
An open letter of gratitude to GitHub - arthurnn
https://github.com/thank-you-github/thank-you-github
======
mmcclure
I assume this is a response to the "Dear Github" letter. I'm fairly certain
that everyone involved in that letter (including myself), is very appreciative
of Github and its impact on OSS. That letter didn't feel ungrateful or
malicious at all to me, but I sure hope it didn't come off that way to others.

What I do frequently see with Github, is that they've managed to work their
way into almost being beyond reproach. This letter feels like an example of
that...Almost like Github needs someone to stand up for it in light of some
meanies picking on it.

It's a good product. We should give credit where credit is due, just don't
forget it's a _product_. A (by all indications), very profitable product that
wants to make money off you. That is its goal and purpose in life, and OSS
furthers it. For the record, I think this is a good and healthy relationship,
but we shouldn't pretend it's some FOSS group or non-profit out struggling to
provide us with Git hosting.

~~~
Gorbzel
> That letter didn't feel ungrateful or malicious at all to me, but I sure
> hope it didn't come off that way to others.

It might have; software engineering is a big tent, and people who touch Github
(in at least someway) no doubt comprise a huge part of it. Full disclaimer,
I'm biased, as I opened an issue attempting to address some potential
editorial/tone issues, and the initial response was not good (a big part of
that may be questions of who exactly is "involved" with the letter. How should
others become involved and contribute in a way the OPs feel is constructive?)

As another commenter pointed out, not everything is so black and white. In
this case, no one should be "beyond reproach", but what seem like simple
issues to Issues may indeed be representative of strong product/technical
decisions from an opinionated vendor. IMO it's not inherently clear that the
people behind dear-github entirely recognized the nuance here. No one is
looking to pick fights or troll anyone, because no, not everyone who is
passionate about this issue is a meanie. That said, the original letter and
the immediate response could be interpreted as brash, and to that end, I
wouldn't be surprised that someone responded with thank-you-github as an
opposite reaction.

~~~
DannoHung
> Full disclaimer, I'm biased, as I opened an issue attempting to address some
> potential editorial/tone issues

Is this your issue? [https://github.com/dear-github/dear-
github/issues/47](https://github.com/dear-github/dear-github/issues/47)

If so, the way you've written your issue is almost incomprehensible and your
point is seriously irrelevant to the requests made by the project creators.

------
luso_brazilian
_Before 2007, the way to participate in Open Source was fragmented. Each
project had their own workflow, patches circulated in emails, issues were
reported in a myriad ways, and if anyone wanted to contribute they had to
figure out every project 's rules.

Then, a handful of guys took the challenge to build an awesome platform and as
a consequence of their hard work, their platform earned its hegemony._

Two things stand out in this "thank you Github" open letter:

1\. While the situation improved tremendously in certain areas the way to
participate in Open Source is still very much fragmented. Most of the major
open source projects (like Linux, Mozilla, Apache and nginx, to name a few)
still have their own workflows, patches are still circulated in emails and
issues are still being reported in a myriad ways. Despite of the big
visibility GitHub has among the new open source projects we are very far from
not being fragmented.

2\. Before 2007 we had, for instance, SourceForge that back then had also
earned its hegemony and, for a series of reasons (one of them being too late
to answer to the community wants and needs) lost its way, its hegemony and its
user base.

There is time for praise and time for hard work and, IMO, the "Dear Github"
open letter is a constructive way to call attention to the perceived problems
while the 'Dear "Dear Github"' and this gratitude letter are dismissive to
their concerns (the former) and mostly empty praise and adulation (the later).

~~~
forgottenpass
_IMO, the "Dear Github" open letter is a constructive way to call attention to
the perceived problems_

I agree entirety. The responses are fanboy trash in a "using my serious voice"
wrapper.

I don't use github enough to share the gripes in "Dear GitHub." They seemed
kinda minor and I understand why they wouldn't be in the product. But in light
of the poor communication from GitHub explained in the letter, it seemed like
a perfectly reasonable and polite step to try and open a channel of
communication.

