[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.

[chazu]

I agree - there's nothing wrong with the original Dear Github letter - github is a big company with lots of inertia, being called out on failing to support the growth of their OSS community isn't going to hurt their feelings but it may spur some change.

This letter just feels sycophantic and obsequious to me. And sucking up to billion-dollar companies doesn't feel like its in the hacker spirit, if you'll allow me to posit that such a thing still exists.