7 ms·

Dear-GitHub: Host Github by itself as an open source project

197 points by joelhandwell 8y ago

m3kw9 8y ago
Don’t matter if you say pretty please, if it aligns with their business they will do it. They’ve probably thought of this move already.
- jen729w 8y ago
  Which one would argue is exactly what they should and must do, given the money they paid for it.
- sdesol 8y ago
  There is no way I can see them open sourcing GitHub. If you have studied the history of versioning control systems (ClearCear, Perforce, TFS, Subversion, etc.) you would know how insanely powerful controlling the hosting solution is. I can see Microsoft making private repos for free and/or making GitHub Enterprise free for the first 10 users though.
  - freedomben 8y ago
    It's definitely powerful, but I don't think the power of github is in the actual product. Gitlab is much better in some important ways (IMHO of course), but it's still not seen much adoption. The power of Github is in the community and the fact that it's the defacto standard place to look for code. That would likely only increase if MS open sourced the code.
tbrock 8y ago
Why? It’s free for open source, reasonable for enterprise and private use and I think you could build a better one starting from scratch. GitHub’s success is largely due to the network effect and it’s entrenched status as the canonical code repository. Besides libgit2, aka “the secret sauce”, is already open source. What are you waiting for?
- derefr 8y ago
  > libgit2, aka “the secret sauce” I would describe GitHub's real "secret sauce" as the issue-tracking, wikis, project boards, and release management parts, that don't get represented in the repo itself. Which is to say, if you wanted to commoditize GitHub (which is basically what "open-sourcing your secret sauce" means), you'd have to create some sort of library that allowed you to treat a git repo + all those other things as one structured data-object. You would be able to use said library to both operate on all those pieces of data locally; and to sync them between different Git hosting services that all share those features. Or, better yet, figure out a way to put all those features into git itself, so that every git repo automatically transports those pieces of data alongside itself.
  - enturn 8y ago
    Fossil SCM has Integrated Bug Tracking, Wiki, and Technotes. It's not git but is distributed. It's used for sqlite project.
    - derefr 8y ago
      That's cool. I wonder why Git hasn't copied the implementation.
      - dcuthbertson 8y ago
        They are completely different. In fossil, commit history is sacred, where git users can rebase, and cherry pick to their hearts content
        derefr 8y ago
        I meant the implementation of these side-features as objects sitting in the repo, with appropriate client commands for creating and editing them, etc. Git already has notes, and signed commits/signed tags, which are all those same kind of "objects that just happen to be there." So they don't need to copy Fossil's architecture; they can just copy the way that said object types interact as dependents of commits (while letting them get blown away when commits themselves do.)
ksubedi 8y ago
after seeing what they did with xamarin, i would not be surprised if they did. but unlike xamarin, open sourcing github wouldnt help them gain more developers on their platform and i do not see any other business benefits. i would love to see this happen though
peterwwillis 8y ago
It's kind of funny how Open Source is now a strategic initiative of many big tech companies. They open source projects for a variety of reasons: 1) to attract tech talent, 2) to "build a community" (aka get customers to become unpaid tech support), 3) to increase quality by increasing eyes on lines of code, 4) to reduce cost of maintenance by allowing the community to provide development work, 5) contributing back to existing tools allows companies to re-use technology rather than having to roll their own, 6) defeat competition by releasing a supported product for free. The last one is a really powerful move for a software company. Normally, people will use your software if it's free, but if there's performance or other limits, it decreases the number of potential users. External open source projects then pick up the user base you might have acquired later. By open sourcing your own product, you effectively eliminate the need market for the external projects, giving you back your user base (which helps your community, potentially leads to sales, etc). For some companies this would be cutting things very close in terms of profit margins, but Microsoft has plenty of other income that it doesn't need to worry about an occasional loss. It has way more to gain from leveraging this product in all its other tech offerings, even if they made zero money off enterprise support.
Someone1234 8y ago
They could, but I'd argue GitHub is powerful for the community, shared user accounts between projects, and integrations. None of which you'd benefit from if you deployed your own instance. If Microsoft open sourced GitHub, I'd still use GitHub.com, for the reasons I stated above. Heck GitLab is already OSS and I don't use that because GitHub wins via the network effect[0]. PS - I have no issue with people asking for this; I'm simply pointing out the "win" if Microsoft agreed, is lower than you'd immediately anticipate. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect
whoisjuan 8y ago
GitLab is not open source though. They call their approach "open core" which imho is just a marketing gimmick to appear as an open source solution when in fact they are not fully open source.
- eropple 8y ago
  I am not a big fan of GitLab-the-company. But GitLab CE is licensed as MIT. You can do with it what you wilt. I have a hunch that your actual complaint is that they too do with it what they wilt, and what they wilt is not "give to you everything they add on top of GitLab for free and forever".
  - whoisjuan 8y ago
    Yes. That's what I meant, but also I don't think that's a bad thing. Building software is hard and expensive. I think is valid to only open source certain parts of your system and reserve the right to monetize other parts and features.
