
Thank You GitHub - stsewd
https://github.com/thank-you-github/thank-you-github
======
macawfish
I kinda understand how people don't like this. They are looking off into the
horizon and seeing even brighter futures. That's fine, but you don't have to
be a hater about it!

Can we just acknowledge just how much of an improvement github is over the
olden days? Seriously. And as far as social media websites go, Github is
surely one of the most ethical of them all.

Github popularized git in a time when svn and cvs were the standards. Don't
forget about those sad, sad times! We are in such a better place now! They
also recognized the power of git to completely lower the bar for participating
in open source projects.

"Pull requests"? "Forks"? That stuff _didn 't exist_ in the mainstream
developer imagination. It was fringe. Now it's the default!

And I'm not trying to say that github is the best model or platform or
anything like that, I just appreciate how easy it makes it to participate in
open source development. It's clean, it's simple, and it works.

GitLab and BitBucket, those are awesome platforms too. But Github struck a
chord in a time when people hadn't even heard the melody yet.

I hope the future brings something _even better_. But I'm still definitely
gonna give props to github for holding it down.

~~~
Grue3
>And as far as social media websites go, Github is surely one of the most
ethical of them all.

Is censoring stuff on behalf of Russian government ethical? [1]

>Github popularized git in a time when svn and cvs were the standards. Don't
forget about those sad, sad times! We are in such a better place now!

Is that a good thing? We could've had a better VCS like darcs!

>They also recognized the power of git to completely lower the bar for
participating in open source projects.

Thus lowering the bar of open-source projects.

>"Pull requests"? "Forks"? That stuff didn't exist in the mainstream developer
imagination.

Forks have certainly existed since open-source model existed. Pull request is
an anti-pattern anyway.

[1] [https://techcrunch.com/2014/12/05/to-get-off-russias-
blackli...](https://techcrunch.com/2014/12/05/to-get-off-russias-blacklist-
github-has-blocked-access-to-pages-that-highlight-suicide/)

~~~
majewsky
Also, pull requests weren't "invented" by Github. Popularized, yes, but not
invented.

~~~
macawfish
I hear you... That's what I was implying, that a lot of people had no idea
about this way of contributing before github.

------
rawrmaan
I’m seeing a lot of hate in this thread. I think we tend to lose sight of the
fact that things don’t just _happen_, people make them happen. GitHub has
absolutely earned its dominance in my eyes, and although it may have
shortcomings, I think it’s one of the most important inventions in the last
ten yesrs, period.

When I look at the software I use to run my business, literally 100% of it is
open source and has a community improving it and patching it on GitHub. There
was simply not this level of open source enthusiasm and participation back in
the Sourceforge “dark ages” (although even Sourceforge was hugely influential
and a big step in software democratization if you compare it to what came
before).

~~~
ac2u
There's a couple of comments complaining about features that are a little out
of place. But I wouldn't call it "a lot" of hate.

I think it's mostly a response to ground the hyperbole a little. There's
usually no need to do the marketing for an organisation with (arguably) a
monopoly of mindshare already.

I think that's why people talk up the underdogs more when they're mentioned,
because as users/consumers it's in our interests to have some competition.

~~~
macawfish
I looked at this post when there were 6 comments. 5 of them were negative and
the 6th was non-positive.

~~~
ac2u
I didn't say they were positive, I said there were a couple of ones
complaining about features, which was just moaning.

We're probably just disagreeing on what constitutes hate, I thought that they
were mostly just mild criticism.

~~~
macawfish
True, and "hater" doesn't necessarily mean "hatred". Sometimes it just means
not being able to see the sunny side if your life depended on it. Doesn't mean
you're all that negative, it just means you can't appreciate.

------
ajdlinux
GitHub is fantastic in so many ways, but I think it would be remiss not to
point out that the hegemonic platform for open source and Free Software
development is itself a _proprietary_ platform, run by a company whose
business model is reliant on companies continuing to develop proprietary
software.

It's also in many ways a single point of failure for many open source
communities, and it will be very interesting to see what happens if GitHub
ever folds.

~~~
pilsetnieks
Git itself is open source; if Github would to away without warning, you could
host your repo anywhere that supports git, or host it yourself.

