
Change GitBucket user interface to make difference with GitHub - sandGorgon
https://gitbucket.github.io/gitbucket-news/gitbucket/2016/03/20/change-user-interface.html
======
lexicality
Looking at the screenshot I thought "Wow, I can see why Github would be
annoyed at that" before realising that was their proposed not-at-all-like-
github-now-honestly new UI.

Their demo looks like they just stole Github's CSS templates.

~~~
Artemis2
I had exactly the same reaction. There are more screenshots of their previous
look in other posts:

[https://gitbucket.github.io/gitbucket-
news/images/gitbucket-...](https://gitbucket.github.io/gitbucket-
news/images/gitbucket-3.12/new-github-ui.png) (there's even "GitBucket now
supports current GitHub UI" in the post?!)

[https://gitbucket.github.io/gitbucket-
news/images/gitbucket-...](https://gitbucket.github.io/gitbucket-
news/images/gitbucket-3.11/branch-protection.png)

[https://gitbucket.github.io/gitbucket-
news/images/gitbucket-...](https://gitbucket.github.io/gitbucket-
news/images/gitbucket-3.6/pull_request.png)

~~~
sheeshkebab
Not defending the ui aping, but GH css is open source:
[http://primercss.io/layout/](http://primercss.io/layout/)

They should have kept it proprietary if their lawyers are touchy about liberal
open source licenses.

>Open source Available for use under the MIT license and built with open
source projects like SCSS, Jekyll, Grunt, and more.

~~~
jerf
Open source covers the copyright. This is more a trademark issue. The
trademark issue is independent of the copyright-openness of their assets, as
it is not valid to infringe their trademark either with their assets, or with
fully copyright-independent assets.

~~~
stingraycharles
This is correct and highlighted by the fact that Github doesn't focus on the
CSS at all -- their claim would have been exactly the same if they did not
copy anything and wrote everything from scratch. It's about trademark and user
confusion, not copyright.

------
sytse
I want to applaud GitHub for doing this in a peaceful manner. They have every
right to ask this. I think having all project develop their own UI style will
allow for more innovation to happen. At GitLab we are greatly inspired by
GitHub but over time the GitLab became more distinctive. And that allowed a
trickle of innovation to flow back, for example protected branches.

~~~
joering2
Not really. I wish most GUIs would be the same if they are offered for pretty
much the same functionality, like searching for hotels or flights. Too bad to
see the smaller is giving up the good fight. Last thing I would care is
someone takes my GUI -- only means I designed something extremely useful in
the first place. Go ahead! Duplicate for everyone's benefit.

And notice they said its a good first start. This will get similar to Apple
having issues with corner's curve of Samsung devices... never enough curved to
actually not remind of Apple's products.

Bad move on Github part, but I'm happy with Btibucket anyways.

~~~
zeveb
> Not really. I wish most GUIs would be the same if they are offered for
> pretty much the same functionality, like searching for hotels or flights.

Agreed. Remember when one of the complaints about Linux apps was that they
used so many different toolkits (e.g. Athena, qt, gtk+ &c.)? Now we use web
apps, and every single one looks different, and none of them is as usable as
xterm.

'Progress'!

------
tenken
Really Gitbucket should seek to change their UX. Not just the UI. Right now
gitbucket looks like a functional clone of github, that's bad.

It's possible to appear different, but retain feature-set it's just hard. And
obvisously -- I think, you could bundle a legacy Github theme as an addon to
gitbucket provided by the community if you really wanted to. Just not ship the
product out the door as a 100% clone of github, UI and all.

~~~
blister
But... GitBucket is a project that is trying to be a Scala-based clone of
GitHub. That's what their project is about. They're trying to copy the look
and feel of GitHub because that's exactly what they're trying to do.

It (to me) would be like Microsoft asking LibreOffice to change their look and
feel because it looks too similar to MS Office. LibreOffice is SUPPOSED to
look like MS Office so that users can switch without much pain.

Right?

------
grandalf
Interestingly, Github seems to be in a similar product vs infrastructure
quagmire to Twitter.

If Github were an infrastructure company, we'd all want our git repos mirrored
there and we'd all want to use the collaboration and reputation APIs.

But viewed through the product lens, Github is a user interface for git which
ought to be considered proprietary.

When Github first launched issues, I was hoping that it would be pulled into
.git itself, so that we might all manage issues locally using a cli and then
sync changes with peer copies of the repo.

Then, when Github launched jobs, I thought the idea was that hiring managers
would get a very good sense of a candidate's skills by seeing information
surfaced by github about a coder's habits and social network. This would in
effect be a big data approach to evaluating a coder as a function of commits,
and a meritocratic leader board for the industry.

Then, when Github announced Atom, I was expecting a bunch of Github branded
open source tooling, yet the approach seems hesitant and focused on beginners.

All along, Github charges a premium for private repos, which has allowed its
competitors to grow.

Now Github has an incentive to become proprietary, because it no longer has a
free network effect. With a $100M investment, one needs pretty big numbers to
move the needle.

I think a turning point was when Github decided to stop being a rubygems repo.
It is exactly that kind of deep integration of hosting, reputation system, and
build system that Github offers a unique competitive advantage. Github's
search was also broken for years.

This allowed NPM to spring up, but lacking the ability to innovate deeply in
the area of reputation the way Github could have.

So now Github has to decide if it can be a trusted platform or if it's going
to fight petty battles over producty things like Twitter has done.

------
smaili
I think it's kind of funny they start out by saying:

 _At first, we have never copied any materials from GitHub so this is not
problem._

But later when you scroll to their footer it says:

 _GitBucket is a GitHub clone powered by Scala._

