
GitHub lock-in? - g1n016399
http://agateau.com/2016/github-lock-in
======
typeformer
There is absolutely no denying that GitHub has done a lot of good for the
world, but at the same time I feel that because of their true open source
foundation GitLab really listens to their community much better. On a related
note, many devs are just now discovering that with GitLab you can have
unlimited private or public repos hosted at GitLab.com for free. Already a
number of prominent projects have made the jump for this reason alone. You can
find the nascent but growing list of publicly listed projects here:
[https://gitlab.com/explore](https://gitlab.com/explore)

In the end, strong competition is good for users and projects and the Git
ecosystem will only continue to grow and benefit from it; may the friendly
rivalry continue.

~~~
dominotw
Gitlab is a me too product whose main selling point is "not github". Github
was a trailblazer that deserves its position as market leader, gitlab can make
no such claim. Gitlab is a slow and clunky github clone at best.

Give me a strong reason to switch by doing something cool gitlab. Please have
at-least one killer original feature that shows that you are capable of
original thinking . Merely existing and throwing some free stuff at me is not
a good reason for me to switch.

~~~
s986s
Do you want to live in a centralized world or one with competition? How do you
support that?

I personally want to live in competition. I support that through allowing my
appetites to lead me when making arbitrary choices rather than ceremonious
dedication.

as a consumer, I want to feel important. I havent switched but gitlab is
making me feel that way. Github makes me feel like I have no choice and Im
stupid not to. What seems like the better relationship?

~~~
dominotw
competition should happen naturally( i.e somone offering something clearly
superior) not because I think there should be competition on principle.

~~~
vertex-four
Surely you're arguing for there to be a monopoly at any given time there - if
company X does Y first, you'll _always_ use company X's stuff (even after
other companies implement Y) until another company does Z first, in which case
you'll always use their stuff.

Or, more specifically - there should only be one company in the world
manufacturing nuts and bolts, because you can't really create a superior nut.
The first company to invent them should've won out.

~~~
reitanqild
To be honest, superior nuts is being produced:

* self locking nuts

* different steel alloys

* different price points

* different certifications

Thinking that others jobs are simple is a mistake that I'm waning myself off:
thinking that what others do is easy, - that they should just do this and
that.

------
Animats
From the article: _" I wrote "your data is accessible", but actually I should
rather write "your data is currently accessible". Theoretically, nothing
prevents GitHub from removing programmatic access to parts of the data they
host."_

Do their terms of service permit them to do that? Unfortunately, yes: _"
GitHub reserves the right at any time to modify or discontinue, temporarily or
permanently, your access to the API (or any part thereof) with or without
notice. ... GitHub, in its sole discretion, has the right to suspend or
terminate your account and refuse any and all current or future use of the
Service, or any other GitHub service, for any reason at any time. Such
termination of the Service will result in the deactivation or deletion of your
Account or your access to your Account, and the forfeiture and relinquishment
of all Content in your Account. GitHub reserves the right to refuse service to
anyone for any reason at any time. In the event that GitHub takes action to
suspend or terminate an account, we will make a reasonable effort to provide
the affected account owner with a copy of their account contents upon request,
unless the account was suspended or terminated due to unlawful conduct."_

That's a problem. A management change at Github could have a big effect on
open source software. This isn't a theoretical issue; Google Code was shut
down, and Sourceforge turned to the dark side and started bundling adware with
downloads.

It would be useful if a nonprofit such as the Internet Archive or the
Wikimedia Foundation mirrored Github periodically. Just in case Github
management got uppity.

------
cburgmer
"github-backup [...] backs up everything GitHub publishes about the
repository, including branches, tags, other forks, issues, comments, wikis,
milestones, pull requests, watchers, and stars."

[https://github.com/joeyh/github-backup](https://github.com/joeyh/github-
backup)

~~~
ludamad
Cool. Along with those looking to migrate, it's good for the good ol' paranoid
people.

