When Microsoft bought GH it was already the most popular forge by far, which is why it was bought in the first place.
> But then who made it critical over the intervening years? That's on us.
That's blaming the victim. The vast majority of the opensource projects were hosted on GH since before Microsoft's acquisition. I remember back in 2018 when my team made the decision to move from bitbucket to GitHub, the main consideration was the platform quality but also the community we were getting access to.
I’ve had the same thought about crypto. The anonymous p2p financial system where the only realistic way for the average person to participate is to send photocopies of government issued IDs to one of the few remaining large exchanges who will happily provide any government with your identity and a paper trail of your actions upon request.
Git is designed so that you always have the full code you're working on copied to your local machine. Github being down for a short time from time to time should be only a minor inconvenience.
Sure, but GitHub is much more than a git repository. Otherwise companies wouldn't pay for it.
As the centralized git repo, it allows devs to collaborate, by exchanging code/features, tracking issues and doing code reviews.
It also provides dependencies management ("Package") and code building/shipping (GH Actions).
Sure, if you usually spend one day or more writing code locally, you're fine.
But if you work on multiple features a day, an outage, even of 30 minutes, can have a big impact on a company because of the multiplier effect on all the people affected.
> If outages [...] stop whole companies in their tracks
They should fucking learn how to code because no one in their right mind would depend on such an external service that can be easily replaced by cloning repos locally or using proxies like Artifactory. Even worse when you know that Microsoft is behind it.
Yes, most companies don't have good practices and suck at maintaining a basic infrastructure, but it doesn't mean GitHub is the center of the internet. It's only a stupid git server with PRs.
How on earth did anyone believe Microsoft was different this time?
There's a whole generation on HN who came up after Microsoft's worst phase, and have spent the last five years defending MS on this very forum.
They're convinced that any bad thing Microsoft does is a "boomer" grudge, and will defend MS to the end.
I hope I'm never so weak-minded that I tie my identity and allegiance to a trillion-dollar company. Or any company that I haven't founded, for that matter.
Even though Git is decentralised, people like having a simple client-server model for version control. So with Github being the most funded free Git hosting service it grew to being the biggest. They also built out the extra services on top of git hosting, the issue tracker, CI/CD, discussion board, integrated wiki, github-pages, etc.
I would say all of those things were present before the acquisition, enough that Microsoft itself started to use the site for its own open source code hosting.
If you travel back to 2018 and ask random software engineers "are git and github developed and owned by the same company", a fair number of them would say yes, just like today.
I am of the opinion that it wasn't critical infra, but it was at least unique infra. Similar to LinkedIn, which MS acquired. It wasn't that LI was critical it was because it was unique.
And since the acquisition, they have built it out to be critical. Similar to what META did with Instagram. Instagram wasn't critical when META purchased it, but now it is the cornerstone of any business's online presence as it has been built out.
If GitHub were to close tomorrow, you'd lose out on the social part temporarily, but there are effectively dozens of providers and solutions that could replace it.
The same could not be said for Figma, where if lost, you'd end up looking at the company that tried to buy it. That's what those laws are for.
No, Adobe/Figma was stopped because it would severely reduce competition in a market where there are already very few relevant players. That's all they can block.
Critical piece of tech infrastructure. Which is absolutely is.
When GitHub goes down, the company I work at is pretty much kneecapped for the duration of the outage. If you’re in the middle of a PR, waiting for GitHub actions, doing work in a codespace, or just need to pull/fetch/push changes before you can work, you’re just stuck!
It's probably easy to self-host Gitlab for a small team working on a limited number of projects.
It's definitely not easy to self-host Gitlab for hundreds of devs working of hundreds of projects.
Especially if you use it as your CI/CD pipeline, because now you have to also manage your workers.
Why company chose to pay GitHub instead of self-hosting their Gitlab instance?
For the same reason they pay Microsoft for their emails instead of self-hosting them.
Among other things, a CDN. If it were to take a sustained outage, lots of important online systems would stop working shortly thereafter. And I’m not talking about developer tools; bigger sites/apps than you think are reliant on GH being up. Stupid to do that, sure, but widespread.
They were allowed to buy it because GitHub is not licensed with an FOSS licence. How on earth did we all settle on such a propietary piece of tech infrastructure? No wonder Microsoft bought it.