~~~
stcredzero
_I don 't use github enough to share the gripes in "Dear GitHub." They seemed
kinda minor and I understand why they wouldn't be in the product._

What about implementing an API to let other people implement some of the
needed features?

~~~
forgottenpass
Sure, that's a possible solution.

I wasn't trying to convey a position that something _shouldn 't_ be done, I'm
just expressing that I understand the wide breadth of possibilities for why it
_hadn 't_ been done.

------
mpdehaan2
Posting this right after some good suggestions for the service was given feels
like this is saying it is wrong to make suggestions for GitHub because they
have done good things.

This to me, itself, is wrong.

The GitHub issue tracker does need to change. While it's great for OSS that
projects can get a leg up SOONER, GitHub does introduce it's own problems by
having some watered down tooling in some areas.

I'm _STILL_ at odds with how it has shifted the equation from _discuss_ to
_throw code at the problem_ , which generates extra code review and often,
angry committers when their patches are not immediately merged or unwanted, or
have to be reworked.

GitHub has done some GREAT things because it has built up critical mass, but
because it has gotten critical mass and has become a defacto standard, does
have some obligation to keep up with demand.

This seems passive aggressive to me.

~~~
pbowyer
> The GitHub issue tracker does need to change.

Does anyone like _any_ bugtracker?

That's a serious question. I've never used one that was a joy to use as a
submitter (GH's issue tracker is one of the better ones, as it's so simple) or
as a maintainer. As a maintainer I've found them really frustrating in
general; JIRA has been one of the better ones for me.

Any consensus on 'decent' trackers?

~~~
gkya
> I've never used [a bug tracker] that was a joy to use as a submitter [...]

And it shouldn't be. If it is, people submit stupid bugs. When you get a
notification of a bug, and you go read the bug, and try to reproduce it,
you'll spend at least about five-ten minutes. The submitter then is obliged to
spend at least about that much to report a proper bug report to an open source
project where even the licence revokes the responsibility of the maintainer to
respond to the submitter. And if good will and conventions can't force this,
the bug tracker should.

~~~
pbowyer
> And it shouldn't be. If it is, people submit stupid bugs.

I strongly disagree. You're conflating easy to enter a bug with a pleasure to
use. There's no reason to throw both out.

Also, you're thinking of a public tracker. Where it's used within a team,
having it easy and a joy to report issues is hugely beneficial, so they get
logged without nagging and moaning.

------
phaed
The motivation behind this letter is embarrassing.

It's as if they were talking to GitHub the thankless FOSS maintainer. Quit
mirroring guys. It's a for-profit enterprise that would do well to listen to
the concerns of its userbase.

~~~
smt88
> _It 's a for-profit enterprise that would do well to listen to the concerns
> of its userbase._

Very true, and I'm surprised this is the first comment that points this out.
GitHub doesn't need our thanks -- it gets our money. You could easily argue
that the OSS/social aspects are excellent marketing tactics, not anything
remotely like altruism.

I'm also starting to become concerned that GitHub, a for-profit, has locked in
so much of our industry. In my opinion, they need to be responsible stewards
of all that lock-in. Look at what happened when SourceForge stagnated and then
started to spread malware. There's no reason the same thing couldn't happen to
GitHub.

------
minimaxir
The controversy isn't black-and-white and I'm not sure why this letter is
painting it that way. GitHub can be a major boon to open source _and_ have
core issues which make it incredibly frustrating to work with the service.

The dilemma is about the _sum of the parts_.

~~~
joshstrange
Completely agree, also this post makes it appear like GH did all it has done
out of the goodness of their heart... Sure it's great what they did for OS but
to pretend that wasn't rooted in making money is just ignorant.

~~~
fxn
The post is assuming nothing about the motivations, which anyone but founders
can't but at most conjecture.

------
throwaway1456
> Before 2007, the way to participate in Open Source was fragmented. Each
> project had their own workflow, patches circulated in emails, issues were
> reported in a myriad ways, and if anyone wanted to contribute they had to
> figure out every project's rules.

And it was much better IMO. Now we have a centralized website, in the hands of
a single corporation, which requires nonfree JavaScript for much of the basic
functionality[1]. Git was designed to work well with email and has commands
built-in to format, send and apply patches. I think anyone who used email for
patches seriously will agree that they are largely superior to GitHub's pull
requests.

The free software movement being fragmented is a good thing. GitHub is the
land of trends: web developers using Mac OS X who make apps with the latest
trendy frameworks like React and Angular (if you think that's a misportrayal,
look at the first three pages of the most starred repositories on GitHub[2]).
These people don't care about the free software movement, they're just
following the current trends, one of which is "Open Source". But if they
really cared about free software, they would not be using Mac OS X or GitHub,
which requires you to run nonfree JavaScript code in your browser to report
issues, open pull requests, etc.

The serious projects that do care about free software don't use GitHub.

[1]: See Mike Gerwitz's _GitHub Does Not Value Software Freedom_ :
[https://mikegerwitz.com/about/githubbub](https://mikegerwitz.com/about/githubbub)

[2]:
[https://github.com/search?q=stars:%3E1&s=stars&type=Reposito...](https://github.com/search?q=stars:%3E1&s=stars&type=Repositories)

~~~
carussell
As someone who sometimes feels like the only one who remembers both the world
before GitHub-style pull requests and the benefits that patches have over
them, I can appreciate your ode to patches and the way that Git was designed
to handle them. Not really excited about your no-true-Scotsman-ing, though.

