

Github has won - db42
http://jmoiron.net/blog/github-has-won/

======
edanm
"[..]but just as distributed vcs' had won over svn a few years ago,"

This is an odd statement, which deserves more explanation. DVCSs have won in
the arena of early-adopter programmers who actually care about these things
enough to read them, but I'd guess that the number of SVN users still trumps
the number of git/hg users by several orders of magnitude. Moreover, I'd guess
that the number of programmer who have _heard_ about git/hg is incredibly
small as well (compared to SVN or other systems.)

By the way, hg has definitely won _me_. I use it with an online project
management and hosting service called Codebasehq.com, which I recommend any
time this comes up - I really love their interface, and their pricing options
(you pay per project, which can have several repositories tied to it; you can
even have several hg repos and several SVN repos tied to the same project,
which is what I do.)

~~~
hartror
I know several people who still have to struggle with CVS on a daily basis.
Git/Hg are going to take a long time to get entrenched into enterprise.

~~~
NickPollard
Anecdote is not the singular of data and all that, but at the major game
development studio I work at, no-one at my team has even /heard/ of git, and
when I try to explain what a distributed version control system is I get blank
stares.

~~~
silentbicycle
Do they use perforce? It seems to be rather popular in the game industry, in
part because its model suits projects that have a lot of large binaries in
their repository.

~~~
zach
Of course -- everyone in games seems to use Perforce. There are no better
alternatives, including p4-git, and believe me, I've looked. Subversion is
passable but slow.

Even though I use git for all my personal stuff, if I started a console or PC
studio, I too would be setting up a P4 server the first week rather than even
experimenting with git.

As you say, it seems to be the only code-oriented VCS that also comfortably
handles large files (especially larger than available memory) with reasonable
speed.

Traditional version control systems consider giant files a user smell.

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makeramen
I've actually found bitbucket slowly becoming a good competitor to github.

From a sales point of view, bitbucket's offering of 5 free private repos might
actually help them attract more developers who are making proprietary apps and
making money, and then more willing to pay for more repos in the future. I
personally have quite a few repos there partly because I don't want the
publicity of github (and partly because hg was quicker to learn than git :P).
I also know a friend who switched to bitbucket simply due to the private repo
offerings.

For open source though, github is probably the way to go.

This is all just anecdotal though, I'd love to hear some solid evidence if
anyone has some.

~~~
wkornewald
Note that it's not 5 free private repos, but 5 private users. You can have
unlimited private repos. So, in a small team you'd probably never have to pay.
I wonder what has led them to this decision business-wise. Was the competition
from github so overwhelming that they decided to counter it with with
relatively drastic measures (giving up lots of $$$)?

~~~
follower
Note that BitBucket was recently acquired by Atlassian:
<http://www.atlassian.com/hosted/bitbucket/faq.jsp>

I think this had an effect on the offers.

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KirinDave
Github has "won" in that it's the current darling child of the code-hosting
industry. It's done this for two reasons:

1\. Git is superior to its competitors as a technology for use by developers.
It isn't very much superior these days, but it is enough to be noticeable and
preferred. This is a superiority in _use_ and _performance_ , which are enough
of an edge to offset its architectural failings.

2\. Github has better UX than the competition: I've been referring to code
hosted in bitbucket frequently, and I often sigh at what they're doing.
Getting to any given piece of code takes longer and requires more clicks than
on Github. Github also has great features for understanding how code is moving
within a project, and I find them more comprehensible and useful than the
competition's.

It doesn't hurt that Github is a small self-started company with a staff full
of brilliant people and a talented support staff. They certainly win the
_personality_ part of the competition thoroughly.

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andrewgodwin
I'm not sure I'd say it has "won" - such a phrase implies a long-term
positioning at the front of the pack, and those that came before it for code
hosting (SourceForge, Google Code) enjoyed their time in the spotlight before
having something new come along.

BitBucket in particular have made a good attempt after the Atlassian takeover,
with the infinite free private repos being the most interesting part - I use
it a lot, but mostly because I do a lot of small personal projects, and so the
"social" features of GitHub - those which benefit most from its prominence -
are mostly meaningless to me.

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MikeW
I don't believe there will ever be a clear "winner" because the landscape is
constantly changing. Sourceforge was THE place to store your OSS code and
provide downloads and there was a really great broad selection of code and a
way to discover it. But they didn't build good ways of managing it and the
whole experience became cluttered and confusing. I saw many projects move to
Google Code who provided a clean interface.

And now I see many of those projects move to github and everyone I know is a
big fan of the forking and pull requests.

