GitHub was not and is not "a friend" that you've lost. It has been, for a long time now, a corporation, in Silicon Valley, backed by people who like to make a lot of money (VCs). The one good take away from your piece is that people have indeed forgotten about the basic tenet of decentralised source code systems, namely the decentralised part.
Would you have been happier if GitHub had gone public? Being at the whim of a small group of people who truly only care about profit? GH is a for-profit business and so are GitLab and Bitbucket. You may like them now, but sooner or later things will change for them too and they will be bought, go public or go bankrupt.
My main objection to your reasoning is that Microsoft is somehow so much worse than GitHub. I have no love lost for MS but they are simply bigger than GitHub. When you feel yourself weeping over your lost friend, remember it's just another corporation that took $350M in funding over time and is now worth $7.5B; i.e. big business, not a rag-tag group of ideological friends. And (some of) the people running GH may be good people, but MS also employs a lot of people, a good number of which with values similar to yours.
I personally feel that Satya Nadella has put the non-Windows parts of MS on a smart course, smart business these days being a lot of open source and cloud. Who knows, maybe in 5 years everything will be different again, but for now I'm fine with them, and you're not which is cool, but in the end this is just business in the valley. Try the competition, because GH is already getting a bit complacent, but keep in mind that they too will sooner or later do the things that corporations do.
Totally agree. It's really about the slap in the face realization of, why did I not see that GitHub was just like the rest before? And judging by open-source's dependence on GH, this looks like it might have been a collective delusion.
It will be good for GH to get some more competition, acquired or not, but I've tried some stuff on Bitbucket and it's… not great. Atlassian in general is not renowned for their great UX, cough*JIRA*cough and Bitbucket has some very odd design elements.
GitLab is quickly getting better, but if they grow, it will be a duopoly which is only slightly better, and in the end, GitLab is also a VC backed venture, currently at $45M total so it's a virtual guarantee they will go public or be acquired at some point, because that is the way of the VC-backed company.
Like I said though, I am at peace with this state of affairs. Once you consider everything most people on the planet use is basically running on Amazon servers it puts things into perspective a bit. Infrastructure costs a ton of money and effort and I'm lazy and don't want to set up my own git servers. Git or Mercurial or such are theoretically good candidates for a Mastodon like setup, except that I would be a bit nervous about my origin suddenly disappearing because someone needed to cut back costs. Could be an interesting project though.
I think the main difference with gitlab is that it is partially open source. If they get acquired and things go south the project could get forked (which would be likely with a large user base). This has happened with Owncloud, MySQL, etc. I see this as really just being another reason to favour open source.
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GitHub was not and is not "a friend" that you've lost. It has been, for a long time now, a corporation, in Silicon Valley, backed by people who like to make a lot of money (VCs). The one good take away from your piece is that people have indeed forgotten about the basic tenet of decentralised source code systems, namely the decentralised part.
Would you have been happier if GitHub had gone public? Being at the whim of a small group of people who truly only care about profit? GH is a for-profit business and so are GitLab and Bitbucket. You may like them now, but sooner or later things will change for them too and they will be bought, go public or go bankrupt.
My main objection to your reasoning is that Microsoft is somehow so much worse than GitHub. I have no love lost for MS but they are simply bigger than GitHub. When you feel yourself weeping over your lost friend, remember it's just another corporation that took $350M in funding over time and is now worth $7.5B; i.e. big business, not a rag-tag group of ideological friends. And (some of) the people running GH may be good people, but MS also employs a lot of people, a good number of which with values similar to yours.
I personally feel that Satya Nadella has put the non-Windows parts of MS on a smart course, smart business these days being a lot of open source and cloud. Who knows, maybe in 5 years everything will be different again, but for now I'm fine with them, and you're not which is cool, but in the end this is just business in the valley. Try the competition, because GH is already getting a bit complacent, but keep in mind that they too will sooner or later do the things that corporations do.
Totally agree. It's really about the slap in the face realization of, why did I not see that GitHub was just like the rest before? And judging by open-source's dependence on GH, this looks like it might have been a collective delusion.
It will be good for GH to get some more competition, acquired or not, but I've tried some stuff on Bitbucket and it's… not great. Atlassian in general is not renowned for their great UX, cough*JIRA*cough and Bitbucket has some very odd design elements.
GitLab is quickly getting better, but if they grow, it will be a duopoly which is only slightly better, and in the end, GitLab is also a VC backed venture, currently at $45M total so it's a virtual guarantee they will go public or be acquired at some point, because that is the way of the VC-backed company.
Like I said though, I am at peace with this state of affairs. Once you consider everything most people on the planet use is basically running on Amazon servers it puts things into perspective a bit. Infrastructure costs a ton of money and effort and I'm lazy and don't want to set up my own git servers. Git or Mercurial or such are theoretically good candidates for a Mastodon like setup, except that I would be a bit nervous about my origin suddenly disappearing because someone needed to cut back costs. Could be an interesting project though.
I think the main difference with gitlab is that it is partially open source. If they get acquired and things go south the project could get forked (which would be likely with a large user base). This has happened with Owncloud, MySQL, etc. I see this as really just being another reason to favour open source.