This seems to be a somewhat baseless claim while using 3 open source projects as examples. Jira makes money off commercial licenses, and is a much more feature rich and productive tool for a large organization.<p>If you can show me atlassian profit loss (hint there isn't any: <a href="https://investors.atlassian.com/financials-and-filings/financial-statements/default.aspx" rel="nofollow">https://investors.atlassian.com/financials-and-filings/finan...</a>) then I would believe this.
Github issues is good because it does not have so many features.<p>If they started adding features to Github issues pretty soon it would be as slow and hard to use as JIRA. It's been a big problem with issue tracking systems for a long time. Once you add enough features and form fields, then the "add ticket" page looks like the cockpit of an old Boeing 747 (not the new glass cockpit.) Then the product manager stops putting tickets in because he can't figure out how to do it, and the developers get afraid of putting time on tickets because you try to subtract an hour that you worked on it and somehow end up adding 5 hours, and the remotes complain that it takes 40 seconds to create a ticket, etc.<p>There are so many issue tracking systems out there because: THEY ALL SUCK!
Disagree. Maybe for small projects with small teams and simpler workflows but I've found the exact opposite.<p>I <i>love</i> GitHub, and it's issues system is great for specific issue management for specific projects/modules. It could be better, but it's pretty solid.<p>However - once you get into wider project management which has multiple modules/repos under it then it's <i>functionally useless</i> for managing issues. No visibility across repos.<p>Nor should there be - it's not what it's trying to solve.<p>Take my companies case: we use GitHub a <i>lot</i> but we also use Jira, and they work <i>really well</i> together. We use a (forked) version of GitFlow to create branches and link them to the JIRA task and when we create a PR (to be reviewed via Github) it notes what issue it's related to.<p>Github's diffing, commenting, and so on, still used as normal. It's great.<p>For for bug tracking, story breakdowns, burn down, spring planning, etc etc - this is Jira's bread and butter (after you configure it at least). And these are not things GitHub is going to be good at - and it shouldn't try!<p>Different use cases. Using one to do what the other does would be horrible.<p>Compare with some OSS projects I run that <i>don't</i> need all I mentioned above and yes, obviously, I use GitHub exclusively... because it's the best tool for the job.
As far as I can tell, Jira sells well to enterprises because it focuses on features that enterprises like (lots of accountability and metrics and charts and graphs and shit, extremely configurable). But it doesn't sell well to developers on the ground because it's slow, its extreme configurability ends up screwing with developer productivity, and it's not a pleasant or easy interface to deal with.<p>I don't foresee the end of Jira any time soon, but I do think that they will go the way of other enterprise bloatware eventually.
Github shouldn't focus on making issues better, for the same reason why Github is eating Jira.<p>Like OP observed, Github is eating <i>despite</i> their investment in issues. If issues was a stronger pulling factor the opposite should be happening.<p>Which means, Github should invest their time and energy more on code side instead of issues. Improving issues will be definitely better but is not the crucial factor.<p>I think it's because the "issues" are ephemeral whereas the code and the community around the code has significantly greater value.
If I'm working solely within a programming team then Github issues works fine for tracking bugs and features. It's when you need to communicate with teams outside of the code that JIRA really shines, everyone in the company has an account - if you need someone to do something then the ticket gets assigned to them!
Atlassian's cloud-hosted JIRA performed so poorly with even an empty account and empty projects that I thought something had to be wrong the two times we tried using it.<p>I imagine it's a problem you can throw resources at when hosting it yourself, but I could not get over how poor the experience was.
And yet Gitlab is eating GitHub according to this other article.. What an empty baseless article.<p>We use Jira (self-hosted) and I can not imagine ever switching to Github Enterprise the featureset doesn't even compare.