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The hosting of open-source projects is free, but the company still needs to make money. They use the open-source portion of their business to drum up paid business. They still need to pay for the servers, coders, and network bandwidth that keep the thing going. I wouldn't get angry when a free service doesn't do everything I ask of it.

They should make their money off of concerts and selling tshirts and merchandise.

I know. That is why I said it. Only my beard is ironic.

The key complains are mostly complaints about common behavior of other users.

1. Ability to force issue submitters to supply more data.
2. Some alternative to +1 issue comment overload.
3. Some way to block pull requests or issues submissions that don't fit certain guidelines.

I strongly disagree with 1 and 3, as they're likely to stop some people from submitting things at all by making it harder to do so.
I too have had crappy issues and sloppy pull requests submitted. I'd rather have those and start working with the person taking the effort to submit them, than have none at all.

2 has some validity to it, for large projects.

I use github, where I manage dozens of open source projects and I contribute to many more.

All 3 of these are real problems, especially #1 "Ability to force issue submitters to supply more data".

Except they're not asking anyone to be "forced". They're asking for customization of the new issue page to prominently display guidelines, and for a template that specific users fill in, rather than the current blank box.

Most users are terrible at reporting problems. They don't tell you which version they're running, which operating system they use, and sometimes they describe an error message rather than copying and pasting the actual text.

It's a huge time waste for the developers who contribute so much open source software for the world to use.

You and everyone will benefit if the tools improve to help the developers who actually create open source software work more productively.

That is why I only use sourceforge. It is completely transparent. As an added bonus I get malware with my downloads.

Github also has enterprise customers that pay money for github's services. 1300 people signed the letter. Why do you assume that none of them are paying customers?

But consider that GitHub would be nothing without the amazing number of free and open projects that it hosts, or without the free and open Git system that runs it.

They can still provide quick and personal support for a cost, or require payment for all support if that's the business model that suits them best. But to say they will provide free support and then not really do it or not really provide insight into the status of the ticket, that can frustrate potential paying customers and those who would have paid for better support from the beginning.

Perhaps they should consider GitHub, which IS open source (except for some Enterprise Edition specific features that they charge for). Users can run GitLab Community Edition themselves on their own machines, or use the hosted gitlab.com version (like github.com).

https://about.gitlab.com/

Have you ever used it?

Bit Bucket works great for me - but I use MercurialHG for revision control because although there's TortioseGit for windows which works very well, it doeesn't exist for Linux - and I find the other Git front ends on Linux a bit cumbersome to use in comparison.
The TortoiseHG GUI absolutely rocks, (pretty similar to TortoiseGit) and is available for both Linux and windows.

Yes, I know you can use the command line tools, but it's a lot nicer having well integrated UI for this stuff when you start dealing with a lot of branches and many repositories.

git is decentralised, in that every copy of the repository is identical in functionality, there isnt a client-server model going on. However, GitHubs advantage over plain git is in its value adds, which include being off site (many people dont have an offsite they can push to) and the PR handling system, the UI improvements, issue tracking etc etc etc.

GitHub doesnt disturb the decentralised aspect of git (although many people treat the GitHub copy as a server to push and pull from, but you are more than able to PR direct to a team member, or involve other off site repositories and only push to GH on occasion), but its value adds are most definitely centralised but most definitely not git.

You can happily use git on its own, on your servers, with no issue.

Github provides a very nice UI running on free, publicly accessible servers, along with related things like issue trackers.

You CAN retrieve web pages via telnet, the HTTP protocol is plain text. Most people prefer a browser such as Firefox or Chrome. Git is the same - a nice UI on top of the open protocol makes things more pleasant.

Also, just as some (most?) people don't even know that it's possible to do "telnet slashdot.org 80" or "lynx http://slashdot.org/", many people don't know how git works either - they've AWLAYS used Github. If you want your project to be accessible to those people, you need to use Github or perhaps a similar site such as gitlab.

Gitolite, Gogs, GitLab all work great on VPSes. Even Amazon's free tier.

This is like complaining to Dice about Slashdot and expecting something to change.

GitHub is GitLab? You could be a /. editor!

I think that github has presence. A lot of employers ask you for your 1) Linkedin profile, and 2) your github url. I've been asked that on 90% of the apps I've sent in (recently landed a new perm gig, thanks), and there's certainly value in that.

I read the letter. Here's a Cliff's Notes for all you guys who don't read because why evenbother:

Some anonymous devs who are so addicted to github that they probably maintain their grocery list there wrote a letter with a bunch of feature requests. These users re mainly bitching about the fact that users of their own projects don't seem to be able to read or follow instructions. Naturally these people are smart enough and forward thinking enough that they have proposed a perfect solution which requires GitHub to do a shitload of work for free despite the fact that the problems will remain because the users still won't read. A surprising number of other developers clearly can't read or think either and as such signed off on this silliness. Naturally, these well meaning individuals posted all of this to yet another github repo despite the fact that there are many better places and formats to use.

Journalists have picked up the story and have jumped so some pretty wild conclusions, proving beyond the shadow of a doubt that they really can't read either.

Don't worry I read it. A bunch of people complained about something. Big deal. People complain about everything. Github is in a situation where they can pick and choose what they care about.

That must mean that git is the only version control system you've ever used.

Mercurial and subversion are both simpler to use, even CVS, but CVS wasn't fully functional. Git feels like it was written by some kernel hacker with no thought for all for the ordinary people that would end up using it.

My friend told me that one of the most popular websites in the world, for developers, doesn't let users sort their list of repositories in any way, or even control the pagination or let users see the entire list of repositories all at once. I told my friend that since repositories are the single most important thing that users need to access from a version control system, this couldn't possibly be true.

Then I visited github.com. I was wrong.

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Developers Frustrated with GitHub Prod For Changes In Bug Reports, Transparency

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