Re:Responsible Open Source Code Parenting
by StrawberryFrog on Thursday December 31, 2009 @01:13PM
(#1024675)
Full marks for getting to the core of what I was asking. It seems almost like a year ago nobody had heard of github; and now there are people who don't seem to have heard of anything else.
Not to take away from GitHub being good, but I'm asking what makes it seems that good.
I put a new code on Github and it seems all right. But I'm not going to move code that's been hosted elsewhere for several years even if something slightly better comes along. Consistency is a virtue.
I'm pretty sure the question was meant a bit more loosely, not as a direct challenge to someone's post here, but to the general prevalence of a meme that roughly fits that description. I certainly wouldn't suggest grepping for that phrase as a method of getting a feel for its virulence out "in the wild".
Instead, look or tacit assumptions, misattribution's of value, and conspicuous omission of alternatives. I guess good, old-fashioned "reading between the lines" is what I'm suggesting.
A pretty dramatic illustration popped up on my RSS reader this morning. Someone submitted a HN article with the title "Jeff Atwood's open source contributions", which was nothing but a link to http://github.com/codinghorror - which currently shows zero projects. It was quickly flagged here at HN, but it lives on over at Reddit.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1023696
The tacit assumption here is that if Jeff has zero repositories at GitHub, then he has made zero open source code contributions.
I don't mean to detract from how cool it is that your product is so successful. (Kudos!) But its fans often have a creepy blind spot to alternatives, in my opinion.