Re: git-scm.com

From: Scott Chacon <schacon@gmail.com>
Date: Jul 26, 2008, 18:33 UTC
Message-ID: <d411cc4a0807261133w6f068176y5c4a23c887da8ed3@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <F3D70DCD-E9A9-42C3-8870-ABB7EECF83CC@wincent.com>

On Sat, Jul 26, 2008 at 8:48 AM, Wincent Colaiuta <win@wincent.com> wrote:

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> El 26/7/2008, a las 7:30, Scott Chacon escribió:
>
>> However, that being said, it's going to be difficult to have Github
>> projects not dominate the list a bit.  The fact is that it hosts far,
>> far more projects than any other single hosting service.  Just in
>> fully public projects, the current stats (from the website pages) are
>> something like this:
>>
>> kernel.org : 475
>> repo.or.cz : 1,553
>> gitorious   : 780
>> github       : 10,560
>>
>> It hosts far more than that if you include private projects, too.  So,
>> if we want to choose totally randomly, it's going to be at least a 5:1
>> ratio between github projects and all other public hosting providers.
>
>
> I think those numbers are pretty meaningless seeing as GitHub encourages
> people to publish "forks" of other projects. Rails, for example, has about
> 270 forks at the time of writing. If I scan the list of popular projects I
> see fork counts like 129, 105, 78 and 78 (again). Are all the forks counted
> in that figure of 10,560 that you count? How many "real" projects are hosted
> there?

Actually, no - I was including forked projects in the repo.or.cz count and _not_ including forks in the github count. The actual apples to apples count is :

Unique Projects:
  repo.or.cz: 1553
  github: 10,560

With Forks:
  repo.or.cz : 1349
  github : 16,021

Again, that is only the free, public projects - there are far more if you include the private projects as well. I understand that the commercial side that is necessitated by that is uncomforting to many people, but it is great for the adoption of Git. Otherwise, every company that wants to use Git professionally, including freelancers and consultants, would have to setup, manage and maintain their own git servers. It should not be a precondition that in order to use Git on a commercial project you either have to be a) a systems administrator capable of setting up and running your own server (and keeping it secure, etc), or b) part of an organization large enough to have a department to take care of that for you. Sure, you and I can do it, and it's easy for us, but that is not true of everyone.

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> I'd like to see the "official" Git homepage as distanced as possible from
> GitHub. They've taken Git (free as in speech, free as in beer) and built a
> closed-source commercial product on top of it -- curiously for something
> which you can do for free yourself anyway -- and as far as I can tell from
> observing this mailing list and watching the commits going into git.git,
> haven't ever contributed _anything_ back to the community. At least within
> the niche that is the Ruby/Rails community, GitHub has basically done a
> hijack job and managed to become synonymous with Git, supplanting it, and
> it's a trend that I wouldn't like to see continue.

Again, very few of us are excellent C programmers - I'm sure you wouldn't want any patches we have to offer there. We have spent considerable time and resources on things like gitcasts (which github sponsors for me), and on libraries and tools like ticgit (which is being included in the next Debian release) and Grit (a ruby/git library that runs Gitorious, and probably most other web-based Git repos), and will be contributing back improvements to ssh libraries that allow for the sort of traffic they have to deal with. They have also been looking to fund further open-source git related projects (in case any of you are interested, btw) :

http://github.com/blog/107-supercharged-ruby-git

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> Just my personal opinion, but GitHub doesn't provoke any warm fuzzy feelings
> here. Quite the contrary. I actively dislike it.
>
> Cheers,
> Wincent

I'm sorry you don't like us, but we're really not that bad. If you're in the SF bay area sometime, send me a note and I'll take you out for a beer and we can discuss what else we can do :)

Scott