------
swillis16
Github makes millions of dollars per year and has a huge amount of users so
the product is proven good. While I understand the need to be appreciative of
Github, giving the organization a bit of user feedback is not going to hurt
them very much. The response assumes that this is written because of the "Dear
Github" letter.

~~~
bitsoda
While GitHub makes millions per year, it's important to keep in mind that
"GitHub" and every other company is really just a collection of people like
you and me. I'm sure their engineers are paid well, but money isn't
everything, and it's nice (and motivating) to show up at the office and know
there's people out there who appreciate the work you put in regardless of what
you're being paid.

There's nothing wrong with showing gratitude from time to time, even if it's
for a for-profit corporation if you truly appreciate what they do.

~~~
forgottenpass
_every other company is really just a collection of people like you and me_

That's cool and all, but wasn't the motivation for the first letter the lack
of humanity from GitHub in communication with the userbase?

I don't think they deserve a cooing public letter to reassure them on the
basis of humanity after they've decided to give "empty response or even no
response at all" to what read like perfectly reasonable attempts to
communicate with them.

I'm entirely willing to use person-to-person social standards for a company.
I'll start with a trust-but-verity attitude, because leveraging a double
standard in customer facing business is often a way for companies to take
advantage of customers. Once they show they're not interested: fuck 'em.

------
gkya
I find the current situation with Github very unhealthy, because, even though
very unlikely, someone can literally pull off the plug of open-source. Not
all, but a great part. If such thing happened, be it with government
intervention or some crazy attack towards github, it would make us lose a lot
time migrating to other solutions. It would be like a Great Barbaric Invasion
of Open Source, where everyone migrated to Bitbucket or private solutions,
sort of an OSS incastellation.

~~~
msellout
The bug tracking data might be tough to replicate, but everything else is
stored on each contributor's machine. I think recovery time wouldn't be so
bad.

~~~
jacquesm
That's a huge mistake you're making there. Recovery time would be in the years
because github is _a hub_. It became a focal point for a very large amount of
activity, losing that hub would be an absolute disaster.

~~~
autoreleasepool
> losing that hub would be an absolute disaster.

Not really. I agree GitHub is a great for open source, but its not essential.
It would be a shame to lose the community, central location, user activity
history, etc... but actively maintained projects would not suffer much.

The recovery process would be as simple as pushing to a new remote and
emailing the core developers. It would probably take a few months to properly
set up a JIRA or other bug tracker and for everyone to settle into the new
work flow.

The genius of git (or should I say BitKeeper) is that its distributed, so
having a _hub_ isn't really important.

~~~
danneu

        > The recovery process would be as simple
    

You're only thinking of the most trivial part of the migration: the immediate
technical one.

It's like suggesting that it's not so bad if a massive forum shuts down by
pointing out how easy it is to install phpbb and run an import script.

~~~
autoreleasepool
> You're only thinking of the most trivial part of the migration: the
> immediate technical one.

That's a straw man. I said it would take a few months to resolve the
logistical issues surrounding migration.

Instead of caricaturing my thought process, could you please specify some of
the "disastrious" difficulties you and the GP are concerned about?

~~~
jacquesm
You entirely fail to appreciate the word 'community'. That's fine with me, I
don't care one way or another whether I can convince you that losing github
would be a disaster for open source but just for a minute consider why all
these open source projects that were formerly hosted in different places
migrate to github. The community has achieved critical mass and that is what
drives this, the technology is entirely secondary to that.

If you lose github you lose the community and a user / contributer to say
'apache spark' will not automatically be a user / contributor of all the other
open source projects hosted on github. Single sign on for contribution to
_any_ open source project and a consistent user interface are also big pluses
(but those are technical), and would be hard to achieve as well.

So in my opinion github (and several other services) are now really too big to
fail.

~~~
autoreleasepool
Thank you for the substantive reply. I love github and I do appreciate the
macro level of community it provides. If no other community platform sprung up
it's demise would certainly be a regression for open source. In that sense, I
agree with what your saying.

The last line is where we fundamentally disagree, but that's ok. I think open
source would be able to recover from the death of github without much long-
term difficulty. It would be a painful transition, like all transitions, but I
don't think it would be an overwhelming problem or disaster. Maybe I'm just
optimistic.