- TAForObvReasons 8y ago
  This is not a fair criticism. There is a truly open source version under an actual good-faith open source MIT license: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/blob/master/LICENSE https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/blob/master/LICENSE GitHub does not have anything remotely close to that.
  - whoisjuan 8y ago
    Good point. I'm not criticizing. I'm a very happy GitLab customer and love what they do. But just wanted to point out that they don't call themselves "Open Source" and their business model is not necessarily an open source first kind of business.
nemothekid 8y ago
I really don't see the value in open sourcing GitHub when Gitlab exists if you are looking for a replacement incase MS decides to go full tyrant - unless if you believe GitHub enterprise is an amazing project. If GitHub wasn't built from the start for hosted deployments, it will probably be both expensive and a pain in the neck to run. GitLab probably has it's issues, but I won't be surprised if there are assumptions made in GitHub's code that assumes you are essentially running on high memory / high cpu machines to reduce latency.
- freedomben 8y ago
  This would be interesting to hear about from an insider. I suspect you're right. Having worked at a company that open sources most of their code, I've seen first hand how much better the code quality is when you know it's going out to the world. When you know it's gonna be hidden and only a handful of people will ever see it, you're much less hesitant to push up hacks :-) We open sourced something that wasn't originally going to be open, and we spent weeks going through cleaning up and refactoring things to avoid public embarrassment.
  - kanwisher 8y ago
    What’s the business value in spending weeks of developer time refactoring things that are going open source. For some industries it’s required like blockchain. For average shop seems like more expense with no profit
    - freedomben 8y ago
      In our case, the business value was that it was a contractual clause with a customer. The idea was that keeping a million dollar customer and spending weeks refactoring was cheaper than losing the customer and getting sued for breach of contract. So we're probably in a similar boat as block chain like you mention. However, I think you underestimate the value of open source. Besides being the right thing to do (respects freedom, allows developers who built it to use their code later in line with license agreement, allows others to learn by contributing or at least reading, plus many other benefits) it can be a powerful recruiting tool. There's real business value in getting good hires.
cutety 8y ago
Like the other commenter said, if it aligns with their business interest, they will. That said, I do find it funny that essentially the "home" of most open source projects itself isn't open source. I'm not a heavy user of GitHub, as we use a self hosted instance of Gitlab at work, so my only use is browsing projects & throwing up my various side projects on it, so maybe someone can enlighten me on my next question. Does GitHub have some proprietary tech/functionality that is valuable enough to warrant it being closed source? As far as I can tell, GitHub's most valuable assets are it's large user base and the brand itself, it's actual functionality seems to be pretty standard amongst git hosting applications (Gitlab, Gitea/Gogs, Bitbucket, etc...). However, like I said, I myself am not a heavy user of it, so there could be some feature the others are lacking that GitHub would like to keep the code closed to prevent others from replicating.
- seabrookmx 8y ago
  I think you're right. The only "secret sauce" I could see them having are some unique operational/architectural features of their back-end code that make sense for an entity at Github's scale. No instance of Gitea/Gitlab is even in the same ballpark wrt repo count and traffic than github.com, obviously.
jasode 8y ago
>Microsoft open sourced Xamarin after acquisition and it was good for community. I don't think Microsoft's previous open sourcing of Xamarin is a good indicator and may lead us to misunderstand MS's strategy. To me, it would be very out of character for MS to open source Github. Yes, MS has released things like C# compiler (Rosalyn), Visual Studio Code (Javascript Electron app), and Xamarin to the open source community. But, MS has not open sourced CodePlex, Visual Studio Team Foundation Server, Skype, Linkedin. I see a difference between "programming tools" and "collaboration platforms" and Github is in the 2nd category. I see no strategic reason why MS would pay $7.5 billion for Github to just turn around and open source it.
- WorldMaker 8y ago
  Xamarin is an easy to use leading indicator because of Nat Friedman's involvement in both. Simply in choosing Nat Friedman as new CEO it is hard not to wonder if Microsoft at least has the intention to explore Open Source as an operating option for GitHub moving forward. > But, MS has not open sourced CodePlex, Visual Studio Team Foundation Server, Skype, Linkedin. [...] I see a difference between "programming tools" and "collaboration platforms" [...] They've open source some of those "collaboration platforms". It's not a clear black & white situation, I don't think. LinkedIn has a large open source footprint: http://linkedin.github.io/ http://linkedin.github.io/ More importantly, Azure has a ton of Open Source: https://azure.github.io/ https://azure.github.io/ A lot of what might possibly be considered "secret sauce" bits of the Azure stack are open source, and you could possibly cobble together your own mini-Azure if you needed too and for some reason it wasn't just cheaper to buy Windows Servers with Azure Stack out of the box or even to just use Azure's existing cloud. The Azure Functions Host is the biggest example off the top of my head that a lot of people imagine would be closed source but is open source. (Another example is I've used over the years for different reasons is Azure's "Kudu" website deployment engine.) I don't know if there's a cut/dried point where Microsoft might currently be drawing the line between its closed source stuff and open source, but "programming tools" versus "collaboration platforms" doesn't seem to be it (even before getting into semantic arguments about the fuzzy boundary between such categories). That said, there probably is no obvious strategic reason for Microsoft to open source GitHub at this point, and maybe all that money that was spent in the purchase are plenty more reasons not to. But Xamarin is an interesting leading indicator, and if there is a person to put in charge of GitHub with any interest in exploring the possibility of at least open sourcing more of GitHub, even if never quite "all" of GitHub, it is probably Nat Friedman.