------
sytse
"A competitor willing to make it easy for GitHub project maintainers to
migrate to their services could actually make use of GitHub APIs and provide
an automated migration system."

This is what we did at GitLab, you can import multiple projects with repos,
wikis, issues and pull requests in one go.

~~~
equalarrow
Yup, thank you. :)

I like Github, but I've had Gitlab repos for a few years because they allow me
to keep some projects "off the books" without having to pay. So, thank you
again for this.

I've also used your CI, which is great. I've recommended it to a few clients,
so thank you again!

You guys have done a great job for the community and I wish you all the best!

~~~
sytse
Great to hear that equalarrow, thanks for recommending GitLab and have a great
weekend!

------
kh_hk
Most articles bashing/unbashing github always forget what to me is the real
point. The problem is not in the git part of GitHub.

GitHub is a social network: star, fork, comment, popularity. The fact that
some devs would see github as the only place to be to get to make their
contributions "public" it is acting more as a social network and less about a
git hosting tool. That's the real lock-in.

That's also GitHub's value. It is the largest social network of developers.

------
jacquesm
One thing I'm missing in the whole gitlab/github hosted discussion is how big
is the chance that gitlab will fail where github will succeed because github
actually has a lot more income because they charge for the private repos?

In the longer term this may be a deciding factor, but if enough people that
right now pay for github move to gitlab the balance will shift to the point
where gitlab won't be able to deal with the amount of free users and gitlab
will fail because they no longer have enough paying users...

It's hard to compete with free, but it is also hard to _sustain_ free.

~~~
manquer
As many open source projects have demonstrated, even if the company backing
the project fails, if the community is strong, the project will continue to
evolve. Same can not be said for Github. Gitlab while does provide free sass
services, their servers are notorious in terms of reliability. Many Gitlab
users like it because we want to host the application ourselves. There was
always bitbucket for free private repos. People are not moving because it is
free, they move because they have great control over their code base.

~~~
sytse
I wanted to add that we're working hard to improve .com reliability in
[https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/operations/issues](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-
com/operations/issues)

------
gonyea
"Vendor Lock-in" is a meaningless phrase if you start applying it to GitHub.
You're talking about competition. GitHub competes and people like it a lot.
That's not a lock-in.

Your business won't end if you switch to bitbucket. A developer might grump at
you for a day. Big deal.

Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, etc. They're the ones with a lock-in. They could go
into a corporate coma and money would still print itself and climb into their
pockets for the next 20-years.

------
taspeotis
I've started hosting some really small projects with Microsoft's Visual Studio
Online ("Team Services" now). It's surprising what you get for free.

[https://www.visualstudio.com/pricing/visual-studio-team-
serv...](https://www.visualstudio.com/pricing/visual-studio-team-services-
pricing-vs)

Work's blessed me with an MSDN Enterprise subscription, so I get some extra
bells and whistles. Discounting the extras, it's a hosted version of TFS for
free (for five developers + unlimited "stakeholders"). Which is great if you
have bug bears about GitHub's issue tracking.

[https://www.visualstudio.com/features/agiletools-
vs](https://www.visualstudio.com/features/agiletools-vs)

It's not going to replace GitHub for me, yet. I think Microsoft said it
themselves when they started hosting projects on GitHub instead of Codeplex:
"GitHub is where the community is."

EDIT: I should say, VSO/VSTS is really focused towards .NET development. It
has some special Java support, too, and beyond that it's general purpose
enough to work with other languages.

~~~
sandGorgon
This is do awesome. 3$ per developer per month and the Ui looks great!

One place where people screw up in git hosting is the issues or navigation. I
can't wait to try this out. The community features of github are unimportant
for a private repo.

------
andrewchambers
[http://phabricator.org/](http://phabricator.org/) seems really good.

