
Lord of the Files: How GitHub Tamed Free Software (And More) - jurre
http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/02/github/all/1
======
newman314
Ryan Blair, a technologist with the New York State Senate, thinks it could
even give citizens a way to fork the law — proposing their own amendments to
elected officials. A tool like GitHub could also make it easier for
constituents to track and even voice their opinions on changes to complex
legal code. “When you really think about it, a bill is a branch of the law,”
he says. “I’m just in love with the idea of a constituent being able to send
their state senator a pull request.”

\-------

I find this quote fascinating. This would be fantastic if it actually gained
traction. It would democratize the process of actually writing a bill. People
could actually vote for/against sections for inclusion.

~~~
ubervero
Docracy (basically GitHub for legal documents) is going to do exactly that at
the next legal hackathon <http://legalhackathon.blipclinic.org/>

~~~
newman314
The question is how do we incentivize politicians to start using this. This
will not gain any traction if meetings and discussions are held in secret
(like ACTA).

Maybe as a start, we can just track what has changed throughout the different
revisions of ACTA. Maybe this is something you could do as part of your
hackathon.

I'm picking ACTA as it's something that is relatively current and at the
forefront of people's minds right now.

~~~
bostonvaulter2
One way is to push it through something like Code For America who could then
bring it to interested city governments.

<http://codeforamerica.org/>

------
psquid
Gah, why would they use a bar chart for the "Getting Into Github" diagram and
then not stick to anything resembling a consistent x-axis - at first it looked
like it might be exponential, but it's not even that. The bar sizes are nearly
meaningless, because different segments of them are to wildly different
scales. All it actually conveys is "this one is more than this one".

------
leftnode
Is it just me or are there a lot of errors in this article? Scott Chabon?

I wonder if they intentionally did that so people would fork the article and
fix it.

~~~
holman
Could be! The article itself is open source, too:

<https://github.com/WiredEnterprise/Lord-of-the-Files>

~~~
peterb
I wish all technical books did this.

~~~
RyanMcGreal
The gold standard might be the way Mark Pilgrim wrote _Dive Into HTML5_.

------
4ad
Oh my god:

> GitHub.com is best thought of as Facebook for geeks

Really?

~~~
dchest
Yes. Including countless memes in comments and pull requests.

~~~
chimeracoder
Unfortunately, the most infamous example of that (Bumblebee's 'rm -rf /usr/'
mistake) seems to have been removed:

>
> [https://github.com/MrMEEE/bumblebee/commit/a047be85247755cdb...](https://github.com/MrMEEE/bumblebee/commit/a047be85247755cdbe0acce6f1dafc8beb84f2ac)

~~~
TeMPOraL
Fortunately...

I wrote a comment under it, and since that day my mailbox was flooded with
notifications about other replies for months to come. I think about doing some
analytics on them; say, plot the number of comments per day over time - I'd
expect to see something like e^(1/x) - 1.

~~~
chimeracoder
You should do that - though I doubt it'd be an exponential decay. You're going
to get a series of bumps every time a post about it pops up on HN (or similar
site), and those bumps will probably be positively correlated with one another
(note how top posts on HN are oftentimes top posts on related subreddits on
Reddit, for example).

Would be interesting to see, though - let me know if you do it.

------
randall
"The old regime “makes it very hard to start radical new branches because you
generally need to convince the people involved in the status quo up-front
about their need to support that radical branch,” Torvalds says. “In contrast,
Git makes it easy to just ‘do it’ without asking for permission, and then come
back later and show the end result off — telling people ‘look what I did, and
I have the numbers to show that my approach is much better.’”"

Substitute "business" for branch and "startup" for git.

Startups are git branching for the economy.

------
hkarthik
Interesting hearing about how they want to tackle the Microsoft ecosystem.

As someone who spent years in that ecosystem and recently left it for OSS,
I'll be curious to see what kind of success they see and who they are
targeting.

~~~
SideburnsOfDoom
Phil Haack is one of the people who recently joined Github from MS developer
tools division, with the aim to make the github experience better for those
same devs.

He blogs, maybe you'll find more info on the subject there:
<http://haacked.com/archive/2011/12/07/hello-github.aspx>

I wonder who the other person who joined Github from Microsoft was?

~~~
icey
I'm pretty sure the other person is Paul Betts. They are working on Github for
Windows (i.e. a Windows version of what they've done with Github for Mac).

~~~
SideburnsOfDoom
Related, I never really _got the point_ of "Github for mac". Do we need a fat-
client app when we already have a first-rate web app? What does it
do/enable/make easy that github the website doesn't? A Mac or PC isn't a tiny
phone screen with no keyboard, where native apps are more usable than
websites.

I use TortoiseGit as well for the rest of the github experience, since I'm not
a git master and I can pretend it's SVN with pull requests.

------
jacques_chester
I was really quite surprised at the way this article was pitched. I'd expect
to read this airy, hand-wavy level of detail in a news magazine, not _Wired_.

~~~
medinism
I actually find it entertaining and fun - specially the bits about history,
how they found common vision etc. It was an interesting human take to subject
that could be inherently jargon-laden and boring

------
yabai
Wow! Linus is using a Macbook Air!

~~~
rmc
I remember reading about his hardware set up a few years ago and yes, he was
using apple hardware.

It's almost certainly running linux though.

~~~
zdw
For a while there he was running Linux on a PowerMac G5 tower as his primary
desktop:

<https://lkml.org/lkml/2004/2/12/13>

Many open source OS projects have core developers on non-x86/amd64 platforms
so as to find errors, x86isms, and other code quality issues reveled by
fundamental differences in the underlying architectures.

------
brown9-2
Quadrupling the number of employees in a year is damn impressive.

~~~
MattJ100
From 14, yes. From 1 it wouldn't be - so it's not just 'quadrupling' itself
that's impressive here :)

------
ComputerGuru
I did a double-take at the title and am left wondering whether or not the one-
letter difference between this and William Golding's Nobel Prize-winning "Lord
of the Flies" is purposeful or not.

~~~
azylman
Uh, yes.