There would be problems, however, with issues, comments, wikis, etc. as well
as all kinds of package managers that rely on github.

~~~
tomjakubowski
What are the most used package / dependency management tools which _rely_ on
GitHub? Many can install packages from there, or from any Git URL, but they
tend to have centralized stores as well, right?

One example that comes to mind is Cargo. At least a couple years ago, the
package index (but not packages themselves) for crates.io was stored in a Git
repo hosted on GitHub. But (without checking, on a phone) I’m fairly certain
crates.io doesn’t/didn’t rely on any GitHub APIs, just Git operations, so it
would be easy to recover if GitHub just disappeared.

Rust’s CI operation, on the other hand, is somewhat tightly coupled with
GitHub. Last time I checked, the software powering bors only support GitHub’s
APIs; support for competing APIs like Gitlab were open tickets. But I’m sure
in an emergency the team would be able to put together support for another
project host.

~~~
steveklabnik
The index is on GitHub, but only the index. You can mirror it and Cargo knows
how to work with the mirror. [http://www.integer32.com/2016/10/08/bare-
minimum-crates-io-m...](http://www.integer32.com/2016/10/08/bare-minimum-
crates-io-mirror-plus-one.html)

------
ac2u
A little cringe for my tastes. It's important to remember that fragmentation
in and of itself isn't inherently bad. It can be useful not to have a
monoculture on how to get things done.

~~~
adamnemecek
Fragmentation in this case is bad. Like I wouldn’t contribute at all if each
repo has some weird workflow.

~~~
macawfish
I think it's kinda cool that different contributors can express their
different creative/organizational (or disorganizational) styles, yet still be
able to contribute bug fixes (and bugs themselves) on absolute strangers
random projects. For me, it feels much more relaxed. I even made a pull
request on a major project recently (sympy). In the past, I'd probably have
felt very intimidated to do something like this. But the lax attitude on
github made it very easy for me, socially, to reach out with my code.

That said, if I were to make a new github-like platform, the number one thing
I'd probably do to decrease fragmentation is make automated testing as
friendly as possible. In the same way that github made git itself friendly,
tests need to be friendly.

------
adamnemecek
GitHub is great and all that but pls fix the search. Just a simple dedup would
be really really amazing. Like I would pay 20 usd a month for a better code
search. Like where I don’t have to go through potentially 100 pages of results
most of which are sometimes duplicates.

~~~
neildahlke
Would something like this help you?

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8XSf6XfYl64](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8XSf6XfYl64)

Developed by a former colleague at [http://near.ai/](http://near.ai/).

~~~
sdesol
This looks interesting, but I would suspect if GitHub implemented wildcard
matching, like this:

[https://public.gitsense.com/insight/github?r=tensorflow/tens...](https://public.gitsense.com/insight/github?r=tensorflow/tensorflow#b%3Dgithub%3Atensorflow%2Ftensorflow%3Amaster%26q%3Dlayernorm*%26s%3Dcommits%26t%3Dcode)

they could significantly improve discovery.

------
smpetrey
If it wasn't for Github, I wouldn't be where I am today. For that, I'm pretty
thankful. Sure Github has its flaws, and the product is still evolving. But
all-in-all, it's been a transformative ride. Thank you, to everyone at Github.
I owe you so much. :)

------
firloop
I'd like to thank Gitlab for competing with Github, it makes both products
better.

------
macawfish
I love github. And I also think it'd be awesome if some of these haters put
their heads together and made something positive on DAT/IPFS that could
replace github altogether. They could include features for bug/feature
bounties, better project management tools, etc.

Like come on, don't just gripe about it, make something cool... the time is
now! And in order for you to make something that's actually cool, I hope you
can pull your head out of your butt and acknowledge that github was amazing
for its time. Recognize what makes github awesome. It's not the fancy project
management stuff. It's the simplicity and focus of the open ended, social,
collaborative platform. It lowered the bar. It made it easy to jump in, no
matter how much clout or recognition you had. It made it normal to fork a
project off the bat, in case you accidentally found yourself fixing a bug or
wanting to make a little feature change.

So yeah, github is awesome and it's getting old. Let's appreciate it and get
to the next level.

------
chx
Just another data point: Drupal uses its own bug tracker and the workflow is
that anyone can participate in an issue with various contributions. Two of
these are uploading or reviewing a patch. But another is reading the issue and
writing a new summary which given a long enough issue is invaluable. Or adding
new tags -- which can be totally new. Or re-titleing the issue. Read:
[https://groups.drupal.org/node/313068#comment-955593](https://groups.drupal.org/node/313068#comment-955593)
for a better writeup on theese.

