An open letter of gratitude to GitHub

I assume this is a response to the &quot;Dear Github&quot; letter. I&#x27;m fairly certain that everyone involved in that letter (including myself), is very appreciative of Github and its impact on OSS. That letter didn&#x27;t feel ungrateful or malicious at all to me, but I sure hope it didn&#x27;t come off that way to others.<p>What I do frequently see with Github, is that they&#x27;ve managed to work their way into almost being beyond reproach. This letter feels like an example of that...Almost like Github needs someone to stand up for it in light of some meanies picking on it.<p>It&#x27;s a good product. We should give credit where credit is due, just don&#x27;t forget it&#x27;s a <i>product</i>. A (by all indications), very profitable product that wants to make money off you. That is its goal and purpose in life, and OSS furthers it. For the record, I think this is a good and healthy relationship, but we shouldn&#x27;t pretend it&#x27;s some FOSS group or non-profit out struggling to provide us with Git hosting.

<i>Before 2007, the way to participate in Open Source was fragmented. Each project had their own workflow, patches circulated in emails, issues were reported in a myriad ways, and if anyone wanted to contribute they had to figure out every project&#x27;s rules.<p>Then, a handful of guys took the challenge to build an awesome platform and as a consequence of their hard work, their platform earned its hegemony.</i><p>Two things stand out in this &quot;thank you Github&quot; open letter:<p>1. While the situation improved tremendously in certain areas the way to participate in Open Source is still very much fragmented. Most of the major open source projects (like Linux, Mozilla, Apache and nginx, to name a few) still have their own workflows, patches are still circulated in emails and issues are still being reported in a myriad ways. Despite of the big visibility GitHub has among the new open source projects we are very far from not being fragmented.<p>2. Before 2007 we had, for instance, SourceForge that back then had also earned its hegemony and, for a series of reasons (one of them being too late to answer to the community wants and needs) lost its way, its hegemony and its user base.<p>There is time for praise and time for hard work and, IMO, the &quot;Dear Github&quot; open letter is a constructive way to call attention to the perceived problems while the &#x27;Dear &quot;Dear Github&quot;&#x27; and this gratitude letter are dismissive to their concerns (the former) and mostly empty praise and adulation (the later).

Posting this right after some good suggestions for the service was given feels like this is saying it is wrong to make suggestions for GitHub because they have done good things.<p>This to me, itself, is wrong.<p>The GitHub issue tracker does need to change. While it&#x27;s great for OSS that projects can get a leg up SOONER, GitHub does introduce it&#x27;s own problems by having some watered down tooling in some areas.<p>I&#x27;m <i>STILL</i> at odds with how it has shifted the equation from <i>discuss</i> to <i>throw code at the problem</i>, which generates extra code review and often, angry committers when their patches are not immediately merged or unwanted, or have to be reworked.<p>GitHub has done some GREAT things because it has built up critical mass, but because it has gotten critical mass and has become a defacto standard, does have some obligation to keep up with demand.<p>This seems passive aggressive to me.

The motivation behind this letter is embarrassing.<p>It&#x27;s as if they were talking to GitHub the thankless FOSS maintainer. Quit mirroring guys. It&#x27;s a for-profit enterprise that would do well to listen to the concerns of its userbase.

The controversy isn&#x27;t black-and-white and I&#x27;m not sure why this letter is painting it that way. GitHub can be a major boon to open source <i>and</i> have core issues which make it incredibly frustrating to work with the service.<p>The dilemma is about the <i>sum of the parts</i>.