_bxg1 8y ago
Yo dawg I heard you like GitHub, so I put GitHub on GitHub so you can contribute to GitHub using GitHub.
- gremlinsinc 8y ago
  Can't get more 'meta' than forking github, on github, to contribute to github or make a clone of github all using github.
- maxkrieger 8y ago
  Replace with "Linux distribution", "compiler", or any other self-referential system https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-hosting https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-hosting
aylmao 8y ago
As much as I wish this happened I don't think it will because it'll open the doors to a lot of self-hosting eating away Github Enterprise's revenue.
gremlinsinc 8y ago
I think it'd be cool if they open sourced it, but w/ federation built in. So self-hosted public repo's, would call back to ms github, and show up in searches/etc. You can star/comment/etc on github.com even if it's a federated/self-hosted github. That way the social aspect is still there, regardless of if the repo is hosted ON github.com or a remote copy.
mythz 8y ago
Pretty sure MS didn't acquire GitHub for 7.5B so they can OSS it and encourage competing, fragmented solutions with a lower barrier to entry.
tills13 8y ago
I _hate_ people using "M$" un-ironically. It wasn't funny 10 years ago when it started and it's still not funny today. How can you take that one comment seriously with that "M$" part in it.
- rurounijones 8y ago
  > How can you take that one comment seriously with that "M$" part in it. Judge the comment on the merits of the data provided and opinion based on that and don't get hung up on a name? "M$" may also be useful as an indicator of bias but again, it is not the whole comment.
- krisdol 8y ago
  It started much longer than 10 years ago. On slashdot, it was pretty much the only way I've ever seen Microsoft referred to.
- peterwwillis 8y ago
  That's cool. I hated Micro$oft for a while, for being a bunch of evil money grubbing assholes who made it harder to run the operating system I wanted, applied proprietary extensions to open standards in order to force vendor lock-in [nearly destroying the open web], and who leveraged PC manufacturer deals to tax us for software we didn't want. They literally called Open Source a cancer and lied about what the GPL specified to discourage use of the software. M$ was a monopoly, and all about the cash. It was never supposed to be funny. Also, irony means suggesting the opposite. I don't know why anyone would use M$ ironically.
nodesocket 8y ago
I am going to be in the minority here, but why does HN always think all software should be free and open source? GitHub generates large revenue and provides immense value for organizations and companies. It's the same argument I see on HN about people not wanting to pay for Slack and going through insane hoops and efforts to run alternatives. Makes no sense being a technical founder. I truly believe in supporting great software with my wallet. If the organization decides to make their software open source... That's awesome and great, but starting outrage campaigns and public outcry I can't get behind. Microsoft is a public company and they have every right to monetize GitHub.
joelhandwell 8y ago
Misunderstandings looks like happened regarding my intention. I'm totally not interested in running my own github instance in other server just like people who signed the open letter dear-github to plead Github to add +1 button in issue which took really long to be recognized as an issue to be implemented. I'm sure if it was open source, somebody implemented the feature and made a pull request. My intention is to make github.com "Client Side Code" better by let OSS community join into the development. So open sourcing backend and architecture is not my interest and possibly not interest of MS too. I'm not sure if Github is made of micro services, but if it is, certain client side code could be open sourced first and only that could generate great contribution to improve it. I'm heavy user of Gitlab and disappointed because it is no longer fully open source and some enterprise features would not be welcomed to be implemented by OSS community because it conflicts with Gitlab company revenue. In my ideal world, MS splits Github source into client and backend and open source "Github client + test backend" for community to test if client code works while they make pull request and keep production backend closed. Do you think MS would be interested in this?
- willchen 8y ago
  I think the +1 button was a really nice feature and something they should've done a while ago, but it's hard to draw the line. If everyone contributes their pet UI feature (e.g. custom theme, use XYZ monospace font), then there will be dozens of features that only 0.01% of users use, but it increases the overall complexity of the product and maintenance burden.
  - joelhandwell 8y ago
    +1 button could work as voting system to reduce that maintenance burden too. Semi-democratic method can be introduced to merge most voted and looks good to MS.
    - nemothekid 8y ago
      The only thing that sounds worse than design by committee is design by democracy. Do you know of any successful projects that are managed this way?
joelhandwell 8y ago
Not sure if they will join conversation but just now I invited @satyanadella @jeffmcaffer @natfriedman @defunkt @bkeepers into the Github issue. If you want them comment, cast vote with +1 https://github.com/dear-github/dear-github/issues/304#issuecomment-402011835 https://github.com/dear-github/dear-github/issues/304#issuec...

