Why people keep asking you to use Github

http://lusislog.blogspot.com/2010/10/designed-for-developers-why-people-keep.html

by preek • 16 years ago

21 42 16 years ago

lusislog.blogspot.com

ianp3• 16 years ago

Cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:9DkGSlU...

Edit: appears to be back up now

ErrantX3• 16 years ago

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 :)

steveklabnik9• 16 years ago

It's just not that important. I'm just one guy without a steady job, and even I can cough up $7/mo for a Micro account. I'd much much rather have GitHub's gorgeous interface than BitBucket's.

If your business can't afford $25/month, then you don't have a business.

ianp3• 16 years ago

It may be $7/mo, but you only get 5 private repos and one collaborator. If you want more than a small handful of private projects, or even want to work on a private project with another person you need to cough up $12/mo, which is infeasable for just a hobby project or two.

BitBucket, on the other hand, gives you unlimited public and private repositories and 5 collaborators for /free/.

For a business, $25/mo isn't much, but for personal projects i prefer free over paid.

pjhyett2• 16 years ago

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.

ErrantX3• 16 years ago

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 :)

jstepka• 16 years ago

We're glad to hear that you're enjoying Bitbucket's unlimited repositories.

Many others have been surprised by our move to allow unlimited private repositories... unlimited repositories is something we're happy to give back to the development and open-source community. This approach is similar to our Starter licenses, which are fully featured versions of our products for $10, for up to 10 users. All of the proceeds go to our favorite charity Room to Read.

To date, we've donated $750k USD to build schools and provide children with scholarships in places like Cambodia so they can complete high school.

Starter licenses are used by millions of developers around the globe, but they had one missing bit. The ability to store your code somewhere -- something every developer needs.

Building on the success of Starter licenses, we've modeled the Bitbucket pricing in the same way -- to help open-source, up-and-coming developers and organizations get their ideas started hassle free.

Be rest assured, our Starter licenses and Bitbucket's unlimited private repositories are here to stay.

ErrantX3• 16 years ago

The only bad thing about your switch to the free plan, from my perspective, is that I no longer could justify paying for anything. Hey, it's great that you want to give me the service I want for free :) but I never really begrudged that $12 a month.

dedward2• 16 years ago

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.

steveklabnik9• 16 years ago

You're welcome: http://fi.github.com/

dedward2• 16 years ago

Right on - thanks.

(and all you other SaaS providers out there - take note!)

cemerick2• 16 years ago

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.

ez77• 16 years ago

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• 16 years ago

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

tmcw• 16 years ago

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.

steveklabnik9• 16 years ago

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

gte910h3• 16 years ago

If you've ever run your own git server (and I do), you have to pretty much setup something like gitosis or other solutions to manage the new projects....or you have to ssh in to make new projects.

I see absolutely no more than an afternoon's work to take people's work and move to a completely different remote central repo if github were to vanish from the internet one day.

The central node is a lot easier. git is not a source control system. It is a system for making a source control system. For many people, the centralized system is great.

tedunangst2• 16 years ago

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.

steveklabnik9• 16 years ago

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://stackoverflow.com/questions/327249/ddg

tedunangst2• 16 years ago

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.

sedachv• 16 years ago

Yeah, that's twice as many steps as "email the author a patch." But you're right, there's still nothing keeping you from emailing the author a patch (I've contributed to github-hosted projects that way).

technomancy2• 16 years ago

> 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.

True, Github badly needs a "bless this non-root repository as the canonical one" feature. That's absolutely important for less plugged-in contributors, which may be why it's not as high on their radar.

St-Clock• 16 years ago

"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?

kenjackson3• 16 years ago

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• 16 years ago

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

kenjackson3• 16 years ago

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.

gte910h3• 16 years ago

>MO, the problem with GitHub is the community. For some reason the Ruby community rubs me the wrong way

While I get that same feel from the rubbings from some ruby folk, (I'm a C/python/Objective C guy mainly), I don't honestly feel their rubbings in relation to github at all. I mean, it's source control, what does it have to do with the language you put into it?

Are you rejecting git too because rubyiests happen to use grabbed onto Linus Torvald's version of Hg?

kenjackson3• 16 years ago

While I get that same feel from the rubbings from some ruby folk, (I'm a C/python/Objective C guy mainly), I don't honestly feel their rubbings in relation to github at all. I mean, it's source control, what does it have to do with the language you put into it?

As the author of the original blog entry stated, feature-wise Git is similar to many other source control systems, "The issue wasn't the technology. Mercurial and Git are pretty much at feature parity (as is Bazaar)."

He goes on to say that the differentiator is the community. If the source control system isn't technologically superior to other competing technologies, and the community is the differentiating factor, but the community is one that I'm not extremely enamored with, wouldn't I be wise to stay away?

Maybe what you're saying is that in fact the community is not that important with repect to GitHub. It's a web front end for source control and it's really good, period. In that case, maybe it's worth another look. Although again, pretty much the only people I hear talking about GitHub are Ruby folks, and most of what they talk about is how GitHub is great because of the Ruby community.

technomancy2• 16 years ago

> 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.)

Why people keep asking you to use Github

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