~~~
rexf
Even the name GitBucket is very confusing. At first, I thought it was
referring to BitBucket. But it's not GitHub or BitBucket.

~~~
ljk
It's till comment that I realized it's not talking about Bitbucket

~~~
mason240
You're not the only one.

------
e40
What am I missing here?? I thought look and feel wasn't copyrightable. Didn't
we learn that in the 80's?

~~~
deckar01
It is a violation of GitHub's ToS. GitBucket is hosted on GitHub.

~~~
justinsb
Which would likely be a violation of anti-trust law, as we learned in the 90s.

I hope GitBucket posts the email from Github.

~~~
mikestew
I mean this in the kindest tone I can muster in a text medium: go read a
Wikipedia page on antitrust, or specifically read the details of the 90s MSFT
case (which I assume you are referring to) before using the phrase "anti-trust
law" in a sentence again. You'll realize why others view your comment as
bordering on non-sequitor.

~~~
justinsb
I would welcome a counterpoint in fact (vs personal statements). To me, the
argument would be that Github has a dominant market position in public source
code hosting, and using their ToS in this way would limit competition by
hindering their distribution, and that this is contrary to the public interest
(see "Dear Github" etc). I am by no means a lawyer, and would welcome
correction and clarification.

~~~
msbarnett
> I would welcome a counterpoint in fact (vs personal statements)

It would help, to make a counterpoint, if you spelled out exactly what in the
90s this reminds you of.

My wild guess is that this reminds you of the legal agreements Microsoft got
in trouble for having computermakers sign that kept BeOS off their computers.

But that's _wildly inapplicable_ here. Nevermind the important fact that a TOS
for Github's own service forbidding using it to create a competing service is
materially different from signing an agreement with a 3rd part to not do
business with a competitor, the simple fact is _Anti-Trust laws only apply to
Trusts_.

At the time Microsoft got in trouble, they had previously signed a legal
agreement _acknowledging they were a trust_ , in 1994. Github hasn't done
that. Microsoft signed a legally binding document that said "We acknowledge we
are a Trust, and we agree to play by the rules governing Trusts" and then
broke those rules. That's what they got in trouble for. None of that applies
here, however much you "think Github has a dominant position". That's not
enough to get you slapped with antitrust violations.

If Github were a monopoly in it's market (which it isn't, but let's pretend),
that's not illegal! They would first have to be shown to be leveraging that
position to enter into other markets, or to in some other way be illegally
using that position to prevent 3rd parties from doing business with
competitors, which is a violation of the Sherman Act. Simply saying that
competitors can't use their free service is not a violation of the Sherman
Act.

~~~
justinsb
Thank you for the explanation. Can you provide a citation that antitrust law
applies only to Trusts?

To answer your question though, I was thinking of the accusation that
Microsoft leveraged the Windows market position to promote Internet Explorer.

It still seems that (if a monopoly) Github's behavior could be covered by the
"essential facilities" section. However both whether Github is a monopoly and
whether their behaviour would be covered seem very fuzzy, and I suggest we
leave that discussion to the lawyers!

------
apetresc
What I find odd is that, even though they appear to be publicly released, they
still develop their own project in GitHub! Anyone know what's holding them
back from self-hosting?

~~~
slig
Well, I believe it's easier to get contributors on GH than to force newcomers
to create an account on a new service just to submit a patch.

------
popey456963
Considering the blatant similarities between the GitBucket and Github UI, I'm
really not surprised they were getting upset about it. Surely GitBucket can
not be surprised either?

------
ocdtrekkie
This was one of those predictable things. Generally when you start your
project on the words "x clone", x is going to take issue with it. Often an
application's UI is one of it's greatest assets, and copying it is generally a
no-go.

Changing the colors of your theme doesn't really substantially change the UI.
They should strive to become something of their own, and go after improving
past what GitHub offers.

------
dimgl
That's their refresh? It looks exactly like GitHub...