197 points by joelhandwell 8y ago

Don’t matter if you say pretty please, if it aligns with their business they will do it. They’ve probably thought of this move already.

jen729w 8y ago
Which one would argue is exactly what they should and must do, given the money they paid for it.
sdesol 8y ago
There is no way I can see them open sourcing GitHub. If you have studied the history of versioning control systems (ClearCear, Perforce, TFS, Subversion, etc.) you would know how insanely powerful controlling the hosting solution is. I can see Microsoft making private repos for free and/or making GitHub Enterprise free for the first 10 users though.
- freedomben 8y ago
  It's definitely powerful, but I don't think the power of github is in the actual product. Gitlab is much better in some important ways (IMHO of course), but it's still not seen much adoption. The power of Github is in the community and the fact that it's the defacto standard place to look for code. That would likely only increase if MS open sourced the code.

tbrock 8y ago

Why? It’s free for open source, reasonable for enterprise and private use and I think you could build a better one starting from scratch. GitHub’s success is largely due to the network effect and it’s entrenched status as the canonical code repository. Besides libgit2, aka “the secret sauce”, is already open source. What are you waiting for?

derefr 8y ago
> libgit2, aka “the secret sauce” I would describe GitHub's real "secret sauce" as the issue-tracking, wikis, project boards, and release management parts, that don't get represented in the repo itself. Which is to say, if you wanted to commoditize GitHub (which is basically what "open-sourcing your secret sauce" means), you'd have to create some sort of library that allowed you to treat a git repo + all those other things as one structured data-object. You would be able to use said library to both operate on all those pieces of data locally; and to sync them between different Git hosting services that all share those features. Or, better yet, figure out a way to put all those features into git itself, so that every git repo automatically transports those pieces of data alongside itself.
- enturn 8y ago
  Fossil SCM has Integrated Bug Tracking, Wiki, and Technotes. It's not git but is distributed. It's used for sqlite project.
  - derefr 8y ago
    That's cool. I wonder why Git hasn't copied the implementation.
    - dcuthbertson 8y ago
      They are completely different. In fossil, commit history is sacred, where git users can rebase, and cherry pick to their hearts content
      - derefr 8y ago
        I meant the implementation of these side-features as objects sitting in the repo, with appropriate client commands for creating and editing them, etc. Git already has notes, and signed commits/signed tags, which are all those same kind of "objects that just happen to be there." So they don't need to copy Fossil's architecture; they can just copy the way that said object types interact as dependents of commits (while letting them get blown away when commits themselves do.)