~~~
jacquesm
Let's hope we won't find out and that if we do find out that you're right and
I'm wrong.

------
jballanc
> Before 2007, the way to participate in Open Source was fragmented.

Um...ever hear of _Source Forge_? Yeah, before 2007 there was another OSS
hegemony. It failed to meet its users needs. It was replaced.

So it goes.

~~~
JustSomeNobody
The Internet has a VERY short memory.

~~~
fxn
The author of the post had projects in SourceForge, also listed in Freshmeat.

But they were not hubs at the GitHub level, contributing to Open Source was
fragmented.

------
skywhopper
A case study in passive aggressive behavior. Well done!

~~~
carussell
I agree with the sentiment of your comment, but I don't think it was
necessary. There are better ways to put it, and several of them have already
been made.

A higher level of discussion and low noise is something to shoot for on HN.

~~~
phaed
I disagree. The passive aggressive nature of the post needed to be pointed
out. It is at the heart of what is wrong with this post. This was not just
another letter that "pretty much anyone signing the Dear Github letter would
also feel comfortable signing" as the OP would now like you to believe, but a
passive aggressive response to the constructive criticism of the original, as
evidenced by its tone, timing, and context.

~~~
carussell
> The passive aggressive nature of the post needed to be pointed out.

It has been, several times, but each in a much better way than the comment I
was responding to did.

------
carlsborg
such a letter should include a note of thanks to torvalds for creating git in
the first place.

~~~
mason240
It's kind of ironic of OSS, isn't it?

Someone develops an OSS platform, a corporation monetizes that platform, and
it's the corporation that is now receiving all the praise.

~~~
caludio
No, usually Linus is relegated among the assholes control freaks of open
source. Together with RMS.

Yeah, the irony :/

------
notabot
I just want to point out accepting pull requests for signatures is a bad idea
-- someone is going to lose the race and rebase over and over if unlucky,
assuming many people are going to sign this. :-)

~~~
joshmanders
Indeed, `dear-github` found this out early thankfully, so it's been migrated
to a Google form that anyone can sign.

------
tzs
> Before 2007, the way to participate in Open Source was fragmented. Each
> project had their own workflow, patches circulated in emails, issues were
> reported in a myriad ways, and if anyone wanted to contribute they had to
> figure out every project's rules.

Don't you still have to figure out every project's rules? Being on Github does
not impose coding guidelines, testing requirements, documentation
requirements, contributor license agreement policies, project management and
governance system, code review process, dispute resolution process, and so on.

> Nowadays doing Open Source is infinitely easier thanks to you, GitHub.
> You've provided the tools and the social conventions to make those days a
> thing of the past.

Nearly every time over the past 30+ years that I've wanted to fix a bug or add
a feature to some open source thing I've been using, and been thwarted, it was
never figuring out the workflow, or patch procedure, or issue reporting that
did me in, or figuring out the project's rules.

The big problem has usually been one or both of (1) the project has a
bazillion files and it is not at all clear from the meager documentation and
haphazard directory organization which are for the thing itself and which are
for ancillary tools, and (2) it gets build errors that I can't resolve.

------
santix
I comment what I wrote on the "Dear GitHub" post.

Shouldn't we (the OSS community) have an open source, roll-your-own version of
something like GitHub? Like, the repo-management equivalent to a phpBB or a
Wiki or a Wordpress.

We do have the separate components, though maybe the hard part is to glue them
together. But still, it is something what would be worth the time and effort,
wouldn't it?

~~~
kstrauser
GitLab is a thing, and it's eminently usable:
[https://about.gitlab.com/downloads/](https://about.gitlab.com/downloads/)

~~~
phaed
Damn that's sexy.

------
davexunit
Sorry, but as a free software advocate, this really bugs me.

>Before 2007, the way to participate in Open Source was fragmented. Each
project had their own workflow, patches circulated in emails, issues were
reported in a myriad ways, and if anyone wanted to contribute they had to
figure out every project's rules.

And now we have a monoculture. Monoculture is bad, folks.

This letter paints pre-2007 as something bad because everyone used their own
infrastructure for their projects, but this is actually a really great thing.
It meant that more projects had autonomy over the infrastructure that they
rely on. So, rather than needing to beg a for-profit corporation for features
that they want, they could actually change the software they used to work for
them. Monoculture is more convenient for the masses, but trading freedom for
convenience is a bad deal in the long-term.

The web is becoming more centralized every day, to the detriment of all
Internet users whether they know it or not, and when SaaS apologists thank
GitHub for helping it makes me upset. A federated, free software source code
hosting tool could solve the barrier to entry problem without relinquishing
control to a company who ultimately does not care about you.

