LWN: Comments on "GitHub finally raises funding (GigaOm)"

GitHub finally raises funding (GigaOm)

smitty_one_each — Fri, 13 Jul 2012 16:27:40 +0000

I am a GitHub customer. The convenience of having a little private repository on the web where I can stash some code I'm too embarrassed to make public is a Good Thing.

GitHub finally raises funding (GigaOm)

nix — Wed, 11 Jul 2012 14:18:35 +0000

Perhaps it's just that SourceForge's user interface, even post-upgrade, makes me want to stick cocktail sticks into my eyes. Its mailing list archive interface in particular is unimaginably awful: I've never seen *anything* worse.

GitHub finally raises funding (GigaOm)

bronson — Wed, 11 Jul 2012 01:51:29 +0000

That's not sufficient explanation. SourceForge exists today, now that the need is painfully clear, and still nobody uses it. (hyperbole of course: lots of people use it but nothing compared to GitHub).

GitHub finally raises funding (GigaOm)

skvidal — Tue, 10 Jul 2012 20:22:54 +0000

Yes, that's what he said.

GitHub finally raises funding (GigaOm)

b7j0c — Tue, 10 Jul 2012 20:10:42 +0000

i don't think the failure of sourceforge really says anything at all about github. sourceforge didn't have a dvcs that had become a social phenomenon. sourceforge didn't have any community features. sourceforge also addressed a developer market which is a fraction of the size of todays, and did so at a time when there wasn't clear acceptance of web tools in the workflow. in short: sourceforge was too early.

GitHub finally raises funding (GigaOm)

karim — Tue, 10 Jul 2012 18:17:14 +0000

I (and I suspect many others) use github because it's a git that just works with no fuss. *That* it does and does well. It's "forking" feature is nice, but nothing I couldn't just do by cloning someone else tree. Sourceforge did many of the things you state and it still got so far. Github embodies the current open development paradigm. If past is prelude, though, these things tend to expire at some point.

GitHub finally raises funding (GigaOm)

b7j0c — Tue, 10 Jul 2012 18:09:43 +0000

there is a HUGE opportunity to unify online development tools, and github actually has a shot if they can put the money to good use, there are many data islands here to be bridged

they've got source repos covered. git is the industry leader, and github has established themselves as the de facto public repo site

the github bug tracker is terrible, but with some serious work, it could become good. now you can have your repo and bug tracker finally united and ditch the standalone bug tracker you are using (jira etc)

now integrate project scheduling, milestone planning and design (balsamiq etc). if it all works and doesn't suck, you have a massive win over using N different services that don't talk to each other. services like sprint.ly and trello vanish because having a data island that doesn't integrate with everything else has little value, regardless of cool ui tweaks

atlassian also seems to be making a run at integrating online dev tools into one location...it will be interesting to see how it plays out. one thing seems certain to me - the standalone sites that only perform one part of the development process in isolation (many i have mentioned above) will vanish

GitHub finally raises funding (GigaOm)

hummassa — Tue, 10 Jul 2012 17:25:15 +0000

I parsed it as [1] "web applications that run the backend in all/many operating systems"... not as [2] "web applications that will run the frontend in all/many operating systems" because [2] is way easier to attain than [1], and your example is more of an exception than a rule.

GitHub finally raises funding (GigaOm)

sjj — Tue, 10 Jul 2012 17:07:48 +0000

That's what you think. NetApp's web-based management console (OnCommand) graciously lets you use it over the web IFF you use something like Firefox 3.* on Windows. Support tells you with a straight face that it's not supported to use a web application from Linux.

Oh how I love enterprise software by and for megacorps.

GitHub finally raises funding (GigaOm)

jonabbey — Tue, 10 Jul 2012 15:50:37 +0000

Well done, GitHub.

GitHub finally raises funding (GigaOm)

nye — Tue, 10 Jul 2012 15:23:49 +0000

>> such as web applications for different operating systems.

> I giggled at this. Web applications were made so that they don't care about operating systems. If you target "different operating systems", there's no need to make it a web application. You make it an... application.

I wonder if something's been lost in translation here. Anyone know what they're really talking about?

