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Developers Frustrated with GitHub Prod For Changes In Bug Reports, Transparency
DeveloperTech reports that a group of GitHub developers have posted an open letter, with nearly 1300 signatures, expressing dissatisfaction with GitHub's processes and policies, and in particular the site's level of transparency. A slice of the letter: "Those of us who run some of the most popular projects on GitHub feel completely ignored by you. We’ve gone through the only support channel that you have given us either to receive an empty response or even no response at all," he wrote. "We have no visibility into what has happened with our requests, or whether GitHub is working on them. Since our own work is usually done in the open and everyone has input into the process, it seems strange for us to be in the dark about one of our most important project dependencies."
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.
http://github.com/gbook/nidb
That is why I only use sourceforge. It is completely transparent. As an added bonus I get malware with my downloads.
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.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
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/
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.
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.