Comment by SwellJoe | Hacker News Reader

Comment by SwellJoe | Hacker News Reader

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While I don't think github is deserving of "vicious accusations", I do believe it is foolish to assume that the github we know today will be the github of tomorrow.

SourceForge.net was once an excellent and trustworthy steward of Open Source software projects. It was predicted by some folks in the free software community that it would not always be the case, and alternatives like Savannah were maintained in order to act as a hedge against that concern. I believe it is more than reasonable to assume that github will change, and it would be downright dangerous to assume that we can rely on a profit-motivated corporation (even one as cool as github currently is) to remain a trustworthy repository forever.

So, sure, say nice things about github; I also think github is a good product, and I appreciate their free hosting for OSS projects. And, sure, you should use github if it provides value for you and you're willing to accept the price. But, don't ask me to trust they'll never change, because history indicates they will. It's probably also unfair to suggest that someone criticizing some valid concerns about github's current behavior, based on their own experience with Open Source projects hosted at github, are making "vicious accusations".

Really? These aren't vicious?

"My guess is that some high-level greedy marketing dickwad, completely unaware of the asinine implications of his brilliant idea, signed off on this dumb-as-a-bag-of-rocks pricing model."

"All the marketing material pimping GitHub’s LFS support [...]. I do not believe this is unintentional."

"This is completely batshit. The side effect of this pernicious, greedy pricing model is to [...]"

"I honestly couldn’t believe that GitHub would be willing to do something that shortsighted, visibly motivated by greed from the cash they thought they could extract from some of their users"

Nothing you wouldn't see in your average jwz rant, or really any rant.

OK, those are maybe a little vicious, and probably not entirely fair. Still, the implication of not being able to fork a whole project from github if you use LFS is a pretty big deal.

GitHub has added features, and made their product better for their customers, but have not yet made it possible to use from everywhere on their platform.

Perhaps that is a big deal (I don't use LFS and until recently neither did anyone else), but it's a far cry from what you said in your original comment, such as "I do believe it is foolish to assume that the github we know today will be the github of tomorrow."

They implement a feature in a restricted manner and all of a sudden they're evil?

No, of course not. I have nowhere said github is evil. I've said it would be foolish to believe they never will be, because we have seen on a number of occasions that good companies turn bad (with varying definitions of "good" and "bad") when given sufficient monetary motivation to do so.

SourceForge is the best past analog for github, and I think it's worth learning from history. SF.net didn't start out evil and untrustworthy; they started out good. Who's to say github won't do the same?

Its not that I believe good forever, but rather that I think it (it being your first comment) was a weird way to take the conversation. Like, why did that even occur to you in this context?

I left some of the early parts of my thought process out of the conversation.

My thought process went something like this: "This is a feature that is currently, probably accidentally, causing vendor lock-in for github users, as there is no easy way to take a project in its entirety back out of github, if it has enabled this feature. That kind of lock-in has been used in the past, by vendors across a wide spectrum, for evil purposes. Github, were it ever to become evil, would find this the kind of thing that would screw users and produce profit."

I don't believe github today has evil intent (though the author of the article seemingly does believe that), but I reserve the right to be skeptical of what the company's intentions will be in the future. Just as I should have been more skeptical of the the future intentions of SourceForge in the past. I think my position on this is entirely fair to github (which is a company and product I like), but I'm also trying to not to be a total sucker and make the same mistakes over and over again.

I see. Yes, lock in has been used for evil in the past.

I thought the OP noted that MS also offers git+LFS (and for free)!

I wouldn't have characterized that as evil per se, but the fact that they are just not disclosing these restrictions is at the very least a communications failure, if not a shady business practice. It would have been completely understandable if they had just mentioned the existence of these restrictions, but they haven't.

If you start using LFS, you are effectively losing features and the product becomes worse for a lot of their users, a lot of them paying customers.

The question is not whether this was being just inflammatory (it was) but rather whether it was unwarranted criticism.

Disclaimer: I am the author of the article.

I'd hate to see the blog post you call vicious. Does it need f-bombs? Death threats?

I think what you mean is that it is not unjustifiably vicious.

It's a little rough, and I wouldn't have been so harsh (my vitriol has faded quite a bit with age). But, having been an open source software developer and running companies based on open source for many years, I am kinda tone deaf to what constitutes "vicious" for folks that aren't accustomed to nerds getting ornery. I'm not defending it...I think the article would have been more eff with less vitriol and more examples of why this behavior is dangerous and past examples of when seemingly non-evil companies have done evil things, whether intentionally or not.

But I didn't write the article. I was just kinda jumping on the "hey Github could potentially do shitty things if we aren't careful" bandwagon. I'm definitely not anti-Github. I think they've built a great product. I'm a paying customer with private repos.

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