Contentless, illogical mince.

GitHub clearly contributes a fair bit to open source - not only their own projects, but the free hosting for open source projects. You have no basis for this accusation, and frankly we are all stupider for having read it.

Well I made 2 claims..

1 Claim was that Github is not a open source company, and they are not. Their core business is not open source, yes they have some side projects that are, but so does MS, I do not believe anyone is going to say MS is a "open source company"

the second claim I made is they are a threat to free software, I used free software here for a reason, free software and open source are different.

GitHub may support some Open Source things, they do NOT support free software.

Tom Preston-Werners infamous post on open sourcing only some things (http://tom.preston-werner.com/2011/11/22/open-source-everyth...) Is a key piece of evidence to prove this.

Git hubs general actions over the years show they do not support free software at all, and have limited support for Open Source software.

They are classic Free Software leaches, using and abusing free software not for the ethical reasons around free software but to advance their profit center

See I am support free software for ethical reasons, not monetary reasons.

That is with out even getting into the MASSIVE issue that is having all of these open source projects on a SINGLE platform. Unless you think github is "too big to fail" which I can assure you it is not

Terribly sorry for this rubbish reply, but here you go: http://i.imgur.com/ueRIgtq.png

I love it, and it's perfect for when you want to say something witty like FUD or D&D, but can't justify it. Now with CIM, I can!

What? Github employs members of the Rails core team including Aaron Patterson. They literally pay for open source software development.

I'm sure they employ direct maintainers/contributors to other open source projects as well.

Are they paying him to help make an open source alternative to github? If not, then it's not really relevant.

They are actively working against open source tooling for software development by developing features only for their closed platform.

Gitlab is a much better example of a company that fully embraces open source.

GitLab does not fully embrace Open Source.

GitLab Enterprise Edition does not have an open source license. Since GitLab.com runs GitLab EE, their two (presumably) primary sources of revenue (EE licenses and GitLab.com paid accounts) come from non-open source software.

But: it's still fair to call GitLab as a company way more Open Source than GitHub. All of their development happens out in the open, the vast majority of their codebase is Open Source, and the source code for GitLab EE is even made available.

This is a spectrum, not black and white.

And you believe that makes them an "Open Source Company"

To me in order to be a Open Source company your primary product must itself be Open Source.

RedHat as an example... RHEL is open source

GitLab.. GitLab is open source

These are open source companies

Hiring a few devs for work on some side projects that are open source does not make one an Open Source Company

If they open GitHub Core then they can claim to be a open source company

Aaron Patterson, who I'll continue to use as an example, works full time on Rails while being paid by Github. Rails is not a side project for him.

Also as mentioned elsewhere in this thread, Github has published plenty of open source software. Electron, Atom, resque, and updates to git itself.

It is a side project for the company, as are all the other projects you mentioned

As I clearly stated, GitHub can not be a Open Source company simply because they hired some devs to work on Open Source

Do you consider Microsoft to be a Open Source Company?

The Atom editor is widely used and was a major inspiration for VS Code. Electron, which is a GitHub project is also used for countless other projects.

"major inspiration for VS Code"

Which is a Microsoft product, and Microsoft is the inventor of EEE. Ergo, GitHub is complicit in an EEE attempt. Q.E.D. Case closed.

/s

So anyone who releases open-source code, that Microsoft might use in another open-source project is complicit in EEE? wow.

My apologies; I should have made the "/s" - which denotes sarcasm - much more apparent.

Yup. GitHub also released/contributed to a lot of other open-source Ruby stuff, like Resque.

> if they could find away to make Git only work with Github they would in a heart bet.

Sorry, but this is unfair :) I remember the early days of Gitlab, before they added all the insanely cool features they have now, when they were just a Github opensource copycat. My thought at the time was : "wow, github is super cool to let them go. At least the almost exact design copy could be a legal problem". Clearly, we would have heard about Github vs Gitlab back then, if Github wanted to lock people in.

Well, if we "heard about GitHub vs. Gitlab" more people outside HN might hear about GitLab. Might be more dangerous, than the chances of a win shutting GitLab down.

So you fault them for being evil geniuses by not acting evilly?

More likely they got sound legal advice and realized they could not actually win in court, or their investors killed that idea as a waste of money

You do not hear about many VC funded startups initiating lawsuits for a reason. That is the realm of established companies.

Just because it's A common motivation and strategy, doesn't mean it's THEIR motivation and strategy.

A more likely strategy/motivation is that the product is you. AKA: farming the users.

Create a desirable pasture, and the animals farm themselves.

It is partly the MS EEE model and partly the Adobe model, where they give away free or low cost services to get indivuals hooked, often at young age, then when they are employed at larger firms they push the firms to adopt that software internally.

Get a bunch of Open Source Developers to do your marketing at their "real jobs" so they can sell the Enterprise Version.

Since GitHub is a private company it is Unknown (at least I can not find the info) if they are profitable or not, or what their revenue numbers even are so it is unclear if that is a successful plan or not.

GitHub could very well run into the same problems as SoundCloud.