Github

Created: Nov 14, 2023 | B quality | Mid importance

I think Github is great, I love it. I feel like it keeps getting better and better. I like how all the "enterprise" features stay out of your way and are completely unnecessary if you're just a personal lone hacker working on your own and other's code. To be clear, I am not in any way opposed to using Github.

I find it interesting, however, that most of the open source, privacy thumping, anti-corporate, free software crusaders I know still use Github. Githubs hedgemony is so complete that it is still unexpected, for me, when I come across a repo that is hosted somewhere other than Github. For example, for my Bandcamp alternative site, I'm using Faircamp as a backend, which is hosted on something called "Codeberg". I've also seen people self host their repos using tools like Gitea. I know that at least GitLab is somewhat popular. But still, day to day, as I find and read about and contribute to code, that code is on Github.

I also find it interesting that Github kind of made git the default Version Control System. I mean, 20 years ago we definitely knew we could do better than CVS, and there was Subversion. I even remember when there were Subversion <=> git import and compatibility layers. But with the popularity of Github, it seems that git just ate the world. Mercurial (hg) came out around the same time if I remember correctly, and offered a different opinion on how to have distributed source control in federated repos, but it didn't catch on the way git did. It's kind of like the killer app completely made the tool. Sort of like Ruby on Rails, where no one would have ever cared about the Ruby without the Rails.



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