State of the GitHub: Chris Kelly Does the Numbers

I talked with Chris Kelly of GitHub at last week's LinuxCon about GitHub. He's got interesting things to say about the demographics and language choices on what has become in short order (just six years) one of the largest repositories of code in the world, and one with an increasingly sophisticated front-end, and several million users. Not all of the code on GitHub is open source, but the majority is -- handy, when that means an account is free as in beer, too. (And if you're reading on the beta or otherwise can't view the video below, here's the alternative video link.)

Comments

can we get a non video recap?

[Anonymous Coward]

can we get a non video recap?

Re:can we get a non video recap?

[i kan reed]

Hide/Show Transcript

It does this:
$("#sdtranscript").toggle();

Re:can we get a non video recap?

[EthanBernard]

Timothy Lord: Chris, can you explain your role with GitHub?

Chris Kelly: Yes, so you know, I do all of our outreach work. So, it’s us going out into the world, talking to people and getting them involved in their communities and really trying to amplify the work that’s already being done in the OpenSource world and how GitHub can support and promote that.

Timothy Lord: GitHub started obviously with Git, talk a little bit about the progression of going from a particular organization tool to having how many repos right now?

Chris Kelly: We have about 18 million public repos currently and we’ve got 6 million active users with accounts, so it’s gotten pretty big. So Git is what, 10 years old next year and so we started with that. It was just – the founders were really are getting involved with Git and needed a solution for solving like sending patches around via email problem, which was kind of a nightmare and so started building GitHub for themselves and that’s how the company has built itself all the way up for the last six years is building the tools to solve the problems that we have and we are all software developers and so it’s grown that way.

Timothy Lord: And it’s not like there is a lot of advertising that goes around saying to use GitHub; GitHub has grown pretty organically?

Chris Kelly: Yeah, so a lot of it has to do with our outreach. Being at conferences, meeting people, and really understanding what their problems are and really just being supportive of the community and then I think that’s the best way to really engage with any kind of audience, any company that’s interested in engaging with the developers is go be developers and go be part of the community. You can’t sell to that audience, you can just be a part of that audience and that really works.

Timothy Lord: Talk about some of the big projects that are on GitHub right now and what sort of scope, we’ve got one aspect of the scope of the entire site is number of users, but talk about some projects and how many commits you see happening?

Chris Kelly: Oh, I’d have to look at some graphs for number of commits. But we have really large projects coming on to GitHub all the time. Microsoft just put Typesafe on to GitHub recently. We’ve got the Rails project, is one of a classic example that the number of commits spiked the second I think Rail moved onto GitHub and started doing the development cycle. So we’re finding that a lot of open source projects, very large ones are moving under GitHub and seeing a lot of adoption and engagement from the community because we think we make it so much easier to both communicate about the project as well as contribute back to it.

Timothy Lord: Talking about the actual development because obviously people use GitHub as their own tool for developing software of their own. What’s the development work like for the software that runs GitHub?

Chris Kelly: So we used GitHub to do everything basically. So it manages all components of the way we work, so between GitHub itself and our open source chat system Hubot that sits on top of Campfire and Slack and HipChat. We can do all things you have in the very open and so that’s what we built GitHub for, is to try to change companies to start working more and more open and so we do it in the open, every project and every product feature gets talked about really publicly and everyone can contribute to that conversation. Everything that happens in our office, the events we put on, all happen in GitHub repos. The planning of this conference and showing up here is done in the GitHub repo. We do literally everything, GitHub repos with issues and port requests, because we think it’s the right way to work and so we’re really kind of stressing the way GitHub can function by doing that and then going on to the world and talking to other companies and that want to change the way their development cycles go and so that’s wha

Thankfully...

[dnebin]

I'm not using beta, cuz I don't want to see live videos in the news feed, in case anyone @slashdot/@dice even cares...

Thankfully...

[viperidaenz]

Except if you were using beta, the video wouldn't show because beta doesn't support videos. Or the transcript for that matter.

business model

[Eric Smith]

Not all of the code on GitHub is open source, but the majority is -- handy, when that means an account is free as in beer, too.

I'm not privy to any details of GitHub's finances or business model, but most likely it's a good thing that there are non-open-source projects using GitHub, because that's probably what's paying for the free open source use. I've recommended to several clients developing proprietary software the use of GitHub rather than running their own in-house repositories, because the interface is easier for them to use and they don't need as much in-house expertise to manage things. Because Git is distributed, they could of course do both, or easily transition away from GitHub later, and that's a selling point.

Re:business model

[m00sh]

Not all of the code on GitHub is open source, but the majority is -- handy, when that means an account is free as in beer, too.