ksubedi 8y ago

after seeing what they did with xamarin, i would not be surprised if they did. but unlike xamarin, open sourcing github wouldnt help them gain more developers on their platform and i do not see any other business benefits. i would love to see this happen though

peterwwillis 8y ago

It's kind of funny how Open Source is now a strategic initiative of many big tech companies. They open source projects for a variety of reasons: 1) to attract tech talent, 2) to "build a community" (aka get customers to become unpaid tech support), 3) to increase quality by increasing eyes on lines of code, 4) to reduce cost of maintenance by allowing the community to provide development work, 5) contributing back to existing tools allows companies to re-use technology rather than having to roll their own, 6) defeat competition by releasing a supported product for free. The last one is a really powerful move for a software company. Normally, people will use your software if it's free, but if there's performance or other limits, it decreases the number of potential users. External open source projects then pick up the user base you might have acquired later. By open sourcing your own product, you effectively eliminate the need market for the external projects, giving you back your user base (which helps your community, potentially leads to sales, etc). For some companies this would be cutting things very close in terms of profit margins, but Microsoft has plenty of other income that it doesn't need to worry about an occasional loss. It has way more to gain from leveraging this product in all its other tech offerings, even if they made zero money off enterprise support.

Someone1234 8y ago

They could, but I'd argue GitHub is powerful for the community, shared user accounts between projects, and integrations. None of which you'd benefit from if you deployed your own instance. If Microsoft open sourced GitHub, I'd still use GitHub.com, for the reasons I stated above. Heck GitLab is already OSS and I don't use that because GitHub wins via the network effect[0]. PS - I have no issue with people asking for this; I'm simply pointing out the "win" if Microsoft agreed, is lower than you'd immediately anticipate. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect

whoisjuan 8y ago

GitLab is not open source though. They call their approach "open core" which imho is just a marketing gimmick to appear as an open source solution when in fact they are not fully open source.

eropple 8y ago
I am not a big fan of GitLab-the-company. But GitLab CE is licensed as MIT. You can do with it what you wilt. I have a hunch that your actual complaint is that they too do with it what they wilt, and what they wilt is not "give to you everything they add on top of GitLab for free and forever".
- whoisjuan 8y ago
  Yes. That's what I meant, but also I don't think that's a bad thing. Building software is hard and expensive. I think is valid to only open source certain parts of your system and reserve the right to monetize other parts and features.
TAForObvReasons 8y ago
This is not a fair criticism. There is a truly open source version under an actual good-faith open source MIT license: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/blob/master/LICENSE https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/blob/master/LICENSE GitHub does not have anything remotely close to that.
- whoisjuan 8y ago
  Good point. I'm not criticizing. I'm a very happy GitLab customer and love what they do. But just wanted to point out that they don't call themselves "Open Source" and their business model is not necessarily an open source first kind of business.

nemothekid 8y ago

I really don't see the value in open sourcing GitHub when Gitlab exists if you are looking for a replacement incase MS decides to go full tyrant - unless if you believe GitHub enterprise is an amazing project. If GitHub wasn't built from the start for hosted deployments, it will probably be both expensive and a pain in the neck to run. GitLab probably has it's issues, but I won't be surprised if there are assumptions made in GitHub's code that assumes you are essentially running on high memory / high cpu machines to reduce latency.

