself was a vast
| improvement over the only VCS I had experienced up until that
| point, CVS). When the author describes the literal jaw-dropping
| demos, I remember having a similar reaction.
| mikemitchelldev wrote:
| I didn't realize Scott Chacon was a founder of Github. Did they
| all cash out equally?
| vander_elst wrote:
| They might have taste but they still don't have IPv6. Sorry for
| the rant, but I'm always baffled that they haven't switched yet.
| Anyone has insight about the challenges they are facing?
| asnyder wrote:
| Personally I really liked darcs, always felt more natural and
| intuitive to me.
|
| Though fortunately was compatible and natively convertible to git
| and made the git takeover mostly smoothless.
|
| At the time it felt that github and the rapid tooling and
| integrations developed in response cemented git's rise and
| downfall of everything else including darcs.
| sylware wrote:
| Well, I can login and use core functions on github with a
| noscript/basic (x)html browser... gitlab... well...
| amir734jj wrote:
| I work at Microsoft, so I write a lot of pipelines and interact a
| lot with git.
|
| This is my own opinion:
|
| - GitHub looks nice but PR merge window between forks is still
| bad
|
| - GitLab CI is so much more intuitive than GitHub CI and there is
| a lot of existing codes that you can copy/paste specially if you
| use Terraform, AWS, K8S
|
| - I am biased, but AzDevops both looks most intuitive, and its
| pipeline system is the best
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