[joelhandwell]

>Why? >What are you waiting for?

If Github was made with micro services architecture, it could be split into open source "Client side + Test-backend" and closed sourced "Production-backend". Backend can be composed of some interface and multiple implementation such as test impl and prod impl. “the secret sauce” could be the "Production-backend" and MS have good in-house talents who operates Azure so no need for the help from OSS community to improve backend.

However for example +1 button took so long time to be implemented even though it seems like small change in client side code and some adjustments in database. That itch lead to the https://github.com/dear-github/dear-github open letter and signers listed here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1oGsg02jS-PnlIMJ3OlWI...

The last sentence of the open letter says: "Hopefully none of these are a surprise to you as we’ve told you them before. We’ve waited years now for progress on any of them. If GitHub were open source itself, we would be implementing these things ourselves as a community—we’re very good at that!"

I think that's OSS community want, including but not only I want.

[TheHydroImpulse]

This just isn't possible. No company in their right mind would take their monolith and rewrite a bunch of stuff just to please a couple randoms on the internet.

I think you're drastically underestimating the amount of code Github is powered by and how freaking long any type of refactor/rewrite would take. We're talking about years.

[joelhandwell]

Oh, was Github monolith? I did not read any articles about their architecture so I assumed that Github could be composed by micro services, and in that case, splitting could go easier. I edited to "If Github was made with micro services architecture,..."

Does anyone have link to any interview or article talking about granularity of their architecture?

[joelhandwell]

Reading Github Engineering blog posts related to their architecture. https://goo.gl/amkJfV As far as I read so far, Github looks like composed of micro services, or at least split into many distributed services.

[joelhandwell]

I did a search and found http://highscalability.com/blog/2009/11/6/product-resque-git...

It's talking about a component of Github backend called Resque (Distrubuted Job Queue)

As long as I see these thing the architecture is highly distributed and it's possibly composed of micro services.

[TheHydroImpulse]

Github has been a well known Rails monolith. Absolutely they have services that power all sorts of stuff (they have a few blog posts on it) but it's just impractical to even start a discussion on splitting it up for the reasons you initially argued for.

I've been through a number of large rewrites/reworks that took monoliths much like Github (with many many many services behind it) and split them up into modular pieces and it's an insane amount of work that can take years. You simply need very good reasons (including business reasons) to do that.

Moreover, companies at these sizes just have a LOT of code all over the place. Tooling, infra, supporting services, etc... Not to mention it's just not useful to have external contributors for a business product like Github. Doing code reviews, addressing bugs that were introduced, spending time discussing things with contributors takes an incredible amount of time.

Basically if the reason you want Github open sourced (and reworked into some weird architecture you described) is so that people can contribute to fix things and add features....Github could/will just hire more devs to work on that.

[joelhandwell]

Thinking about the fact that Github have Github.com (production service) and Github Enterprise (self hosted), could it be like this?

Github.com = Github Core + Production Services and Infra

Github Enterprise = Github Core + Services need for Self Hosting

Maybe it's not worthy to proceed based on assumption but if there is something like "Github Core" which is shared codebase between prod and self-hosted, open sourcing the core can be an option?

[joelhandwell]

Thanks TheHydroImpulse for the insights. So Github IS monolith. It really makes sense that splitting is too much work for just open sourcing and I do not see business gain to invest money and people into it.

Then possible path might be isolating least coupled (and small) components of client side code and open source?