~~~
rolfvandekrol
I don't know. The homepage of Phabricator doesn't give me the impression the
developers take the task of building a corporate collaboration tool very
seriously.

~~~
sangnoir
Sounds like you might prefer the Serious Business Edition(TM) [1] of
Phabricator. I don't fault them for having a little fun/being irreverent (or
as they call it:'flavor'), but it's a config setting you can toggle on your
deployment, seriously [1]

1\.
[https://secure.phabricator.com/book/phabricator/article/tone...](https://secure.phabricator.com/book/phabricator/article/tone/#removing-
flavor)

------
gspetr
> GitHub is, in my opinion, an "ethical" proprietary software company, if such
> thing can exist

If that were true, they would not have embarked upon a Thought Police crusade
like this one:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9966118](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9966118)
"Github threatens to shut down a repository for using the word 'retard'"

~~~
k__
Maybe the use of such words increases toxicity by 250%?

~~~
stonogo
You're not doing anyone any favors by assuming 'toxicity' is a measurable
quantity or that you've sufficiently developed a Theory of Toxicity such that
you can ascribe relative values to specific words.

~~~
k__
Oh no, I didn't developed this "Theory of Toxicity", Riot Games did.

------
precedent123
Lock-in or not, it's hard to see what is compelling about GitHub in the first
place. I agree with Torvalds that pull request are a horrible and bureaucratic
way of submitting patches.

Possibly that is what people like about GitHub: Leave an audit trail of your
activities, do a lot of doc fixes to have better statistics...

Perhaps the following quote of pg also applies to GitHub:

"Object-oriented programming generates a lot of what looks like work. Back in
the days of fanfold, there was a type of programmer who would only put five or
ten lines of code on a page, preceded by twenty lines of elaborately formatted
comments. Object-oriented programming is like crack for these people: it lets
you incorporate all this scaffolding right into your source code. Something
that a Lisp hacker might handle by pushing a symbol onto a list becomes a
whole file of classes and methods. So it is a good tool if you want to
convince yourself, or someone else, that you are doing a lot of work."

------
junto
I'm really surprised that Github hasn't done what Stackoverflow does, and
advertise jobs. They have an awesome knowledge of the skills of their users up
front.

~~~
phpnode
Github jobs has existed for years and years but I agree that they are
massively under-utilising their data.
[https://jobs.github.com/](https://jobs.github.com/)

------
softinio
I wish these anti-github blogs and fud would stop and people found better
things to write about.

Github is fantastic.I love using it over anyone else.

GitLab and Bitbucket are good too. You can even host stuff yourself.

Its nice to have choice. Choose the one your like.I Choose github and that is
my choice.

------
rogerthatt
Happy to be locked in to github. There is a tipping point where value gained
exceeds the risk of vendor lockin, and in my case there is no question the
benefits outweight the risk.

~~~
rogerthatt
Why would this comment be getting downvoted so many times??

If you dont agree comment. HN users can be so passive agressive sometimes

~~~
softinio
I agree with you. Unbelievable. I upvoted you btw :-)

Quality of readers of HN and reddit getting lower all the time.

Look forward to being downvoted for ageeing with you :-)

------
ThePhysicist
With the risk of sounding overly critical, I really can't understand why
people get so emotional about software. Github isn't a public utility company
and so isn't obliged to provide free services to anyone or cater specifically
to the needs of one group of users, if they do so it is by their own choice
and because it helps them to fulfill their monetary goals (making money is the
main purpose of a for-profit company). Also, I can't see any significant lock-
in effects at work here.

Personally, I have several dozens software projects: Some of them are on
Github, some on Bitbucket, some run on a custom Gitlab instance and some are
plain git repositories on some Linux server. I think we have more choices for
hosting code projects today than we had ever before, it's just that like in
many other markets there is a power law at work which makes that one player
has 90 % market share, this doesn't automatically mean that the largest player
has a monopoly on source code hosting though.

As the author says, the fact that the software Github provides is affordable,
convenient and works very well is probably the only lock-in there is, and this
kind of quality-based lock-in is actually desirable in my opinion. What would
not be acceptable to me is a lock-in based on the fact that your data is
stored somewhere from where it's very hard/impossible to get out (SAP comes to
mind), this isn't the case for Github though.