&gt; Before 2007, the way to participate in Open Source was fragmented. Each project had their own workflow, patches circulated in emails, issues were reported in a myriad ways, and if anyone wanted to contribute they had to figure out every project&#x27;s rules.<p>And it was much better IMO. Now we have a centralized website, in the hands of a single corporation, which requires nonfree JavaScript for much of the basic functionality[1]. Git was designed to work well with email and has commands built-in to format, send and apply patches. I think anyone who used email for patches seriously will agree that they are largely superior to GitHub&#x27;s pull requests.<p>The free software movement being fragmented is a good thing. GitHub is the land of trends: web developers using Mac OS X who make apps with the latest trendy frameworks like React and Angular (if you think that&#x27;s a misportrayal, look at the first three pages of the most starred repositories on GitHub[2]). These people don&#x27;t care about the free software movement, they&#x27;re just following the current trends, one of which is &quot;Open Source&quot;. But if they really cared about free software, they would not be using Mac OS X or GitHub, which requires you to run nonfree JavaScript code in your browser to report issues, open pull requests, etc.<p>The serious projects that do care about free software don&#x27;t use GitHub.<p>[1]: See Mike Gerwitz&#x27;s <i>GitHub Does Not Value Software Freedom</i>: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mikegerwitz.com&#x2F;about&#x2F;githubbub" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mikegerwitz.com&#x2F;about&#x2F;githubbub</a><p>[2]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;search?q=stars:%3E1&amp;s=stars&amp;type=Repositories" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;search?q=stars:%3E1&amp;s=stars&amp;type=Reposito...</a>

Github makes millions of dollars per year and has a huge amount of users so the product is proven good. While I understand the need to be appreciative of Github, giving the organization a bit of user feedback is not going to hurt them very much. The response assumes that this is written because of the &quot;Dear Github&quot; letter.

I find the current situation with Github very unhealthy, because, even though very unlikely, someone can literally pull off the plug of open-source. Not all, but a great part. If such thing happened, be it with government intervention or some crazy attack towards github, it would make us lose a lot time migrating to other solutions. It would be like a Great Barbaric Invasion of Open Source, where everyone migrated to Bitbucket or private solutions, sort of an OSS incastellation.

&gt; Before 2007, the way to participate in Open Source was fragmented.<p>Um...ever hear of <i>Source Forge</i>? Yeah, before 2007 there was another OSS hegemony. It failed to meet its users needs. It was replaced.<p>So it goes.

A case study in passive aggressive behavior. Well done!

such a letter should include a note of thanks to torvalds for creating git in the first place.

I just want to point out accepting pull requests for signatures is a bad idea -- someone is going to lose the race and rebase over and over if unlucky, assuming many people are going to sign this. :-)

&gt; Before 2007, the way to participate in Open Source was fragmented. Each project had their own workflow, patches circulated in emails, issues were reported in a myriad ways, and if anyone wanted to contribute they had to figure out every project&#x27;s rules.<p>Don&#x27;t you still have to figure out every project&#x27;s rules? Being on Github does not impose coding guidelines, testing requirements, documentation requirements, contributor license agreement policies, project management and governance system, code review process, dispute resolution process, and so on.<p>&gt; Nowadays doing Open Source is infinitely easier thanks to you, GitHub. You&#x27;ve provided the tools and the social conventions to make those days a thing of the past.<p>Nearly every time over the past 30+ years that I&#x27;ve wanted to fix a bug or add a feature to some open source thing I&#x27;ve been using, and been thwarted, it was never figuring out the workflow, or patch procedure, or issue reporting that did me in, or figuring out the project&#x27;s rules.<p>The big problem has usually been one or both of (1) the project has a bazillion files and it is not at all clear from the meager documentation and haphazard directory organization which are for the thing itself and which are for ancillary tools, and (2) it gets build errors that I can&#x27;t resolve.

I comment what I wrote on the &quot;Dear GitHub&quot; post.<p>Shouldn&#x27;t we (the OSS community) have an open source, roll-your-own version of something like GitHub? Like, the repo-management equivalent to a phpBB or a Wiki or a Wordpress.<p>We do have the separate components, though maybe the hard part is to glue them together. But still, it is something what would be worth the time and effort, wouldn&#x27;t it?

