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by davidcelis 3787 days ago
Was it a good incident to see how dependent we are on GitHub? Every time there's a GitHub outage, a vocal group of people will voice their opinions that we are too dependent on GitHub, we should be using open source alternatives, GitHub should be open source, etc. Then, within a few days, everybody goes silent and we return to our normal lives.

I don't think outages at GitHub are very frequent. This one was lengthy, so it's definitely been on a lot of peoples' minds, but this conversation always comes up when it happens.
2 comments
technion 3786 days ago 

    I don't think outages at GitHub are very frequent
And yet, some of the entitlement around this outage is incredible. It's as though a community's want to see Github online, is far more relevant than the lack of SLAs and thousand dollar service fees.
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merqurio 3787 days ago
Of course it was. I don't know if everybody goes silent after a few days, It's the first outage I'm aware of, but some people at university made see the hypocrisy of using GitHub for open source projects and I feel that if there is a community strong enough to make some impact on GitHub that could be hackernews. Maybe I'm wrong.
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davidcelis 3787 days ago
If you look back through the years and find a few other stories of "GitHub is down", you'll see that this conversation happens every time. Some people tread into the HackerNews thread and say "More people should be using self-hosted GitLab instances" or "if GitHub would just open source their code, we wouldn't need to be so dependent."

But then the conversation stops within days because, the fact is, hosting your own git servers and getting people to actually use them is a huge pain in the ass. More simply put: people just like using GitHub.

Furthermore, GitHub's a business. They're selling private repositories. They do open source quite a bit of code, but they're not going to open source their actual product.

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uiri 3787 days ago
hosting your own git servers and getting people to actually use them is a huge pain in the ass. More simply put: people just like using GitHub.

Given that this is the case, I fell like GitHub is entrenched enough that they could open source their codebase and not lose any customers. People are paying them for the convenience of someone else hosting their git repository.

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maerF0x0 3787 days ago
Technically you dont need a server. You just need access to remotes. That could be your team's repos. Then PRs just mean pulling from a coworker to your repo.

But yes, most of us are most comfortable with the central repository model.

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merqurio 3787 days ago
Sure ! And I think it's a great business and I'm a happy customer too. My comment wasn't against the enterprise at all!

I just wanted to point that now that you guys are well stablished and have huge impact in the open source community, adopting a more open approach with your end users can be very beneficial for both, GitHub and the user base. I'm sure that lot of people would contribute to your codebase and thing like this: https://github.com/dear-github/dear-github would be less frequent and notorious.

But if the enterprise edition is really the source of income, open sourcing it doesn't have any sense. I agree on that. Maybe, another way to be more open to contributions from the community ? I dunno

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