
Why aren't you using GitHub? - oever
http://www.valdyas.org/fading/index.cgi/2015/05/29#no-github
======
jordigh
Kind of telling that of the other comments I see here so far, nobody seems to
be addressing what the article is about: because they don't trust github, a
for-profit company who hides their source code, to not some day pull a
Sourceforge.

We had this discussion in the GNU project. The basic conclusion I could see
was that simply using github as a place to host the repo like Linus does with
Linux is not a problem. In typical GNU fashion, the biggest problem people saw
was with the non-free javascript that entails from using the github web
interface. Some also were concerned with whole SaSS problem with github, were
they tie you up with wikis, bug trackers, pull requests and a lot of other
things around just git hosting that are difficult to transplant to another
service.

~~~
aaronbrethorst

        they tie you up with wikis, bug trackers, pull
        requests and a lot of other things around just
        git hosting that are difficult to transplant to
        another service.
    

Are you saying that some people say GitHub should be avoided for GNU projects
because it's too useful?

~~~
bonsai80
"tie you up" might have been better written as "lock you in". Those tools can
certainly be made available through other means via free (as in freedom)
software. It takes work in doing so and that's what Github is selling - ease
and convenience.

Github has obviously done a great job of making these tools useful and
approachable. The point about having ultimate control over that data though is
valid. Github might be able to mitigate some of these concerns with something
like Google's "Data Liberation Front", providing a contractual agreement with
users to make their data easily exportable if they choose to do so. Of course,
even that may not be enough for some projects and for them it's a totally
valid option to avoid github (and similar closed SaaS options).

~~~
sytse
GitLab CEO here, we want to give people options to prevent lock in. GitLab CE
already has a one click importer for all your GitHub.com repo's and issues.
We're working on automatically importing your pull requests and wiki's too.

~~~
thedaniel
Do you provide an export function as well, to prevent lock in?

------
ryandvm
I don't use Github because their pricing model for hobby projects sucks.
Bitbucket's model of only charging for projects that have more than 5 users
makes much more sense.

Also, I don't like monocultures.

~~~
agumonkey
Talking about monocultures :
[https://twitter.com/mjackson/status/604325015333412864](https://twitter.com/mjackson/status/604325015333412864)

That tweet explain that there are numerous cool projects on codepen that you
can explore.

------
bowlich
Github's payment plans don't work out well for a team that's doing lots of
small repositories.

My team is pretty small (5 devs) and we easily have 150+ repositories for
different packages that all get wrapped into our main product. Github charges
per private repository and 125 repositories maxes out github's organizational
plans. Hence, we are currently on bitbucket.

The team also didn't want to have to make a business justification everytime
someone wanted to fork a repository or throw something together experimental.
We would rather just be free to create as many repositories as we please and
not have to concern ourselves with the question of whether it should be a
public or private repo.

~~~
marcc
You don't have to pay for private forks.

~~~
pc86
What does that matter? They still have over 150 repositories.

~~~
avalaunch
It matters because he specifically mentions that the team "didn't want to have
to make a business justification everytime someone wanted to fork a
repository".

~~~
yebyen
They wouldn't have to, if they were on Github's maxed-out plan already. There
is no higher tier. They're already paying the most. (hypothetically)

~~~
pc86
The maxed out organizational plan ($200/mo) is still only 125 private
repositories.

GitHub is just not financially feasible for small organizations with many
small, private repos. For small teams like mine (3 + an occasional contractor)
that have close to 200 repositories of closed-source code, $200/mo is
laughable, particularly when we can host all of that on BitBucket for _free_
because we never go above 5 users.

------
cgtyoder
I don't use Github because of their unacceptable TOS. They reserve the right
to delete my account and all content for any reason, at any time, without
giving prior notification.

Who can operate a real business with that hanging over your head? Seems very
foolish to me.

------
Joeboy
Page is down, but my answer to the title is that I don't (always) use github
because it's really, really easy to set up a private repo on the Debian VPS
I'm renting anyway.

Edit: For those who don't know:

On the server:

mkdir ~/whatever.git

cd ~/whatever.git

git init --bare

On your local machine:

git clone me@myserver.com:~/whatever.git

That's it. Admittedly you are now responsible for backups, but hopefully you
back up your server anyway. And of course you don't get the snazzy web
interface but I don't imagine most of us use that much anyway.

~~~
tajen
Sorry, is there an easy way to backup a server (e.g. Debian)? Do you use the
provider's "backup your instance" feature? How can you be confident that
they'll never close your account and lose ypur backups, for example based on
an assumption that something you're doing isn't legit?