------
ukulele
The skeptic in me sees this as a way to get a bunch of developers subscribed
to a feed / notification. Will be interesting to see if the repo gets misused
somehow.

~~~
milesokeefe
What’s the worst case scenario here? I can only imagine the devs just getting
some spammy notifications and having to unsubscribe.

~~~
ukulele
No real danger, just seems like it could be used as a marketing ploy.

~~~
brennebeck
It definitely can be. And maybe it should be, if github needed it. But they
control enough market share that I don’t think it’s necessary to go that
route.

------
iNeal
Not that I have anything against this (I do love GitHub) but pretty sure it's
against their ToS to create multiple accounts.

------
dopamean
I look forward to all the negative comments here from people for whom GitHub
is not serving their very specific need.

~~~
TheDong
Github has done a lot to move the conversation from free software to open
source.

"Open source" is now this thing companies do. It's now a PR and marketing
trick, or sometimes an attempt to get free labor selfishly.

It is no longer about user's rights and freedom. Github has been a huge part
of the slow bleedout of the free software movement.

I think this is the true damage that the combination of Github and "open
source" companies have done to the software ecosystem.

------
zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC
What the fuck?

Today, participation in the development of Free Software is more difficult
than ever as tons of projects make it impossible to contribute unless you use
a proprietary piece of software to do so--namely, github.

Also, how is it even remotely sensible to compare the state of github today to
the state of not-github a decade ago? If anything, the proprietary nature of
github and its network effects is likely to have hampered progress in the
development of Free Software collaboration tools. It's not exactly like you
need a proprietary middleman in order to not exchange patches by manually
attaching them to emails in a world with ubiquitous broadband internet.

~~~
scrollaway
Speaking as someone who's participated, led and created several open source
software projects and organizations, you're wrong. Github is the primary
reason why open source is thriving today. GitHub and GitHub Pages have made it
both easy and free for FOSS projects to get contributors set up and managed,
market themselves and be more than an obscure project on a nameless site.

The centralization that Github provides is essential to lowering the barrier
of entry for new contributors, and those are what makes or breaks a project.
So yes, you do need a middleman; or at least you need _something_. You're
welcome to attempt solving the problem, in the mean time you can't start
claiming that they "hampered" progress, that's just delusional.

~~~
zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC
> Speaking as someone who's participated, led and created several open source
> software projects and organizations, you're wrong. Github is the primary
> reason why open source is thriving today.

OK, so what do you think would the world of free software look like today if
github had never existed, and why do you think that?

> GitHub and GitHub Pages have made it both easy and free for FOSS projects to
> get contributors set up and managed, market themselves and be more than an
> obscure project on a nameless site.

Why do you think would the alternative solution that would have been developed
if github had not been around not have been able to achieve the same?

> The centralization that Github provides is essential to lowering the barrier
> of entry for new contributors, and those are what makes or breaks a project.

Why do you think that the centralization is essential?

> So yes, you do need a middleman; or at least you need something.

What specifically do you mean by "something"?

> You're welcome to attempt solving the problem, in the mean time you can't
> start claiming that they "hampered" progress, that's just delusional.

Does that mean then that your implicit claims about alternative histories are
also delusional? I mean, your claims about how github is better than what the
world would look like if github had not been around obviously also imply some
idea of what you think the world would otherwise look like (i.e. worse). Is
that speculation on your part also delusional?

~~~
ajdlinux
> Why do you think that the centralization is essential?

Decentralisation, as a general concept, has a lot of benefits. Ease of use for
new users is generally not one of them.

I'm a Linux kernel dev by day, where we still submit patches through mailing
lists. Now, I don't believe the kernel _can_ switch to using a platform like
GitHub, as our development workflow on the whole is too decentralised and too
complex to shoehorn into the kinds of tools that GitHub et al give us, but I
can certainly say that the existing kernel process is a right PITA for new
contributors. A large part of this is that we don't have centralised
development resources and every different subsystem has a slightly different
workflow.

~~~
zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC
> Decentralisation, as a general concept, has a lot of benefits. Ease of use
> for new users is generally not one of them.

Why do you think that ease of use for new users is a benefit of centralized
systems such as github? And not, say, of standardization?

Is electricity, say, easy to use because it is all supplied by one centralized
world-wide supplier, or is it easy to use because voltage, frequency and so on
are standardized, so you can plug in your appliances no matter who the
supplier is?

