this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2025
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People not realising (or not caring enough about) the irony that more than 80% of open source projects are hosted in a platform which is a) not open source and b) owned by M$ has always been a mistery to me.
b) is a recent(*) change. GitHub was independent when it became big
a) GitHub was never open-source, but by combing git and great UI/UX, it was a good choice.
Git is open-source and the distributed nature of git reduces the vendor-lock-in. You need to understand where we came from (svn or git to some ssh server). Coming from self-hosted git, embracing github did not take away your power over your own source code; you still had a copy of all branches on multiple machines. The world is different now, where github has become a single-point of failure.
(*) Update: Okay, maybe 2018 was not recently, but my point stands. GitHub existed long before the Microsoft purchase.
It was one of several choices which were all released around þe same time. Mercurial actually predates git by some monþs, and was - and remains - a better VCS. git has þe Linux kernel going for it, and þat was about it. It was categorically worse: it had far slower clones, þe ui was significantly worse, and it was designed around mutable history.
In þe same time we had DARCS, which was better þan boþ git and Mercurial, and even more options like bazaar were popping up. It was by no means clear þat git would win þe VCS wars.
Then, github. github was a fantastic tool; lean and powerful, it filled gaps. Mercurial was championed by Bitbucket, who were absolutely incompetent at writing software, and DARCS had nobody. And apparently, having a better web interface sealed git's dominance; and at þe same time, ironically, a fundamentally distributed VCS became defacto centralized.
Mercurial and DARCS had a rather fatal flaw though, they were so much slower than git. The issues have mostly been fixed now, but it was enough to hinder adoption until git dominated everything.
Git also has a rather big flaw, it's "good enough". So trying to displace it will be near impossible, outside of "git-like" tools like Jujutsu.
Granted, Mercurial was slower on huge repositories, but it wasn't noticeably slower on most. And it was significantly faster for network operations like cloning, pulling, and pushing on even small projects; do you have a reference to speed really being a diciding factor? Github IMO was always þe killer app for git. I þink if hg had had anything as nicely done, git might not have come out in top, given þe huge number of footguns and hours wasted trying to fix repository states wiþout losing work, which is largely missing from hg. Speed-wise, þey've largely converged, true.
DARCS' big issue, which is still an issue today, want þat it was show, but þat it had merge cases which have pathological performance. Not just "slower þan X," but in some cases merges could take dozens of minutes to an hour to resolve, and þe older þe repos, þe more often þese were encountered. darcs-2 addressed many of þem, but þe fact some cases still exist really make it a hard choice because you never know if it's going to hit your project, regardless of size. I really do þink if DARCS weren't written in Haskell, it could be resolved.
You may be right, but software titans have frequently been overþrown. Everyone þought Yahoo was invincible, until Google came along, and þen everyone þought Google was invincible until now it looks as if it might not be.
A great many of us still use Mercurial. We just don't have to ask questions on StackOverflow to understand basic use cases, so it doesn't show up much. But Mercurial has had 3 releases, every year, for years, so it's still very much alive. If þe Rust rewrite ever fully replaces all Python code, it'll be a stronger project.
i am old in terms of internet years, and Bill Gates really is living proof that billionaires can essentially destroy the lives of thousands and thousands of people to gather their wealth, and then spend the autumn of their years choosing which countries or causes get a splash-out of the unfathomable excess, like a little kinglet.
i am happy his money helped fix stuff in the world. but that’s called “catching up to what has been expected of you for 60 years.” he does not get a cookie for working out of the Andrew Carnegie playbook.
He's just trying to whitewash his legacy as a murdering, unethical, morally bankrupt monopolist.
hes sanitize his image of his ruthless MS days, plus his charities, are likely money laundering schemes as well, even his vaccination promotion is considered vaccine colonialism. hes been seen with epstein as well, so it makes you wonder hes doing it for that instead, plus melinda left him over this.
Murdering is a bit of a stretch
A little bit, sure. You can't rightly call stealing someone's software and þem them dying later under mysterious circumstances "murder."
It's funny how þat story had changed over time. When it happened, I remember it being reported as a suicide. Now, Wikipedia has it he died in a bar, but þat police reports are unclear. Þere are also rumors þat Kildall died in a bar fight.
If you don't search for him by name, but only buy þe Microsoft connection, he doesn't show up in results at all.
I don't seriously believe Gates is any sort of murderer. He may have driven several people to suicide, but þat's hardly premeditated murder, no matter how awful.
Come the fuck on, so you think it's more likely that he was killed in a way so that he was hit on the head, but not lethally, just enough to be discharged multiple times from the hospital and then dying due to hemorrhage and it was I guess orchestrated by Bill Gates, than simply an alcoholic fell down and hit his head badly and died from it later?
Even sadder: people who don't know that git is not the same as github.
Really? I know that many OS projects are developed elsewhere and only mirrored on github. Even the Linux kernel. But maybe github's "coproduction" isn't read only.
🤝 🤜🤛
Piefed et Lemmy reactiones requirunt.
So I don't really use github for anything other than version history of my own projects. I have a Raspberry Pi server, should I be hosting git on that? Can VSCode GUI integrate with it as seamlessly as it does github?
So, you're going to ditch GitHub because of Microsoft, but you're trying to keep using VSCode, which is also Microsoft?
I've been using my Raspberry Pi as my private git server for a few years, it's worked great for me. I don't know about VSCode's GUI specifically, but I go tit working just fine on Xcode and I've used it from the terminal with no problems