megastep

I would completely agree with you if that was the way GitHub presented that feature, being open about the consequences of adopting it. They haven't done that, and as a result their customers are not properly informed on the trade-offs they are making.

It is not disingenuous if it is exactly what they are doing. The entire cause of this problem, and the reason it breaks so many things, is because they are trying to monetize bandwidth usage. This model is unsustainable because free users only get a paltry 1GB/month and their attempt to enforce that is what breaks forks.

If they would just stop trying to do that, then we would have nothing to talk about.

It is not at all uncalled for to criticize the way they are trying to do business, especially when it affects you as an existing customer.

I wouldn't have characterized that as evil per se, but the fact that they are just not disclosing these restrictions is at the very least a communications failure, if not a shady business practice. It would have been completely understandable if they had just mentioned the existence of these restrictions, but they haven't.

If you start using LFS, you are effectively losing features and the product becomes worse for a lot of their users, a lot of them paying customers.

The question is not whether this was being just inflammatory (it was) but rather whether it was unwarranted criticism.

Disclaimer: I am the author of the article.

My argument was that this was actually bad for their business. This is not a customer-friendly move.

Yes, my criticism was not that they're trying to make money from this, but rather that they are crippling their core product in an effort to monetize it some more.

I do, actually. I just noticed that there was a large Kernel git repo hosted on Github, and figured it would make a good example of a large, popular repository. I'm not surprised Linus is not actually using Github, so my bad for not stressing that this was more hypothetical than meant as a statement of fact.

The way I understand it, it should be possible, though it's more complicated since they seem to infer the LFS URL from the repo URL by default. So if you wanted to say keep your repo on Github, and store your LFS files on S3, you'd need to explicitly tell git where to write the files. There are configuration values for that.

Also you'd need the necessary LFS server piece on Amazon's side.

I am the author and yes this was very much unapologetically hyperbolic. At least it got the conversation started.