
Dear “Dear GitHub” - sethvargo
http://www.juliandunn.net/2016/01/14/dear-dear-github-from-your-local-friendly-product-person/
======
holman
I wrote Issues, so I've likely thought through these problems more than anyone
else.

I really disagree with the general sentiment of this post, and very much agree
with the original "Dear GitHub" letter. The product needs a lot of work, and
that I couldn't address these problems while I was there really, deeply
depresses me.

Issues hasn't been touched since I shipped the third large iteration a year
and a half ago. It was never intended to be a finished product at that point;
it was intended to evolve quite a bit from that initial vision. There's a lot
of pain that open source developers _and_ private source developers face
today, and I really hope we all can start seeing that pain in our community
eased soon.

~~~
purpled_haze
Agreed. You should never, ever publicly confront a set of publicly notable and
popular customers to tell them what they are asking for is wrong because the
company you are trying to defend doesn't need to do those things for their
_paying_ customers.

I love GitHub and use it everyday. But I have a feeling this post with result
in a talk with the "product guy" to tell him how this attempt at "putting
customers in their place" backfired, even if he doesn't work for GitHub.

What a PR disaster.

~~~
jsmeaton
You know the author of the article wasn't a product person from Github right?
They work at Chef.

~~~
purpled_haze
Correction made, thanks.

------
benjamincburns
If the product people at GitHub don't understand the sales/marketing impact
that GitHub's free offerings have on its paid offerings, then they need to
hire new product people.

I think it's plausible that the authors of the "Dear GitHub" open letter
already realized the truth of Julian's response, which is why they posed their
request in the way that they did.

This gives GitHub three choices. They can react positively, remain passive, or
react negatively. If they react negatively, they have the risk of a PR shit-
storm, which will negatively impact new customer acquisition. If they remain
passive, they risk the chance that the attention to this campaign will grow
and their reputation will decline. This will negatively impact new customer
acquisition.

However, if they react positively, they show good will toward consumers of
their free offering, and they show would-be paying customers their willingness
to improve their services. This will positively impact new customer
acquisition.

Were this request not made in the open, GitHub would not need worry about any
of these outcomes, and would therefore not be forced to react.

~~~
jsnk
Github's life blood is not just the enterprise side, but its free offering,
the community and the huge network effect it has over the open source
community.

No one is sticking with Github because it has particularly good UI or
functionality. Github raw functionality is completely undifferentiable from
its competitors such as gitlab and bitbucket. People stay on github because of
the number of developers who uses it, star counts, fork counts and reputation
system it has built over time.

~~~
jkroso
If either of its competitors were even a little better I would switch.

~~~
btown
And this fact is why Github can't afford _not_ to prioritize "Dear Github." If
there's one thing we've learned from social media, it's that network effect
makes you strong as an incumbent, but it doesn't make you immortal. All it
takes is one upstart that just feels "perfect" in terms of UX to cut into your
bottom line. (Though I suppose you can acquire them...)

------
mavdi
This is sadly exactly what I'd expect a senseless product person to say.
Obviously the reason Github is Github today is because of the OSS offerings.
These OSS developers then go and set up teams of their own which bring their
projects and business back to Github.

