
Why people keep asking you to use Github  - preek
http://lusislog.blogspot.com/2010/10/designed-for-developers-why-people-keep.html
======
ErrantX
What BitBucket _does_ have is a killer free package which Github simply
doesn't compete on.

So for the small development workshops (i.e. 5 or less employees) it is a
definite no brainer of the other sort :)

~~~
pjhyett
We compete against BitBucket's free plan by providing better service &
features, a much larger community, and an insane amount of publicly available
code.

It came as no surprise to us when Atlassian decided the only way BitBucket
could compete with GitHub was to essentially give it away.

While they can afford to do this now, I'm fearful that the people choosing
BitBucket for this reason alone may get a rude awakening when Atlassian
decides BitBucket shouldn't continue being a loss-leader for the rest of their
products.

Our growth at GitHub has only continued to increase month over month, so while
people laud BitBucket's free plan, many more understand the value of paying
for a premium service.

~~~
ErrantX
I have huge respect for Github, but I don't like git. Hence my choice of
provider.

But, ultimately, I see only good things in having two competing products and
providers, and I hope you all both do well :)

~~~
pjhyett
I don't begrudge you for using BitBucket because you prefer Mercurial, but
your original response only had to do with the cost of the service which is
why I felt compelled to respond. Thanks for the kind words about GitHub.

------
tedunangst
I suspect I'm a minority, but I miss the old days of "download a tgz, make a
change, mail the author a patch". There's a lot of effort involved in cloning
(then discovering I need to fork first, then clone my fork), and somehow
communicating my change to the author.

I think this has a lot to do with UI. Even after a few attempts at this, I
still can't find the various buttons when I want to. For example, there's a
pull requests tab on the original repo and on my fork plus another button
somewhere above that. Which do I click when?

This is on top of the fact I'm rarely sure if I'm working on the "real" repo
or some random dude's copy.

Note I don't dislike DVCS. I like it a lot. But if you don't read the right
blogs or wherever it is the cool kids figure out which repos are active and
which aren't, the github centric experience is frustrating.

~~~
steveklabnik
1\. Click "fork"

2\. Type "git clone git@github.com:mygithubusername/projectname.git"

3\. cd projectname

4\. make changes, and commit.

5\. git push origin master (master may be optional, or a different branch)

6\. Click the 'pull request' button

7\. Fill out the form

8\. You're done!

Also, git does support the 'mail the author a patch' workflow, too: it's just
not what GitHub uses. I _believe_ the kernel is developed this way.

[http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-
format-p...](http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-format-
patch.html)

<http://stackoverflow.com/questions/327249/ddg>

~~~
tedunangst
1\. The fork button is a lot smaller than the git clone url staring right up
at me in the middle of the page. 6\. Which pull request button on which page?
There are several.

Yes, I've done this a few times. But the procedure is not internalizable in
the same way that "mail patch" is. In particular, the pull requests tab always
looks really appealing to me whenever I want to clone a new repo (I'd like to
make a request to pull your source, after all). The problem is unrelated to
git, I could happily use git with email.

~~~
steveklabnik
Yep, I think this is just a preferences thing. The bug "Pull request" tab
implies to me that they're pull requests that are currently pending, since
it's in amongst the source, the issues... and since it's a tab. The button
implies "start a pull request for upstream" since it's up near several other
'action' buttons.

To each his own. TMTOWTDI. :)

------
kenjackson
IMO, the problem with GitHub is the community. For some reason the Ruby
community rubs me the wrong way, in a way that the Java, Python, Lisp
communities don't.

While I can respect Ruby and RoR technically, it's not so far above other
products that it can make up for the fact that I'd prefer not to interact with
the community on a day to day basis.

Maybe I've just hit a weird sample, but I've heard other people outside of my
circle make similar comments, yet I've rarely, if ever, heard it said about
other communities (except maybe the Slashdot community).

~~~
daleharvey
I believe javascript is the most popular language on github, either way I
really dont see github as a "ruby / rails community"