Sorry, but as a free software advocate, this really bugs me.<p>&gt;Before 2007, the way to participate in Open Source was fragmented. Each project had their own workflow, patches circulated in emails, issues were reported in a myriad ways, and if anyone wanted to contribute they had to figure out every project&#x27;s rules.<p>And now we have a monoculture. Monoculture is bad, folks.<p>This letter paints pre-2007 as something bad because everyone used their own infrastructure for their projects, but this is actually a really great thing. It meant that more projects had autonomy over the infrastructure that they rely on. So, rather than needing to beg a for-profit corporation for features that they want, they could actually change the software they used to work for them. Monoculture is more convenient for the masses, but trading freedom for convenience is a bad deal in the long-term.<p>The web is becoming more centralized every day, to the detriment of all Internet users whether they know it or not, and when SaaS apologists thank GitHub for helping it makes me upset. A federated, free software source code hosting tool could solve the barrier to entry problem without relinquishing control to a company who ultimately does not care about you.<p>And how about GitHub&#x27;s ToS? Has anyone read it? Probably not. I didn&#x27;t when I signed up. Did you know that changes to the ToS can happen any time and without notice? Even if you did read the terms, by agreeing to them, you agree that they can completely change them. Who would reasonably agree to that if it were not buried in legalese? You also surrender your rights to a fair trial by defending and indemnifying GitHub. For further reading, see &quot;Why I don&#x27;t support or contribute to GitHub repositories&quot; [0] or read the ToS for yourself.<p>Now, on a technical note: GitHub encourages bad development practices via hooking people on their web interface. The Pull Request interface is the biggest offender. It encourages unclean commit history because it&#x27;s scary to rewrite the patch set of a pull request. If you rebase fixup commits, you have to force push the changes. You cannot even do the safer route of deleting the remote branch and pushing the new branch because GitHub will automatically close the pull request with no way to re-open it. So, most people just pile on fixup commits that never get squashed into decent patches. And that&#x27;s not all! The Pull Request interface makes it difficult to comment on individual patches by encouraging reviewers to look only at the aggregate diff of all patches. This leads to lower patch quality because it leads to a bunch of terrible patches that look okay squashed together to enter the Git repository. When your patch history sucks, it reduces the utility of blaming and bisecting to find issues or otherwise learn about the code. Reviewing patch sets on a mailing list is, despite being &quot;low tech&quot;, a much better experience for me. I&#x27;m not forced to use a web interface, I can just use the email client of my choosing, and Git already knows how to do an email-based workflow. There&#x27;s a reason why a huge project like Linux still does patch review via email.<p>In conclusion, GitHub is a company that receives almost nothing but praise. Most criticism is dismissed because they have a nice UX for a certain group of users (not me). I think GitHub has harmed the free and open source software community both ethically, legally, and technically. I no longer use GitHub for hosting my personal projects. I write all of this in the hopes that more people will recognize this and work on real replacements for GitHub.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wubthecaptain.eu&#x2F;articles&#x2F;why-i-dont-support-github.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wubthecaptain.eu&#x2F;articles&#x2F;why-i-dont-support-github....</a>

One time an Atom user posted a question on the Atom editor forum. He said he loved Atom and wanted to donate. It was a bit complex to explain that they would be contributing to a large corporation, GitHub. I thought this was symbolic of the confusing relationship GitHub has with open software.

That user seriously gonna merge any incoming PR? What a great person with hell lot of time.

I&#x27;m not totally agree with both letters, just for personal reasons, but this is not the point.<p>Overall GitHub is a cultural place where anyone can improve his personal skills, expecially in computer programming, thanks to the huge code present on it. I have romantic vision of Github. For instance, guys from poor parts of the world can study great code with this site.<p>Yes it is a company with investors and probably it made some wrong decisions, and if we want we can choose other services, but today sorry for the repetition Github represents an open and huge cultural Hub.

I recommend, dont send any pull requests. On of the useless project on Github. How he gonna merge 1000s of PR - and PR to just add a name - seriously? This is just waste of time &amp; resources.

When GitHub came along it was an improvement over what was available back then. But that doesn&#x27;t mean it&#x27;s perfect or that it can stop evolving. Yes, thank you GitHub for what you achieved in our community so far, but dear GitHub don&#x27;t stop and keep moving forward.

If you want to thank them, just be a customer. This is unnecessary and seems like it devalues any criticism, especially considering the other recent letter. They are not some sacred thing to be protected.

I can&#x27;t stand brown-nosing...

Did anyone else notice that the list of signers on this letter is entirely male?

Can we PLEASE stahp already with the &quot;open letters&quot;!?

Hmm so the response of the GitHub is to post a single generic response of &quot;we will look into it&quot; and then spend time and resources arranging this marvel of a letter.

What a nice slap to so called community leaders.

Since corporations are people too under US law, I guess someone wanted to make sure it feels good about itself.....;)