And how about GitHub's ToS? Has anyone read it? Probably not. I didn't when I
signed up. Did you know that changes to the ToS can happen any time and
without notice? Even if you did read the terms, by agreeing to them, you agree
that they can completely change them. Who would reasonably agree to that if it
were not buried in legalese? You also surrender your rights to a fair trial by
defending and indemnifying GitHub. For further reading, see "Why I don't
support or contribute to GitHub repositories" [0] or read the ToS for
yourself.

Now, on a technical note: GitHub encourages bad development practices via
hooking people on their web interface. The Pull Request interface is the
biggest offender. It encourages unclean commit history because it's scary to
rewrite the patch set of a pull request. If you rebase fixup commits, you have
to force push the changes. You cannot even do the safer route of deleting the
remote branch and pushing the new branch because GitHub will automatically
close the pull request with no way to re-open it. So, most people just pile on
fixup commits that never get squashed into decent patches. And that's not all!
The Pull Request interface makes it difficult to comment on individual patches
by encouraging reviewers to look only at the aggregate diff of all patches.
This leads to lower patch quality because it leads to a bunch of terrible
patches that look okay squashed together to enter the Git repository. When
your patch history sucks, it reduces the utility of blaming and bisecting to
find issues or otherwise learn about the code. Reviewing patch sets on a
mailing list is, despite being "low tech", a much better experience for me.
I'm not forced to use a web interface, I can just use the email client of my
choosing, and Git already knows how to do an email-based workflow. There's a
reason why a huge project like Linux still does patch review via email.

In conclusion, GitHub is a company that receives almost nothing but praise.
Most criticism is dismissed because they have a nice UX for a certain group of
users (not me). I think GitHub has harmed the free and open source software
community both ethically, legally, and technically. I no longer use GitHub for
hosting my personal projects. I write all of this in the hopes that more
people will recognize this and work on real replacements for GitHub.

[0] [https://wubthecaptain.eu/articles/why-i-dont-support-
github....](https://wubthecaptain.eu/articles/why-i-dont-support-github.html)

------
mchahn
One time an Atom user posted a question on the Atom editor forum. He said he
loved Atom and wanted to donate. It was a bit complex to explain that they
would be contributing to a large corporation, GitHub. I thought this was
symbolic of the confusing relationship GitHub has with open software.

------
akash0x53
That user seriously gonna merge any incoming PR? What a great person with hell
lot of time.

~~~
oalders
If everybody signs at the bottom, the bulk of the PRs will have merge
conflicts. So this could be quite painful, I think.

~~~
fxn
All merged by now, more than 60 signatures ATM.

------
resca79
I'm not totally agree with both letters, just for personal reasons, but this
is not the point.

Overall GitHub is a cultural place where anyone can improve his personal
skills, expecially in computer programming, thanks to the huge code present on
it. I have romantic vision of Github. For instance, guys from poor parts of
the world can study great code with this site.

Yes it is a company with investors and probably it made some wrong decisions,
and if we want we can choose other services, but today sorry for the
repetition Github represents an open and huge cultural Hub.

------
akash0x53
I recommend, dont send any pull requests. On of the useless project on Github.
How he gonna merge 1000s of PR - and PR to just add a name - seriously? This
is just waste of time & resources.

~~~
gooddoob
Why are you having a problem?

------
wereHamster
When GitHub came along it was an improvement over what was available back
then. But that doesn't mean it's perfect or that it can stop evolving. Yes,
thank you GitHub for what you achieved in our community so far, but dear
GitHub don't stop and keep moving forward.

------
manigandham
If you want to thank them, just be a customer. This is unnecessary and seems
like it devalues any criticism, especially considering the other recent
letter. They are not some sacred thing to be protected.

------
nikolay
I can't stand brown-nosing...

------
justinph
Did anyone else notice that the list of signers on this letter is entirely
male?

~~~
TomBombadildoze
No, but I did notice that it's almost entirely individual contributors rather
than maintainers

------
JustSomeNobody
Can we PLEASE stahp already with the "open letters"!?

~~~
sotojuan
Open letters, "sad state" of X, programming fatigue... Looks like people had
"write more" as their new year's resolution!

~~~
J_Darnley
Hopefully most people will give up on that like most resolutions.

------
qaq
Hmm so the response of the GitHub is to post a single generic response of "we
will look into it" and then spend time and resources arranging this marvel of
a letter.

------
gooddoob
What a nice slap to so called community leaders.

------
lgleason
Since corporations are people too under US law, I guess someone wanted to make
sure it feels good about itself.....;)