freedomben 8y ago
This would be interesting to hear about from an insider. I suspect you're right. Having worked at a company that open sources most of their code, I've seen first hand how much better the code quality is when you know it's going out to the world. When you know it's gonna be hidden and only a handful of people will ever see it, you're much less hesitant to push up hacks :-) We open sourced something that wasn't originally going to be open, and we spent weeks going through cleaning up and refactoring things to avoid public embarrassment.
- kanwisher 8y ago
  What’s the business value in spending weeks of developer time refactoring things that are going open source. For some industries it’s required like blockchain. For average shop seems like more expense with no profit
  - freedomben 8y ago
    In our case, the business value was that it was a contractual clause with a customer. The idea was that keeping a million dollar customer and spending weeks refactoring was cheaper than losing the customer and getting sued for breach of contract. So we're probably in a similar boat as block chain like you mention. However, I think you underestimate the value of open source. Besides being the right thing to do (respects freedom, allows developers who built it to use their code later in line with license agreement, allows others to learn by contributing or at least reading, plus many other benefits) it can be a powerful recruiting tool. There's real business value in getting good hires.

cutety 8y ago

Like the other commenter said, if it aligns with their business interest, they will. That said, I do find it funny that essentially the "home" of most open source projects itself isn't open source. I'm not a heavy user of GitHub, as we use a self hosted instance of Gitlab at work, so my only use is browsing projects & throwing up my various side projects on it, so maybe someone can enlighten me on my next question. Does GitHub have some proprietary tech/functionality that is valuable enough to warrant it being closed source? As far as I can tell, GitHub's most valuable assets are it's large user base and the brand itself, it's actual functionality seems to be pretty standard amongst git hosting applications (Gitlab, Gitea/Gogs, Bitbucket, etc...). However, like I said, I myself am not a heavy user of it, so there could be some feature the others are lacking that GitHub would like to keep the code closed to prevent others from replicating.

seabrookmx 8y ago
I think you're right. The only "secret sauce" I could see them having are some unique operational/architectural features of their back-end code that make sense for an entity at Github's scale. No instance of Gitea/Gitlab is even in the same ballpark wrt repo count and traffic than github.com, obviously.

jasode 8y ago

>Microsoft open sourced Xamarin after acquisition and it was good for community. I don't think Microsoft's previous open sourcing of Xamarin is a good indicator and may lead us to misunderstand MS's strategy. To me, it would be very out of character for MS to open source Github. Yes, MS has released things like C# compiler (Rosalyn), Visual Studio Code (Javascript Electron app), and Xamarin to the open source community. But, MS has not open sourced CodePlex, Visual Studio Team Foundation Server, Skype, Linkedin. I see a difference between "programming tools" and "collaboration platforms" and Github is in the 2nd category. I see no strategic reason why MS would pay $7.5 billion for Github to just turn around and open source it.

WorldMaker 8y ago
Xamarin is an easy to use leading indicator because of Nat Friedman's involvement in both. Simply in choosing Nat Friedman as new CEO it is hard not to wonder if Microsoft at least has the intention to explore Open Source as an operating option for GitHub moving forward. > But, MS has not open sourced CodePlex, Visual Studio Team Foundation Server, Skype, Linkedin. [...] I see a difference between "programming tools" and "collaboration platforms" [...] They've open source some of those "collaboration platforms". It's not a clear black & white situation, I don't think. LinkedIn has a large open source footprint: http://linkedin.github.io/ http://linkedin.github.io/ More importantly, Azure has a ton of Open Source: https://azure.github.io/ https://azure.github.io/ A lot of what might possibly be considered "secret sauce" bits of the Azure stack are open source, and you could possibly cobble together your own mini-Azure if you needed too and for some reason it wasn't just cheaper to buy Windows Servers with Azure Stack out of the box or even to just use Azure's existing cloud. The Azure Functions Host is the biggest example off the top of my head that a lot of people imagine would be closed source but is open source. (Another example is I've used over the years for different reasons is Azure's "Kudu" website deployment engine.) I don't know if there's a cut/dried point where Microsoft might currently be drawing the line between its closed source stuff and open source, but "programming tools" versus "collaboration platforms" doesn't seem to be it (even before getting into semantic arguments about the fuzzy boundary between such categories). That said, there probably is no obvious strategic reason for Microsoft to open source GitHub at this point, and maybe all that money that was spent in the purchase are plenty more reasons not to. But Xamarin is an interesting leading indicator, and if there is a person to put in charge of GitHub with any interest in exploring the possibility of at least open sourcing more of GitHub, even if never quite "all" of GitHub, it is probably Nat Friedman.