But also: Do you think that ease of use for new users is a worthwhile
optimization target? I mean, at what cost for non-new users does this
optimization come, and is that cost worth it?

> but I can certainly say that the existing kernel process is a right PITA for
> new contributors.

Why do you think that? My experience would say the exact opposite: You read
the readme that comes in the source tree, you run that script that figures out
who is responsible for the respective component and you send an email ... you
don't even need to create an account with some third party with lengthy TOS to
study and stuff. Seriously, submitting patches to the linux kernel so far has
been one of the smoothest experiences contributing to free software, with an
absolutely minimal barrier to entry.

~~~
ajdlinux
> Is electricity, say, easy to use because it is all supplied by one
> centralized world-wide supplier, or is it easy to use because voltage,
> frequency and so on are standardized, so you can plug in your appliances no
> matter who the supplier is?

The voltage, frequency and so on only became standardised because of either
monopoly providers or government regulation, depending on where you are in the
world. There are parts of the world where they've actually ended up with
different electrical standards in different parts of the same country as a
direct result of having non-centralised suppliers and multiple different
electric grids.

> But also: Do you think that ease of use for new users is a worthwhile
> optimization target? I mean, at what cost for non-new users does this
> optimization come, and is that cost worth it?

Yes, and ideally, it's not a _cost_ for non-new users.

------
netmask
Sourceforge

------
fictionfuture
I don’t know why we are thanking a successful company that is making tons of
money (as thanks)...

Why don’t we spend the time to thank the creators and supporters of open
source projects instead?

~~~
scrollaway
> _I don’t know why we are thanking a successful company that is making tons
> of money (as thanks)..._

I mean, other than to be nice to a service that a lot of people genuinely
appreciate? It's also worth mentioning that Github is the primary reason why a
lot of people have a job at all. Github resumes have immense weight in the
industry nowadays.

~~~
zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC
Seriously? If github didn't exist, software companies simply wouldn't have
employees? It is truly amazing how twisted a view people have of power
structures ... the fact that github has installed themselves as a de-facto co-
arbitrator for access to jobs is reinterpreted as a sort of philanthropic
contribution to society.

~~~
scrollaway
My Github profile is, in fact, the reason I got several of my jobs and clients
in the past and there's a bunch of other people I know this is the case for.

It really is baffling how completely out of touch you are with the immense
amount of benefit that the FOSS community and Github users have been reaping
the past decade. You've equated Github to Oracle for some reason and are on a
crusade against them, I don't get it. I truly don't get how you can be so
hateful against people doing things right, versus the atrocious alternatives
that exist out there.

Perfect is the enemy of the good.

~~~
zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC
> My Github profile is, in fact, the reason I got several of my jobs and
> clients in the past and there's a bunch of other people I know this is the
> case for.

Which is great for you--but does that mean that without github, you wouldn't
have a job?

> It really is baffling how completely out of touch you are with the immense
> amount of benefit that the FOSS community and Github users have been reaping
> the past decade.

Well, the thing is: How do you know that? It is really baffling to me how
everyone seems to agree that that is the case, yet noone seems to actually be
able to make a solid case why they think that.

> You've equated Github to Oracle for some reason and are on a crusade against
> them, I don't get it. I truly don't get how you can be so hateful against
> people doing things right, versus the atrocious alternatives that exist out
> there.

They absolutely are not doing things right, that is my whole point.

> Perfect is the enemy of the good.

Which is true--but also completely vacuous: What bad thing could you not
justify using that adage?

------
aphexcx
Or how about updating the godawful PR review process? Tools like Reviewable
are light years ahead. Github is great, but come on, it's stagnant. They don't
release anything anymore. They don't even have mobile apps for crying out
loud!

~~~
KGIII
Err... I am stuck in the past. I can figure out sourceforge well enough, but I
forgot the Git tutorial already. So, I may be missing something.

Why would you want a mobile app for github? What would it do?

------
djrobstep
What makes people engage in bootlicking like this?

I'd rather people supported underfunded open source projects rather than
engaging in marketing for VC financed for-profit companies.

~~~
crispinb
You'd have a hard time arguing that people signing up there are doing so for
benefit from on high, so 'bootlicking' is misplaced.

Perhaps people just appreciate what they actually find, in their real lived
experience, when they use the service?