If people get together and write up an open letter for you to fix things, you
really should take it as a warning sign as the same people could easily get
frustrated and move elsewhere or someone else could come along and offer a
better product. It would honestly take only a handful of high profile
developers to cause a mass migration.

~~~
verusfossa
This. Github's enterprise base is at least partially a subset of their open
source population. If Github doesn't keep OSS momentum for their product, they
lose the perceived "default client" status to git repositories. OSS and
eventually enterprise starts looking elsewhere.

This is getting more and more relvent since solid competition is starting to
crop up everywhere. Gitlab, Bitbucket, GOGs, Gitolite, Gerrit. Not apples to
apples of course, but Enterprise has a lot of decisions when it comes to git
control.

Even the things that could be considered Github "lockins" aren't really so:
Google's git-appraise[0] could make pull-requests portable, Github's wikis are
portable by their very nature[1], software like git-issues[2] could make
issues portable. Not in the immediate, but decentralize-everything is a rising
sentiment.

The only real lockins I see are Github's work-flow and social community. If
either become toxic, developers will start to look elsewhere. Like Microsoft,
I'm sure Github can ride the majority-player wave for years before it starts
really hurting them, but simply saying a community-centric company only has to
look out for their paying community's interests is short-sighted.

[0] [https://github.com/google/git-appraise](https://github.com/google/git-
appraise) [1]
[https://github.com/gollum/gollum](https://github.com/gollum/gollum) [2]
[https://github.com/duplys/git-issues](https://github.com/duplys/git-issues)

------
iamstef
As someone who is:

* OSS user (and signee of the Dear Github letter)

* paid user

* user of an enterprise installation of Github

I can honestly say the problems I see in OSS land, are the same shape as those
in paid, and the enterprise installation. The difference is, due to the volume
of usage the enterprise installation suffers from these same issues even more.

Now, we may not see +1 DOS often (on the enterprise side of this), largely
because its seen as bad manners and/or the goals are already shared via some
other disjoint medium. But this doesn't mean the issue isn't present.

Being able to enforce additional semantics (such as priority/interest,
reviewers, blocked by etc.) would be a big win

~~~
sangnoir
> But this doesn't mean the issue isn't present.

No one is saying that the issue does not exist. However,th author is
suggesting that since it hardly impacts paying customers, it is going to get
low priority.

------
bovermyer
It's stuff like this that gives me a bad taste in my mouth when I think about
Chef.

Whenever I've interacted with people from Chef-the-company, I've always gotten
the impression that they believe they're talking to me because (at best) they
want to save me from my misbegotten ways and join the Chef Way. At worst, I've
gotten the impression that they think I'm a terrible person and/or worthless
for not just getting with the program and bowing to their wisdom.

I know from other experiences that the Chef community in general is not like
that. But Chef itself has never imparted a good experience on me.

It doesn't help that I wholeheartedly agree with the Dear GitHub letter, and
get a very bad vibe from this "Dear 'Dear GitHub'" letter.

~~~
corprew
maybe write a `Dear "Dear 'Dear Github'"` letter"?

~~~
bovermyer
At that point I think I'd be a little too derivative. Right now, I'm content
to be "Dear GitHub" +1. With apologies, of course.

------
cbuq
The author jokes at projects leaving GitHub for BitbBucket.

I would have actually recommended GitLab! It has all the features of GitHub
and more, and is actually open source ([https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-
ce/](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/))

~~~
StavrosK
I've deployed a Gogs installation at home and am very happy with it. It's not
Github, but it's great for my needs, and I can create accounts for friends to
use privately, which is fantastic. I've tried GitLab and it is also very good.

~~~
girvo
Same. We currently use Gogs as a local mirror for our Github repos here at
work, too. Brilliantly done app, Gogs.

------
andrewbarba
I'd love to agree with the author, I really would... but GitHub put quite a
bit of engineering talent and resources behind Atom (and Electron), and last I
checked, that hasn't made them a single dollar. It's very clear the company
does not simply prioritize resources based on immediate return. If they did,
we surely wouldn't have the text editor that I've been addicted to for the
past year.

------
noamsml
I don't entirely agree. As someone who works in a mid-to-large company, and
who has worked in a 50,000 person company (admittedly for both companies not
all employees were engineers), I feel it's worth noting that as companies get
larger and teams more diverse, they tend to require the exact features open
source projects need.

A product manager in team X who noticed a bug in product Y is not going to
know what fields are necessary for that product, and as issues make their way
to company-wide mailing-lists (or are linked from internal meme websites --
you know who you are), they may accumulate +1-spam if no voting system is put
in place. As such, I believe GitHub's ability to move upmarket and satisfy its
larger customers is actually aligned with implementing the features requested
in the "Dear Github" letter.

------
aaronbrethorst
What an incredibly passive aggressive, rude, thinly veiled 'fuck you' of a
blog post. Does this guy actually work for GitHub?