_bxg1 8y ago

Yo dawg I heard you like GitHub, so I put GitHub on GitHub so you can contribute to GitHub using GitHub.

gremlinsinc 8y ago
Can't get more 'meta' than forking github, on github, to contribute to github or make a clone of github all using github.
maxkrieger 8y ago
Replace with "Linux distribution", "compiler", or any other self-referential system https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-hosting https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-hosting

aylmao 8y ago

As much as I wish this happened I don't think it will because it'll open the doors to a lot of self-hosting eating away Github Enterprise's revenue.

gremlinsinc 8y ago

I think it'd be cool if they open sourced it, but w/ federation built in. So self-hosted public repo's, would call back to ms github, and show up in searches/etc. You can star/comment/etc on github.com even if it's a federated/self-hosted github. That way the social aspect is still there, regardless of if the repo is hosted ON github.com or a remote copy.

mythz 8y ago

Pretty sure MS didn't acquire GitHub for 7.5B so they can OSS it and encourage competing, fragmented solutions with a lower barrier to entry.

tills13 8y ago

I _hate_ people using "M$" un-ironically. It wasn't funny 10 years ago when it started and it's still not funny today. How can you take that one comment seriously with that "M$" part in it.

rurounijones 8y ago
> How can you take that one comment seriously with that "M$" part in it. Judge the comment on the merits of the data provided and opinion based on that and don't get hung up on a name? "M$" may also be useful as an indicator of bias but again, it is not the whole comment.
krisdol 8y ago
It started much longer than 10 years ago. On slashdot, it was pretty much the only way I've ever seen Microsoft referred to.
peterwwillis 8y ago
That's cool. I hated Micro$oft for a while, for being a bunch of evil money grubbing assholes who made it harder to run the operating system I wanted, applied proprietary extensions to open standards in order to force vendor lock-in [nearly destroying the open web], and who leveraged PC manufacturer deals to tax us for software we didn't want. They literally called Open Source a cancer and lied about what the GPL specified to discourage use of the software. M$ was a monopoly, and all about the cash. It was never supposed to be funny. Also, irony means suggesting the opposite. I don't know why anyone would use M$ ironically.

nodesocket 8y ago

I am going to be in the minority here, but why does HN always think all software should be free and open source? GitHub generates large revenue and provides immense value for organizations and companies. It's the same argument I see on HN about people not wanting to pay for Slack and going through insane hoops and efforts to run alternatives. Makes no sense being a technical founder. I truly believe in supporting great software with my wallet. If the organization decides to make their software open source... That's awesome and great, but starting outrage campaigns and public outcry I can't get behind. Microsoft is a public company and they have every right to monetize GitHub.

joelhandwell 8y ago

Misunderstandings looks like happened regarding my intention. I'm totally not interested in running my own github instance in other server just like people who signed the open letter dear-github to plead Github to add +1 button in issue which took really long to be recognized as an issue to be implemented. I'm sure if it was open source, somebody implemented the feature and made a pull request. My intention is to make github.com "Client Side Code" better by let OSS community join into the development. So open sourcing backend and architecture is not my interest and possibly not interest of MS too. I'm not sure if Github is made of micro services, but if it is, certain client side code could be open sourced first and only that could generate great contribution to improve it. I'm heavy user of Gitlab and disappointed because it is no longer fully open source and some enterprise features would not be welcomed to be implemented by OSS community because it conflicts with Gitlab company revenue. In my ideal world, MS splits Github source into client and backend and open source "Github client + test backend" for community to test if client code works while they make pull request and keep production backend closed. Do you think MS would be interested in this?

willchen 8y ago
I think the +1 button was a really nice feature and something they should've done a while ago, but it's hard to draw the line. If everyone contributes their pet UI feature (e.g. custom theme, use XYZ monospace font), then there will be dozens of features that only 0.01% of users use, but it increases the overall complexity of the product and maintenance burden.
- joelhandwell 8y ago
  +1 button could work as voting system to reduce that maintenance burden too. Semi-democratic method can be introduced to merge most voted and looks good to MS.
  - nemothekid 8y ago
    The only thing that sounds worse than design by committee is design by democracy. Do you know of any successful projects that are managed this way?

joelhandwell 8y ago

Not sure if they will join conversation but just now I invited @satyanadella @jeffmcaffer @natfriedman @defunkt @bkeepers into the Github issue. If you want them comment, cast vote with +1 https://github.com/dear-github/dear-github/issues/304#issuecomment-402011835 https://github.com/dear-github/dear-github/issues/304#issuec...