I'm not privy to any details of GitHub's finances or business model, but most likely it's a good thing that there are non-open-source projects using GitHub, because that's probably what's paying for the free open source use. I've recommended to several clients developing proprietary software the use of GitHub rather than running their own in-house repositories, because the interface is easier for them to use and they don't need as much in-house expertise to manage things. Because Git is distributed, they could of course do both, or easily transition away from GitHub later, and that's a selling point.

Wasn't the whole point of git to not have central servers and such? That you could use a directory or any other source as a repo instead of centralized server repos.

Re:business model

[DMUTPeregrine]

No, it was that any of the clones would have the full version history of the entire source tree. You still want a primary repo from which you make your releases, but all the developers can have a copy of the whole thing. They can also make changes to their local clones when offline, then merge all the changes later. Anyone can branch from any point, and the whole thing works on snapshots of the repo instead of sets of incremental changes to each file.

People use the Beta interface for Slashdot?

[turp182]

Really? What are the stats on Classic vs. Beta pageview counts?

Beta = no video

[Anonymous Coward]

And if you're reading on the beta or otherwise can't view the video below

No video clutter - finally, now I can say something good about Beta.

Yeah, so

[dbc]

Yeah, so, I start almost everything I say with "Yeah, so,..."

social network / free webhosting

[globaljustin]

GitHub has become a facebook.com alternative for the 1337 haxxor set and alot of people use it for free hosting to put up a personal site

that's my experience anyway...the idea is great, a website that hosts code for coding projects...but the whole abstraction layer of calling it a 'Git' still irks me...it's not a 'git' it's a computer file that contains code...

any frequent uses of GitHub care to comment? what does /. think?

Re:social network / free webhosting

[m00sh]

GitHub has become a facebook.com alternative for the 1337 haxxor set and alot of people use it for free hosting to put up a personal site

that's my experience anyway...the idea is great, a website that hosts code for coding projects...but the whole abstraction layer of calling it a 'Git' still irks me...it's not a 'git' it's a computer file that contains code...

any frequent uses of GitHub care to comment? what does /. think?

No the git comes from the fact that Linus is a git.

Re:social network / free webhosting

[kiddygrinder]

i have no idea what you're talking about, i download code off of it and use it, it's a hub of git repositories... am i missing something?

Re:social network / free webhosting

[preflex]

No the git comes from the fact that Linus is a git.

Precisely.
"I'm an egotistical bastard, and I name all my projects after myself. First 'Linux', now 'git'."

Re:social network / free webhosting

[globaljustin]

right right...

but I'm asking if y'all think GitHub is becoming facebook for haxxorz

Yes, but not for the reason you think

[Anonymous Coward]

A central "master server" is stilll useful from an organizational point of view.

The point behind git is that it's not special for any reason other than organization. In case of a problem (technical, political, maintainer disappears, whatever), there's no technical factor preventing you from failing over to another one very easily.

In all technical respects, the repository on my laptop is just as good as the central server. I don't have to be on line to examine history or make commits.

This also facilitates forking: I can clone a project and work on my fork with no special permissions.

In fact, a while ago there was a big problem (security breach) at kernel.org and the Linux kernel did do its official distribution from github for a few weeks.

Re:antagonistic abstract wacky names

[kiddygrinder]

hate to tell you this but all words are just made up

version control program != the code itself

[globaljustin]

ok...thanks for the reply...

download code off of it and use it, it's a hub of git repositories

now we can converse...see...what is a 'git'...as in GitHub...it's a "hub" for "gits"...

this is a 'git': http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G...

it's is a software program that is used as **version control for making other software programs**

the version control system is not the program/code you are making...they are two separtate things completely...theoretically a text editor, discipline, and good filenames is all you need for "version control"

GitHub is a storage for *code*...not just "gits"....and we all know code is just alpha/numberic

so, in practice, as I said, it seems GitHub is becoming a kind of facebook for the 1337 haxxor set, b/c people can use it to show off their personal coding projects and use GitHub's space to host their own website

so the whole "git" thing is confusing because of how they bandy about words with overlapping meanings...but that's not the main point...my main question is about if others think GitHub is the facebook for haxxorz

Re:version control program != the code itself

[kiddygrinder]

what's software? is it soft? does it "ware" out. what's a program? am i watching TV? you're just bitching because you don't like the name, it's just as clear as the naming process for a billion other concepts. i hate the idea that you're down on people for hosting their person projects on there, what's your problem with people having a good place to host their stuff? i use projects hosted on there pretty much every day, do you work at sourceforge or something?

GitHub facebook for haxxorz

[globaljustin]

...but that's not the main point...my main question is about if others think GitHub is the facebook for haxxorz

i put my point in the headline so you wouldn't miss it...and copied above the text from my previous comment (which you responded to)

my question...this whole time...has been if others think GitHub is becoming a defacto social network