I am sufficiently offended by the tenor of this post to consider taking my
private repos off GitHub and move them to BitBucket. And, given that my
employer already uses JIRA for issue tracking, I'll probably suggest we
consider moving our organization's repos over to BitBucket while we're at it,
too.

Edit: Julian doesn't work for GitHub. He works for Chef:
[https://github.com/juliandunn](https://github.com/juliandunn), and his blog
post is incredibly poorly worded. Fwiw, if this is what Chef's product people
are like, I will never consider working there.

~~~
teckii
Agreed. He works for Chef.io though, so those who are concerned about his
response should consider what relies on Chef, not GitHub. There are many open
source CI platforms available so it shouldn't be difficult.

Even if he did work for GH, they haven't published an initial response, so
your actions would be spontaneous.

~~~
aaronbrethorst
I noted this in the edit to my post that I posted just before your comment was
written (you were probably writing this when I posted my change). Given the
sort of 'distributed' nature, and low managerial overhead of GitHub, this
could well be considered a "they" post were it from a GitHub employee.

------
markbao
A few issues here. Filtering feature requests to "whatever makes money" seems
to be overly reductionist and a bit cynical, especially given a company like
GitHub which is relatively open and has a flexible policy as to what is being
worked on. Sibling commenters bring up examples like Atom and Electron that
GitHub pours salary money into but don't make money off of.

Also, it assumes that the requests don't matter for paying users – on the
contrary, the features listed in the original article could be useful features
that could make more projects, including paid projects, use GitHub Issues,
which could in turn make more people pay for GitHub. I know that the first
request, metadata for issues, would have been _incredibly_ useful for when my
team was using GitHub Issues.

Finally, the lack of features that open-source authors consider important is a
pretty big deal. This article asks, where are the projects going to go if
GitHub doesn't implement these features? Well, it's far from inconceivable
that they'd switch to another place that had better features and supported
open-source projects more fully, taking away steam from what originally pushed
GitHub to be so popular and become the juggernaut in public and private source
code hosting – open-source projects.

Remember Google Code and SourceForge?

------
n0us
When those developers working on open source start using a new product from a
different company, then go to their own place of work and ask to use that
produce instead of github it will impact their paid customers.

How do you think they got those paid customers in the first place? They came
from the free tier. If the free tier isn't nice to use, why would you pay for
it?

~~~
otoburb
>>If the free tier isn't nice to use, why would you pay for it?

The free tier is _good enough_ , and has been good enough, to use long enough
for users to convince their orgs to move to the non-free tiers. Mission
accomplished for GitHub.

Julian's point still stands: paying customers with complaints and suggested
improvements have the best hope of influencing improvements.

Hopefully these propagate to the free tier.

~~~
clinta
Fortunately GitHub now has competition in the free offerings. It's no longer a
question of being good enough. If GitLab is better, and OSS projects start
moving to GitLab in large numbers, those OSS developers will start asking
their employers to pay for GitLab instead of GitHub when they need the paid
offerings.

GitHub not improving the free offerings while competitors do will affect their
income.

------
ericflo
Surprised that a product person without data would go on record saying that an
issue big enough to warrant a co-signed open letter isn't important enough for
Github to address. The best product people I've worked with start by getting
as much information as possible first before making decisions.

------
suprgeek
Somehow this "Product Guy" misses the fact that popular OSS devs that
evangelize your product are also "Paying Customers" \- they help you Grow &
spread in a fashion that is next to impossible by buying advertising.

Please stop spreading the FUD that they adon't count

------
muaddirac
> You’re unlikely to see +1-DDoS-type behavior inside private repos, for
> example.

Maybe not, but the lack of an "Approval" system is keeping us from moving from
Bitbucket to Github. The proposed fix for +1 spamming could easily serve as an
approval system for us.

(Bitbucket, I might add, has also become incredibly stagnant, as can be seen
by this long standing issue to support Markdown[0])

[0]: [https://bitbucket.org/site/master/issues/6930/support-
some-o...](https://bitbucket.org/site/master/issues/6930/support-some-or-all-
html-in-markdown-bb)

------
monkmartinez
The "thing" is... my code sits in git at the end of the day. That is
portability like no other. Can I migrate issues? Sure![1] What[2] language do
you prefer to work with?