~~~
Joeboy
I use [http://duplicity.nongnu.org](http://duplicity.nongnu.org) to back up my
data (not the whole server). I don't know if it's necessarily the best thing
these days, but it works OK.

I think the risk of losing my VPS, my working copy and my backups at the same
time is acceptably low, given that the world would not end if my git repos
disappeared anyway.

------
bonsai80
Server seems to be having issues. Google cache:

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Y9Z0KT1...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Y9Z0KT1Z5e8J:www.valdyas.org/fading/index.cgi/2015/05/29&hl=en&gl=us&strip=1)

~~~
boudewijnrempt
Yeah, my poor blosxom instance running on an ancient ideapad I got for free at
a meego conference in Dublin isn't made for loads like ycombinator causes.
It's got a load average of over 150 now. The moment my screen session started
getting slow, I thought -- someone posted this on ycombinator...

~~~
oever
Hey boud, sorry for getting your server hammered. Your blog is now getting
points on the strength of the title alone.

~~~
boudewijnrempt
Well, it's down now. I guess I'll bring it up again tomorrow or so.

------
bonsai80
Reading the article, I don't think this was meant as a question to the group
here. The question/title feeds into the article explaining why they don't use
github. Perhaps a more forum-friendly title would have been "Why We Don't Use
Github." I'd be curious to hear people's thoughts on the statements made in
the article (see posts with cache link if you can't load it).

------
michaelhoffman
1) Because I prefer Mercurial.

2) Because Bitbucket gives me a free academic plan.

------
newsreader
Because I been using Bitbucket for the past five years and I have no
compelling reason to switch.

------
fweespeech
Google Cache:
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Y9Z0KT1...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Y9Z0KT1Z5e8J:www.valdyas.org/fading/index.cgi/2015/05/29+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)

1) Private repos are too expensive from a value standpoint. Its a $200/month
service [ [https://github.com/pricing](https://github.com/pricing) ] for what
I can get for $50/month worth of VM time internally.

2) I prefer to support open source projects.

~~~
bonsai80
Regarding #2. Do you choose to pay some amount to the OSS project(s) you use
for this? (seriously asking, not meaning to sound like a jerk here)

~~~
fweespeech
[https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/](https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/)

Yeah, for work. Not for my side projects.

------
pnathan
I strongly prefer Mercurial. Github, Inc. seems like a decent company, and I
like the UI.

But hg roxx. :-)