~~~
kenjackson
I don't have the data in front of me, but if JS is #1, Ruby can't be far
behind. And while I completely believe you, it still _feels_ to me more like a
Ruby/Rails community than it does a JS community.

~~~
thwarted
That's because it's not a community based on language use, it's a community
based on code sharing via a specific source control engine + community/social
features + project management features.

github has to be one of the few services/companies that use ruby that doesn't
constantly push it in your face with a bunch of better-than-thou blog posts
about how ruby is awesome. Twitter used to be like that (or at least felt like
it) with ruby/rails and then eventually with whatever language or technology
du jour they were using.

None of my github projects are ruby, and I don't think many of the projects I
follow are ruby (I honestly don't really keep track of that, but it would be
an interesting statistic).

While I know github uses ruby, I don't think of them as doing anything other
than providing the github service/website. In the same way I don't really
think of Facebook as anything other than providing the facebook
service/website. It only comes up when we talk about hiring ("If you want to
work at Facebook, you'd have to do PHP.") or when you get a fatal error (I
actually got "Fatal error: Uncaught OAuthException: An active access token
must be used to query information about the current user. thrown in
/var/www/publisher/system/application/libraries/facebook.php on line 453" the
other day -- that's only happened once for me). I'd like to think that some
places concentrating on providing a good service/experience and the actual
choice of implementation only matters to them and they'd use the best tools
for the job (where "best" may be defined as amount of experience they have
with it).

Consider the perception of the language agnostic nature of github vs codeplex.
I don't spend a lot of time on codeplex, but I have this perception that just
about everything hosted on codeplex is written in one of the limited subset of
languages that Microsoft sanctions/supports (this may be a function of the
Microsoft/Windows platform, where it's non-trivial to get things like, say,
vanilla ruby or python running on Windows compared to .Net stuff). Code that
is hosted on github is merely known to use git for source control.

------
St-Clock
"The main reason is that at this point, BitBucket is simple attempting to
feature copy from Github except using Mercurial in the background."

I am so tired to read things like that.

Issue-tracking at github is far behind bitbucket issue tracking (try to make
complex search queries... you cannot link a commit to an issue except when
closing the issue... tags are nice, but i dislike having to create a tag for
each milestone/release).

Wikis at Github have only been recently backed by a git repository: as far as
I know, wikis at bitbucket have always been backed by a mercurial repository.

It's true that bitbucket is a lot like github and that github has a bigger and
more dynamic community (from my experience, github's infrastructure is also
faster), but can we leave bitbucket alone and stop the bashing?

------
technomancy
> Mercurial and Git are pretty much at feature parity (as is Bazaar).

Someone hasn't tried to use bzr on a nontrivial project. Half the threads on
the emacs-devel mailing list are either complaining about bzr or asking for
help because it's misbehaving. (The people who aren't complaining are the ones
using the git mirror.)

------
dedward
The one question that bothers me is confidentiality.... code is IP of the
company writing it. What prevents someone on a copyright fishing expedition
from getting some kind of court order for the hosting provider to turn over
all of my company's code without even telling me? It's the same argument for
all hosted services.

For open development, it's awesome... closed - I wish so many saas providers
offered self-hosted solutions with a subscription so I could at least control
the hardware & it's location.

~~~
steveklabnik
You're welcome: <http://fi.github.com/>

~~~
cemerick
Except, their pricing _starts_ at $2,500 _per year_ for 10 devs. Holy shit.

I'll bet they sell scads of it to companies with more money than they know
what to do with, but that seems crazy to me. As wonderful as github is, it's
still just source control.

Here's hoping gitorious will get sanely installable at some point (i.e. `apt-
get install gitorious`, not "oh my god":
<http://gitorious.org/gitorious/pages/UbuntuInstallation>). I'd pay something
for that.

~~~
steveklabnik
Seems totally reasonable to me. That's not that much money for an actual
business expense. If you have such Super Ultra Secrets that they Must Be Kept
On Your Servers, or else The World Breaks!!!!1, then you can afford to pay
good money to keep it safe. I'd argue that it's still pretty cheap. Compared
to ten salaries?

~~~
cemerick
Super-ultra-secrets has nothing to do with it (though if you're a small shop,
pointing the finger at github if/when confidential stuff flies the coop isn't
going to go over well with certain clients).

My code (and other assets) are important to me; if it ends up on a torrent
server in china, that's bad. Github's security is better than mine, but I'm
not a honeypot either. Perhaps the formal probabilities are against me; I
guess I'm irrational in a few ways.

~~~
steveklabnik
Truth. I do so much open source work that I'm not used to being in that kind
of position.

------
ianp
Cache:
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:9DkGSlU...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:9DkGSlUmYL0J:lusislog.blogspot.com/2010/10/designed-
for-developers-why-people-
keep.html+http://lusislog.blogspot.com/2010/10/designed-for-developers-why-
people-keep.html&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=ubuntu)

Edit: appears to be back up now

------
tmcw
Color me a little disappointed that this article wasn't about the fact that
GitHub's roaring success has watered down everyone's enthusiasm for git's
decentralized model. People keep asking you to use GitHub, in part, because
they aren't setting up their own git servers, although they could - and one
could argue that the future's a little safer with people keeping a bit of
control.

~~~
steveklabnik
Even if you use GitHub, you're still decentralized.

------
ez77
Paranoid thought: An "evil" service like this could handily take a look at
promising private projects, right? I guess that if your company becomes too
innovative you would not risk that innovation by putting it in somebody else's
server. Or would you?

Edit: My question goes along the same lines as dedward's.

~~~
dlsspy
github has been profitable for a while now because of people like me who give
them money for a great service. If something like this happened, they would
stop being profitable.

It's hard to imagine what they'd find in a private repo that would make them
more money than what they've got in <https://github.com/github>