Video /camera/

tialaramex — Tue, 10 Jul 2012 10:06:47 +0000

In case anybody else is as confused as I was, khim seems to mean a video /camera/ not a recorder (video recorder was the widespread term for a video cassette recorder, and a less widespread term for several logical successors in that niche including DVD recorders and PVRs)

There isn't an equivalent phenomenon in version control in my opinion, or rather there is, but it was with us from the outset. The clueless will copy a few files to another directory, or zip everything up once a week and count this as "version control" and feel glad they didn't have to learn those over-complicated tools they see discussed on sites like StackOverflow.

GitHub finally raises funding (GigaOm)

realnc — Tue, 10 Jul 2012 07:41:13 +0000

> such as web applications for different operating systems.

I giggled at this. Web applications were made so that they don't care about operating systems. If you target "different operating systems", there's no need to make it a web application. You make it an... application.

Github and git's user base

khim — Tue, 10 Jul 2012 07:16:25 +0000

It's just shows that professional tools and customer's tools follow different paths. Git is professional tool, it's not directed to Joe Average. Thus it was enough to create robust core and pretty pictures were added by other people later (a lot of git users don't need and don't use them at all). In user-facing world hype is everything and real capabilities are of lesser consequence.

This phenomenon is observed not just in software. Think video recorders. The professional ones try to boost the thing that matters (optical resolution, cross-talk reduction, etc). Size of the matrix is the deciding factor. The customer-oriented ones talk about megapixels (which can only be used to produce megabytes of noise when they are not supported by appropriate optical resolution), image "enhancers" (which actually destroy the quality - and often can not even be disabled), etc. Recent trend is to portray mobiles are adequate replacement for the video recorder. Sure, mobile wins on one important point: availability. When you need it mobile is always there and video recorder is almost never there. But everything else... there are no comparison. Yet hype machine is in full swing and tries to sell phones as a replacement not for customer cam, but for professional one! Sure, these adverts will never convince a professional to buy the phone as a replacement for professional video recorder - but Joe Average looks on the cheap "tool of a professional" and reaches for his wallet! Will we see something similar WRT VCS where people will try to bill wiki as replacement for a proper VCS? Who knows...

GitHub finally raises funding (GigaOm)

artem — Tue, 10 Jul 2012 05:37:55 +0000

You mean, something like this - https://github.com/ajaxorg/cloud9 ?

GitHub finally raises funding (GigaOm)

leif81 — Tue, 10 Jul 2012 02:01:15 +0000

The next obvious frontier for github is a full blown web IDE. Set up web IDE once for the project and invite participants. Barrier of entry just got a whole lot lower.

Github and git's user base

pr1268 — Tue, 10 Jul 2012 00:16:12 +0000

It's interesting to note that Microsoft is using git, at least according to both the GitHub site and git-scm.com. (Most of the other companies/projects shown using git are either Linux-friendly or OS-agnostic [except Netflix, sigh].)

That has to be pretty good validation for a SCM originally created by Linus for managing the kernel's source code, and for one whose man page reads, "git - the stupid content tracker". ;-)

Just an observation from the gallery...

GitHub finally raises funding (GigaOm)

louie — Tue, 10 Jul 2012 00:15:16 +0000

"Nothing to offer enterprises" besides, you know, SourceForge Enterprise Edition ;)

GitHub finally raises funding (GigaOm)

geofft — Mon, 09 Jul 2012 23:16:38 +0000

Well, GitHub has a product they can sell to enterprises -- there's no reason they can't be as profitable as Perforce, ClearCase, etc. have been (or for a slightly more current example, Atlassian). SourceForge doesn't have anything to offer a company.

GitHub also has a lot of the people doing development of git itself (another notable difference from SourceForge), so the team's ability to come up with a different product that is highly profitable is much more clearly there, even if github.com never becomes profitable.

GitHub finally raises funding (GigaOm)

karim — Mon, 09 Jul 2012 22:40:29 +0000

I've got to be missing it, but I fail to see the VC-type cash liquidity exit on this one. SourceForge was there before and went through something similar. Somehow, it seems startups (and their funders) generally seem to confuse success in responding to a niche need with ability to do a 10x exit.