~~~
atmosx
Why? Are there any technical reasons or is it just the nerd-within wich pushes
into the "less popular" choice?

~~~
pnathan
sure, a number of reasons.

hg interface makes _sense_. there's clear distinction in semantics between
commands and flags. that is not the case with git. git demands being a wizard
to be excellent; hg doesn't.

hg repos typically are clones of each other: it takes work to not have all
changesets replicated everywhere. the implication of that is that there's no
forgetting branches; ergo, there's no confusion about what piece of the dag is
pushed and what isn't. it's all pushed.

hg branches are 'true' branches, as opposed to refs. I could go into depth
into how that plays out in better ways than git, but that's more of an actual
essay.

hg extensions give hg more power - if you really want to get complicated, it's
not unbelievably difficult.

hg project makes certain guarantees about stability of interface; tooling is
easy to develop around that. tooling makes life better, often.

as a general rule of thumb, the hg project and experience adopts a principled
way of choices; this flows out into the code and experience. it's a very clean
and "better is better" way of working.

------
pbreit
Free private repos.

------
vezzy-fnord
GitHub's issue tracker is pretty bare bones. I always thought that was sort of
reflective of its culture.

I'm also not too keen on the entire gamification aspect that GH places on you.
I find it gratuitous.

When it comes to layout and design, I think cgit is the leader, though GH is a
close second perhaps.

------
zyxley
Incidentally, for anyone who like's GitHub's features and workflow but not
GitHub the organization itself, GitLab
([https://about.gitlab.com/](https://about.gitlab.com/)) has an open-source
and self-hostable CE version that's very much "well-executed GitHub clone",
with a paid (but still self-hostable) EE version with stuff like extended
LDAP/Active Directory and JIRA integration.

------
asddubs
I agree with the article, and the stated reasons, but a little nitpick:

"And Github's business model is exactly what SourceForge's was."

I don't think that's actually true, is it? Githubs business model is based on
enterprise customers, which to my knowledge, SourceForge wasn't. Not that that
diminishes the point.

------
joeblau
Free private repositories; Although I'm using GitHub to host two OSS projects.

------
Touche
I actually prefer the cgit interface. It's fast and simple. I just don't trust
myself to run a server and do backups, etc. for something as important as
source code.

------
caherrerapa
Pricing plans for small teams with many repos and because the pull request
review sucks compared to Bitbucket.

------
Ave
They have a tendency to remove repos that they don't agree with ideologically.

------
404error
I don't use it because I am a one man show. I don't have a need for it.

------
PuffinBlue
For convenience or in case you can't visit Google or something, here's the
text of the article from Google cache as the origin server is down [mirror for
the ctrl+f folks]

\---

Why aren't you using github?

Is a question we, Krita developers, get asked a lot. As in, many times a week.
Some people are confused enough that they think that github is somehow the
"official" place to put git repositories -- more official than
projects.kde.org, phabricator.kde.org, git.gnome.org or where-ever else.
Github, after all, is so much more convenient: you only need a github account
or login with your social media account. It's so much more social, it's so
cosy, and no worries about licensing either! So refreshing and modern.

So much better than, say, SourceForge ever was! Evil SourceForge, having
failed to make a business out of hosting commercial software development
projects is now descending to wrapping existing free software Windows
installers in malware-distributing, ad-laden installer wrappers.

The thing is, though, Github might be the cool place to hack on code these
days, the favourite place to host your projects: that is exactly what
SourceForge was, too, back in the days. And Github's business model is exactly
what SourceForge's was. And if that isn't a warning against giving your first-
born children in the hands of a big, faceless, profit-oriented, venture-
capital-backed company, then I don't know what is!

And yes, I have heard the arguments. Github is so familiar, so convenient, you
can always remove your project (until Github decides to resurrect it, of
course), it's git, so you're not losing your code revision history! But what
about other artefacts: wiki, documents, bugs, tasks? Maybe you can export them
now, I haven't checked, but what will you import it into?

I've spent over ten years of my life on Krita. I care about Krita. I don't
want to run that sort of risk. One thing I've learned in the course of a mis-
spent professional life is that you always should keep the core of your
business in your own hands. You shouldn't outsource that!

So, one big reason for not moving Krita's development to github is that I
simply do not trust them.

That's a negative reason, but there are also positive reasons. And they all
have to do with KDE.

I know that a lot of people like to bitch about KDE -- they like to bitch
about the layout of the forum, the performance of the repo browser, the size
of the libraries, the releases of new versions of the Plasma Desktop, about
fifteen year old conflicts with the FSF (which somehow proves to them that KDE
isn't trustworthy...) The fact is that especially in the Linux world, a bunch
of people decided ages ago they didn't like KDE, it wasn't their tribe and
they apparently find it enjoyable to kick like a mule everytime we do
something.

Well, shucks to them.

Then there are people for whom the free software world is a strange place. You
don't see something like Corel Painter being hosted together with a bunch of
other software on a bigger entity's website. It's confusing! But it's still
strange, to many people, to see that Krita shares a bug tracker, a forum, a
mailing list platform, a git repository platform with a bunch of other
projects that they aren't interested in.

Well, I see that as a learning moment

And not as a hint that we should separate out and... Start using using github?
Which would also mean sharing infra with a bunch of other projects, but
without any sense of community?

Because that is what make KDE valuable for Krita: the community. KDE is a big
community of people who are making free software for end users. All kinds of
free software, a wild variety. But KDE as a community is extremely open.
Anyone can get a KDE identity, and it doesn't take a lot of effort to actually
get commit access to all the source code, to all projects. Once in, you can
work on everything.

All the pieces needed to develop software are here: websites, forums, wiki's,
bug trackers, repo hosting, mailing lists, continuous-integration, file
hosting, todo management, calendaring, collaborative editing, file hosting.
The system admin team does an incredible job keeping it all up and running,
and the best thing is: we own it. We, the community, own our platforms and our
data. We cannot be forced by a venture capitalist to monetize our projects by
adding malware installers. We own our stuff, which means we can trust our
stuff.

And we can improve our platform: try to improve a closed-source, company-owned
platform like github! So suggestions for improvement are welcome: we're now
looking into phabricator, which is a very nice platform giving a lot of the
advantages of github (but with some weird limitations: it very clearly wasn't
made for hosting hundreds of git repos and hundreds of projects!), we're
looking into question-and-answers websites. Recently, the continuous
integration system got improved a whole bunch. All awesome deveopments!

But moving development to github? Bad idea.

------
coppolaemilio
Basically, they don't want to. I don't see any relevant argument made on this
text.

~~~
nicarus1984
Not how I read that.

>So, one big reason for not moving Krita's development to github is that I
simply do not trust them.

>We cannot be forced by a venture capitalist to monetize our projects by
adding malware installers. We own our stuff, which means we can trust our
stuff.

Whether you agree or disagree, they did in fact make an argument.

