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Comment by slimsag | Hacker News Reader

GitHub appears to be slowly but surely ensuring anyone who extends their ecosystem is either acquired by GitHub or extinguished -- something I am pretty sure everyone who works in the space has known for a long time.

It is no coincidence that many of the companies that have used this developer program: Pull Panda, Dependabot and others like Semmle, Spectrum, etc. have been acquired by them. It starts looking a lot like going in the trajectory of an Apple App Store-esque developer platform in terms of lockdown to me.

I know GitLab isn't perfect, but I truly appreciate their openness[1] and willingness to partner with others in this space that are trying to improve developer tooling. If we want better developer tools, we need open platforms for those tools to exist.

[1] https://about.gitlab.com/partners/integrate/

Disclaimer: I work in the space (@ Sourcegraph) but the words/thoughts here are my own, I'm not a corporate shill (I hope) :)

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> It starts looking a lot like going in the trajectory of an Apple App Store-esque developer platform in terms of lockdown to me.

Worse than that, it looks like Twitter's pattern of acquiring successful businesses using their API, before significantly locking down access.

How is https://about.gitlab.com/partners/integrate/ materially different from https://developer.github.com/marketplace/ ?

Not trolling, just curious why you think one is open and one is not when they both provide ways to get a stamp of approval when you write apps to a public API.

is the second link not the thing they just announced the shutdown of? Unless i'm missing something, the big material differnce between gitlab's developer program and github's developer program is that gitlab's version isn't deprecated.

If you want to test your integration with GitLab Enterprise, they will give you a development license for free because they understand you are contributing positively to their ecosystem: https://about.gitlab.com/partners/integrate/#requesting-ee-d...

It used to be the same case with GitHub Enterprise, they would give you a development license to test your integration. After this, you will need to purchase a GHE license which is $2,500/yr (you must first go through their sales team).

Basically, this shuts out people from developing integrations that can be sold to other enterprises from what I understand.

This is standard incumbent behaviour, it’s been happening forever. Any company that gets to a significant size or scale will behave in the same way, and that includes Sourcegraph, gitlab and anyone else.

That is just not true.

Many market dominating companies/products aim for the exact opposite: try to be "platform" instead of "product". For example Google Apps and Salesforce.

I dont know enough about Saleforce

But Google Apps is not a good exampe of "openess"

Google is historic about closing off Dev and API Access (See Nest product line), Removing Open protocol from services (i.e removing XMPP from Chat and Hangouts), and killing products that have more open API's replacing them with less open ones

But i wasn't talking about Google. I was talking about Google Apps. Your examples are about other divisions of Alphabet/Google...

...When you deal with the tech giants they are so large that different divisions commonly have totally different goals and ethos; some divisions are transparent and great to work with, others are pure nightmare.

Love Sourcegraph, by the way. Can’t say how many times I’ve used it instead of GitHub’s anemic search.

None of the acquired companies were forced at gunpoint to sell to Github. Very few technology companies are created with the intention of being an ongoing profitable concern. If they are investor backed, almost by definition they are looking to be acquired. A statistical minuscule number of technology companies ever become profitable.

I would think almost every acquisition ever has been voluntary, among companies that aren't publicly traded. But we were talking about Github's/Microsoft's acquisition strategy. The companies being acquired don't drive that, even if they enable it.

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