But the landscape will change again and github keeps needing to iterate and
innovate on their product. Just about every time I use github, I curse their
disastrous search. There is just so much innovation they could develop around
code management which they don't have, a competitor could jump in and they too
could become the darling of the development world. They too will have "won".

~~~
sdesol
When I started developing my product two years ago, I seriously thought about
throwing my product into the source code hosting ring. I knew I had a product
that could compete but as you pointed out, the landscape is constantly
changing and it is also one of the places where you have compete by price.

Look at the recent shift by Bitbucket after being purchased by Atlassian.
Bitbucket can now afford to be a money pit so that Mercurial can gain further
adoption. Atlassian is really trying to build an enterprise solution around
Mercurial (they've said this publicly) so they don't care if they lose money
with Bitbucket. And this is going to affect Github. Only time will tell how
much of an impact this is going to have.

So yeah I'm glad I decided I didn't want to get into this market space. I
decided I was better off focusing on developing the innovations and be a
complimentary asset for sites like Github, Bitbucket, and other hosting sites
instead. My product certainly has overlap with some of the things that Github
and Bitbucket has, but it's not designed to be a hosting solution. It's more
of a competitor for Atlassians Fisheye and Fogcreeks kiln.

If you are curious you can see a bit of my tool in action at
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MfEDwirFO1s>

Sorry it has no sound so it might not make any sense.

------
mjs
It occurs to me just now that it's kinda weird that subversion repositories
are pretty much distributed everywhere; git repositories generally end up on
github.

~~~
joshuacc
That's probably because with a distributed system, there isn't too much
downside to everyone relying on a central service. If Github goes down, you
can be up and running at a new host in 5 minutes.

~~~
mjs
My comment was more of an observation rather than a telling point for or
against git, but I don't think it's a huge advantage of git that everyone has
a backup copy of the repo that can be used for failover. github is essentially
a central point of failure for many teams. You're going to change the location
your CI checks out from if github goes down? Are you using github for issue
tracking? Code reviews? What's more likely, I think, is that you just wait for
a few minutes or hours until it comes up again, which is what you'd do with
svn.

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csomar
I started using bitbucket a month ago and everything went fine. I'm new to
version control and selected mercurial as my VCS, so I was happy by finding a
github counterpart.

I think it's wrong to compare bitbucket to github. You won't move to github
because github is superior, but if you want to move to git, you'll probably
do.

Bitbucket has all I need. I don't think I need any other fancy features, I
already get things done the right way. I'm using the free version, but would
upgrade if needed.

Also, make sure you read the down times before you argue about it:

"Bitbucket will be unavailable for approximately two hours starting Monday,
Nov 1st, 01:00 GMT for a kernel upgrade."

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jmoiron
I normally shy away from writing provocative information-light rants. The
important parts (for me):

1\. github is a social service, or perhaps best used as a social service

2\. it has "the momentum", which is paramount for social services

3\. git has "the momentum" wrt adoption of dvcs

There are assumptions implicit within these arguments that I've accepted,
based largely on the summation of 'soft' and anecdotal evidence that has built
up over the last couple years. People are right to challenge them, and right
in their criticism that I take them at face value.

------
tzs
Disclaimer: I've only used Github for projects where either I'm the only
coder, or where someone else was the only coder and I was just handling some
release management stuff. So I've not experienced the full glory of
collaboration via Github.

Am I the only one who is not particular impressed with Github? It seems OK,
but not in a different league from other code hosting places the way many make
it out to be.

~~~
docgnome
I think it's main neat feature is to be able to click a button to fork. Many
others have this now but, iirc (and my memory my be faulty), github was the
first. At least the first I saw. That alone makes it easy to fork, fix, pull
request. I'm a bit of a github fanboi.

------
swah
Has Linus ever mentioned Github?

~~~
pjscott
The Linux kernel has its own fairly elaborate and entrenched system for
handling their source; Github, as lovely as it is, just wouldn't be a good fit
for them.

------
Estragon
As others here and in the blog comments have pointed out, this post is
semantically incoherent. But it was worth reading for the reference to hg-git
alone. Cool stuff!

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lusis
I've said it multiple times but github won because of what they focused on -
code:

<http://goo.gl/XfvG> ([http://lusislog.blogspot.com/2010/10/designed-for-
developers...](http://lusislog.blogspot.com/2010/10/designed-for-developers-
why-people-keep.html) for the paranoid)

~~~
bonzoesc
Why shorten a link if you're putting the real one there anyways?

~~~
kemayo
He wants to track how many clicks it gets.

Take a look at <http://goo.gl/> and note the stats on urls you've previously
shortened.

~~~
lusis
Yep. It's just to track interest. Blogger does crap for stats and logging.

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Tycho
For some reason this page immediately crashes Safari on my iPad. Can see it
for an instant then window closes and back to iike screen.

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kaffiene
Come on. Saying "yay Github" does not mean that Git/Github have 'won'. What
does it even mean to say that, anyway?

"Yay Mercurial!" there we are, hg wins!! Whoo!!

Who the hell thought this counted as news? Even as opinion, it's wishy washy.