~~~
robotnoises
No no... as you can clearly see, the buttons on Gitbucket have a border-radius
of 6px while Github is 5.

------
foxly
Er... it does look an awful lot like GitHub. Like down to the pixel.

Props to both parties for dealing with this like adults versus suing each
other, which is how most of these situations usually end.

------
eckza
Round of applause for everyone involved for staying level-headed and
agreeable.

------
orliesaurus
After reading the article and looking at the screenshots I can only say: No
shit Sherlock!

------
smoyer
I've been using GitBucket since about version 0.5.0 and I honestly liked the
GitBucket UI better before the push to look just like GitHub.

Feature-wise, it's behind both GitHub and GitLab, but for company internal
repositories, it also doesn't me to risk the security of my server by running
RoR. I lost a server to hackers (temporarily) due to an RoR vulnerability that
was exposed through Redmine, so perhaps I'm a bit sensitive.

~~~
icebraining
If it's just for internal use, why not close off external access or put an
authentication layer "over" the application? I have my personal services
protected with Basic Auth¹, it's just a matter of running a command to create
the passwords file and adding two lines to your Nginx config.

¹ With HTTPS, of course, but that should be used anyway, to protect the app's
own authentication.

------
spdustin
Seems to me that nearly every UI component in the screenshot is stock
Bootstrap.

------
pfarnsworth
GitHub was not wrong to do this. Gitbucket's UI is confusingly similar to
GitHub's so I have no qualms with the actions taken. The good thing is that
they took a reasonable approach to this.

~~~
lovelearning
I'm not sure I understand how someone can get confused between a reputed SaaS
like GitHub and something called GitBucket. Don't software engineers look at
URLs and page titles nowadays?

~~~
icebraining
What makes you think only software engineers use Github?

------
kowdermeister
Guys should be bought by Rocket Internet.

------
selamtux
I don't understant why people think gitbucket should look different then
github.

Ofcourse logo, icons, css, js files must be rewrited by project contributors
but looks can be same as github.

We love github, we use github, we promote github to companies, friends and
community, we help them grow and being great with open letters, whishes,
advises, even we publish our codes under gpl or other free/open source
projects on github

They change and show how we can interact with other developers.

Github have a great experiences with coding community, resources to explore
more ways to do things with rigth way with our help.

Github must be proud them self and its good.

But as a community driven projects doesnt have this experiences and/or
knowlage. Copying ui and ux it's not be issue for those projects if they dont
go to commertial way.

Its shows what github doing rigth. In this community we have great hackers,
they can offer help to gitbucket, but we don't have great ux hackers as code
hackers. Until we have ux developers (in general speaking) copying experiences
from somewhere and given them to people sould not be issue.

------
Mizza
It kind of looks like this is a cultural difference. It's an Asian project,
and it seems like they simply don't care about IP as much over there.

We don't really care about it here either, but we'll at least try to hide it
by changing the UI so it doesn't look like a clone, even if it blatantly is.

There, the _point_ is to be a clone. It's sort of a mark of respect.

It's just a very different mentality around this stuff, I hope it can be
resolved amicably.

------
BogusIKnow
As always, if you're HNs darling, it's fine to send the lawyers.

------
frade33
>GitBucket is a GitHub clone powered by Scala.

site footer

------
Flimm
Note that this is blog post is not from "BitBucket" but "GitBucket", it took
my brain longer than it should have to realise this.

~~~
savanaly
I didn't realize it until I read your comment and can attest I was extremely
confused. "Wait, bitbucket is hosted on github? Wait they redesigned to look
like github? Why is the blog post for this major cloud provider written in
broken english?"

(to be clear I didn't have a problem understanding the blog post and don't
mind that the english isn't perfect, I just thought it was curious).

------
dfc
> "It was saying GitHub does not allow to clone..."

One of the things they did not clone from GitHub is well written prose.
GitHub's blog posts are always well written and enjoyable to read.

~~~
budu3
To be fair to them they are not native English speakers. I would have an
equally hard time (of not impossible) writing well written Japanese prose.

~~~
dfc
It would be impossible for me to write at all in Japanese. Romans would laugh
hysterically if they read the blog I wrote in Latin. Which is why any
corporate communications to my Roman customers would not come from my stylus.
I can't imagine building a brand and or loyal customer base any other way.

