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Comment by meddlepal | Hacker News Reader

Why do you think they should open source it?

My two cents? Because they have based their entire business and clientele around an open source piece of technology. Their contributions back to the community which gave them the core of their company feels... anemic.

Even if their entire stack was open sourced, GitHub would still be a profitable company simply because it's GitHub. They're hosting hundreds of thousands of repos on bare metal and providing tools around those repos allowing for the maintenance of a community - that's why they are making money; not because of some secret sauce in the code. Otherwise, GitLabs would have eaten their lunch by now.

I could definitely be wrong, and they do have 8ish pages of projects they offer up themselves, but so many are just meaningless dumps of one-off projects.

By that definition Google and Facebook should do the same. Or asking a farmer to give away their seeds for a similar reason.

Why not? They could release community version at least.

Because if you say to management "hey, why don't we release the code that our entire business is built off of for anyone to host for themselves for free!" you'd be laughed out of the building on your way to the psych ward.

Their entire business is already built upon software that anyone can host themselves for free.

So github has no custom/proprietary code or value adding features?

Then what's the problem? You already have access to their core business software.

I have never worked on a piece of proprietary software that would be in a state where it could be released publicly in any form without a very large outlay of development time and money. I'd be very surprised if github is any different. "Why not" is for things that are easy to do. Things that are hard and / or expensive to do require strong justification.

Honest question - do you think if the proprietary software you worked on had been planned from the beginning to be released publicly, a very large outlay would be unnecessary?

Not him, but if I were writing something that was going to be publicly released then I could imagine the team would:

a) Have to include a lot more documentation

b) Be a lot more paranoid about best practices, and writing generalizable code even if it doesn't fit their particular slice of the market

c) Never have the chance to use a closed source solution for part of the problem (e.g. no we can't have half our app actually be a series of Oracle specific stored procedures, or buy a UI package for $20,000 rather than use a heavily modified version of Bootstrap).

Not at all - if it were part of the strategy from the outset, different decisions would be made along the way. I wasn't trying to say that it's necessarily harder to build software for public release, just that it's hard to publicly release software that was not built that way. But I guess I don't really know for sure - I've never worked on a project like that.

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