The real "thing" is, my git repos do not care where they are hosted. All I
need to change is my origin.

[1] [https://github.com/sorich87/github-to-bitbucket-issues-
migra...](https://github.com/sorich87/github-to-bitbucket-issues-migration)

[2] [https://github.com/jeffwidman/bitbucket-issue-
migration](https://github.com/jeffwidman/bitbucket-issue-migration)

~~~
gravypod
Hell, you could even host your own!

~~~
macawfish
Why didn't I think of that! JK I actually host my own git repos on my personal
computer's hard drive every day ;)

------
chazu
Dear "Dear 'Dear Github'",

I found your letter to be patronizing and facile. Saying "I could explain X
but it should be obvious" is a good indication that your snarky post is
lacking substance.

------
gravypod
With the growing prevalence of things like GitLab, GoGs, and GitBucket I think
that GitHub has to thing very long and hard before they make any official
statements like this. All someone would need to do is make a central list
where you could post a link to your git server and list what projects are on
there to make it searchable. I that is done, I see no reason why anyone, with
the needed hardware, would stick to github.

I think we are seeing the "end of days" for this open source power house.

------
piyush_soni
This was nothing more than an attention grabbing 'run-of-the-mill' counter
post. Possibly to passively advertize 'chef'.

------
bsimpson
Those authors presumably work at places that pay GitHub non-zero sums of
money. For instance, many of them are Googlers and Facebookers. I have no idea
how many private repos those orgs have, but I have a feeling large companies
with a significant open-source footprint (like the ones represented on that
list) tend to buy the biggest plans GitHub sells.

------
TheHippo
I'm currently working in a start up that's using a paid Github organisation.
The mentioned issues are a pain for us, even though we are currently only 6
people working on the code. Because of this shortcomings we will migrate
somewhere else if we grew larger. So I would say this affects the business
side of Github.

------
burntcaramel
Open source surely benefits the majority of GitHub’s paying customers. So the
way I see it, if this improves how open source projects are run, that will
result in better libraries and tools for GitHub’s paying customers.

------
aaronbrethorst
Hey dang - it might be worth clarifying in the title that the author of this
works for Chef, not GitHub.

~~~
simoncion
Why? At the time of _this_ comment (and -according to the timestamp-, the time
of your comment), the title was 'Dear "Dear Github"', and the domain that
hosted the article was listed as juliandunn.net.

I... can't imagine that any _reasonable_ person would draw from these two
facts that this was a GitHub employee writing in any official capacity.

~~~
xirdstl
There is at least one thread where there's already been confusion around it.

At first, I thought this would be from someone who worked at GitHub, because I
didn't understand why else it got upvoted.

~~~
simoncion
> There is at least one thread where there's already been confusion around it.

It's _impossible_ to prevent _everyone_ from getting confused. What's more, it
appears that purple_haze's confusion didn't _materially_ alter what they had
to say.

> At first, I thought this would be from someone who worked at GitHub, because
> I didn't understand why else it got upvoted.

I guess it got upvoted because people liked what it said and/or thought it
contributed to the ongoing discussion here on HN. We're generally not too
terribly authoritarian and/or credentialist around here.

------
rurban
Yes. It's open source so if you want a feature badly, file a pull request.
Much easier than complaining

------
saiko-chriskun
So much wrong with this post.

------
forgottenacc56
GitHub makes plenty of money. Just fix it.

~~~
pekk
For example, any web developer on here could implement 'delete an issue' in a
few days, with unit tests. It's not rocket science.

------
elinchrome
No response articles, please.

~~~
smt88
I don't see much difference between a comment on Reddit/HN and a response
article, except that the response article is platform-agnostic and (sometimes)
more thoughtfully assembled.

~~~
RubyPinch
because its practically a long comment on the original. If it has to be
platform agnostic with formatting, then that is why comments are allowed to
have links to other sites.

Otherwise we really should all start writing response articles and post those
instead of comments, because there are only positives yeah? 70 comments for
this post alone, all articles so people can use their own variant of
formatting languages or whatever

