alt Hacker NewsLots of apologia for Github here. Aside from the fact that defending a billion-dollar company is a bit strange; especially one that is steward to the the overwhelming majority of open-source software.
Maybe that's good-will doing the work? For me it's always been a sour pill to swallow that I have to buy in to a large companies internal politics and practices in order to work on projects I love. I don't feel like I owe them anything.
Especially if they can't hold up their end of the deal.
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Defending a multi-trillion dollar company you mean (Microsoft).
I think it depends if you pay them money. If you do, then you should indeed have strong expectations towards them and hold them accountable. If they provide a free service to you, then it's still reasonable to feel upset, but at the same time you get what you pay for.
I'm surprised at how little the perception of GitHub changed post-acquisition. Coupled with WSL, it almost balanced things for a lot of people and put Microsoft back in the "benefit of the doubt" column. This is undoing a lot of that, on top of the operational costs. Suddenly the bad press is more noticeable and harder to ignore.
there are two groups of people willing to die defending [billion-dollar company]: HN users and Nintendo fans
> Maybe that's good-will doing the work?
Of course. GitHub has been an enormous gift to the open source community. Arguably more than Git itself. They deserve a lot of good will.
I think its the fact that people have used the software for so long that they feel emotional to it (Hashimoto crying tears of sadness when he decided to move ghostty away from github) and there is completely nothing wrong about it as we are emotional human beings.
But, you are right in the sense that, Github has failed to accept its part of the deal which is actually to just be a usable place. People HAVE previously tolerated so much AI slop and slowness in github's UI just because of its reliability but this downtime is like the Github's achilles heel.
At some point, I recommend people to accept this and move to more healthier alternatives, there is also an momentum. For example, the only reason I joined github was that I wanted to join codeberg but so many of projects used github and involved sign in with github that I finally gave in into github and I had thought that codeberg is so good but nobody is gonna come here because of the network effects but the tide is turning and I hope more people look into codeberg and healthier alternatives.
> Aside from the fact that defending a billion-dollar company is a bit strange
More than a bit strange. This is an HNism that I'll never get. Why would you go to the comment section anywhere to passionately try to defend the honor of a trillion dollar company, unless 1. you're being paid to astroturf or 2. you own that company's stock? Satya Nadella isn't going to read a post here and say, "Gosh, how nice of that commenter! I'm going to send him some Microsoft stock as a show of appreciation for him defending us online!" I don't think I'll ever understand company-fanboys.
Let me ask the question in reverse: what do you have against them such that the fellow human beings struggling to maintain their operations don’t deserve even a modicum of kindness, respect, and good will? Are you unable to separate the business from the hard working people behind it?
It’s not like they don’t know that people like us are counting on them: they recognize that their service is the “dial tone” for much of the world’s software development capability. They are keenly aware of the impact.
What happened to #hugops? Does it go out the window because those people happen to work for a company you don’t like?