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Comment by bhouston | Hacker News Reader

Brutal delay in responding to their most important constituent? What the hell? This wasn't a minor user's feature request, it was an open letter signed by a ton of major open source leaders. If I was an investor in GitHub I would fire the CEO.

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That's the problem. GitHub brass thinks their most important constituent is the people paying thousands of dollars to buy GitHub Enterprise. The only reason they have the enterprise customers is because they got popular with open source first. However, at this point their enterprise popularity may be big enough that success there is self-sustaining -- enterprises make decisions based more on what other enterprises do rather than on what open source and small companies do.

That being said, I bet that enterprises are screaming about Issues too. Enterprise loves their custom fields.

Enterprises use JIRA and various github plugins, works a treat and keeps PM types happy. This is about OSS projects that are to small for JIRA/Bugzilla, but have outgrown the limited github issue tracker.

You say that, but much has changed in the past 10 years. If it truly were "up to enterprises", we wouldn't be using Git in the first place.

> The only reason they have the enterprise customers is because they got popular with open source first.

I have absolutely no idea how GitHub could have lost sight of this simple fact.

Didn't they just replace their complete management?

That'd explain it.

  their most important constituent

Do you mean their millions of users? In which case, is this one letter a voice for every single one of them and is this one letter the only request to come from those -- again -- millions of users? Or do you specifically mean those on the letter, in which case what makes them their 'most important constituents' over all the other organizations, open source projects, enterprise users, and developers?

Well, if they responded within a day, the answer would be something like "we'll look that up".

Because they waited for almost a month, they can confidently say something like "we thought about your issues thoroughly and we are ready to take some actions to resolve them".

Sure, they had a more meaningful response, but a public response immediately saying "We hear you, and we'll have a more detailed response after we look things over. Thank you." Would have sufficed and been way better for their case.

Ignoring your users just to spend a month writing a response to those users is not in the best interests.

Once you strip out the fluff, those sentences are effectively identical. It's not like they said what they'll be doing. Just a bunch of hand-wavey "we're working on it".

I'm glad that you are not.

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