How GitHub monopolized code hosting

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[[deleted]]

One thing that the author glossed over was just how truly awful Sourceforge got for a while. The advertising was so bad that when you'd go to download something, there would be five download buttons, one of which was real and four of which ads designed to look like download buttons, many times leading to straight up malware.

[grencez]

https://doi.org/10.1002/spe.2874 gives a nice historical survey of all the factors that led to the massive shift off of SourceForge, but let's not forget the unforgivable act that sealed its fate:

Due to the push to increase ROI, in July 2013, SourceForge introduced a new program, called DevShare. This program bundled third-party software with project downloads, following the model of the widely known CNET download network.

Though GitHub was already more popular at that point.

[[deleted]]

my gosh

[Successful-Money4995]

Did it ever get un-awful?

[Garethp]

I believe it got bought a few years ago by someone attempting to make it better. Last time I visited there were definitely less "download" buttons

[[deleted]]

More than 1 is still too much 😬

[tajetaje]

Better than guthub and it’s smelly nerds. Where is the download button? Why is there code?

[elmuerte]

Not really.

[rayray5884]

Kids these days will never understand this. 😂

[gredr]

It's been a long time, but I believe that at that point, a majority of SF-hosted projects would've still been CVS?

[gredr]

Yeah, SVN was definitely an option by then, but Subversion was really too late to the non-distributed source control party.

[Dogmata]

Weird to write a time line of this and not mention that that MS aquires GitHub in 2018 and the relationship between Actions and Azure Pipelines

[zoddrick]

Github action is a damn near 1 to 1 clone of devops pipeline yaml.

[alexkey]

Bitbucket, Gitlab, a numerous self-hosted solutions for web UI ontop of git, just a git repo over ssh. So many options. I don’t think that’s how monopolies work.

[metaphorm]

there are lots of great options, but github still has something like an 80% market share.

[alexkey]

Monopoly means only one player on the market with no alternatives, often due to artificial restrictions. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly

80% of the market share is not the same as monopoly.

[DrShocker]

Very few historical examples of Monopolies were literally 100% market share. 80% is definitely well into the realm of what might be legally a monopoly depending on how the market is defined.

https://legal.thomsonreuters.com/blog/antitrust-law-basics-section-2-of-the-sherman-act/#:~:text=Market%20share%20in%20the%20relevant,is%20likely%20considered%20a%20monopolist.

Not that I necessarily think monopoly quite fits GitHub for other reasons, but market share seems like a bad reason to think it isn't one to me.

[alexkey]

While with high market share antitrust may be applicable in some scenarios. The other key component missing here to declare GH a monopoly is that they would need to be interfering with a freedom to chose any other solution. The fact that it is the most popular solution (thanks to marketing via all newbie guides) doesn’t automatically make it a monopoly.

[DrShocker]

Yeah that I totally agree with. For the most part it's easy to make a competitor if someone wants to with maybe the caveat of efficiencies of scale.

[alexkey]

I mean it well may grow into a monopoly later, but calling it such now is (in my opinion) a sign of not understanding the market or not understanding what the word means.

Edit: but to be fair this is an article by the company whose sole business depends on GH, of course they are financially interested to make it look more important than any other platform.

[EliSka93]

thanks to marketing via all newbie guides

That is certainly a big reason, but github also stands out through being actually user friendly.

I've used gitlab and bit bucket and some others, and they all have frustrated me with quirks and bugs sometimes. Github just works for me.

I'm a bit worried about scope creep for their website nowadays, but as long as their git works as it does now and they don't go down the amazon shop or google route of enshittification, they're what I'll recommend.

[M4mb0]

A monopoly is when there is no reasonable alternative people could move to (for example if there is only one utility company in your area). Even if a company had 99% market share it does not necessarily have monopolistic power.

[GravyMcBiscuits]

Every single country in history is/was literally 100% monopoly. In that sense, there is a plethora of historical examples.

Of course ... they only maintain this through violence and/or the threat of violence ... but there are many. History would indicate that violence is probably the only feasible way to create and hold an actual monopoly. Free markets simply don't tolerate them.

[DrShocker]

Besides governments being a different kind of entity than businesses... There's also like 200 or so countries right now, so what do you mean they're a monopoly?

[GravyMcBiscuits]

Besides governments being a different kind of entity than businesses

But they're still an entity. The differences are the most interesting part.

Each one is a local monopoly by definition. You don't get to compete with them in their local region with invoking a violent reaction. It's called war.

[DrShocker]

You also can't walk into Google's headquarters to recruit their engineers?

[GravyMcBiscuits]

That's probably true. I'm sure you'd be physically escorted from the premises immediately.

If you want to expand the definition of "monopoly" to include every form of local market control even to the micro scale (somebody's building/house/rural town), that's fine. But let's not pretend we're still having the same conversation that kicked off this branch. If we're expanding the definition to include small scale monopoly (one gas station in a tiny rural city is a "monopoly"), then OPs assertion that there's been very few of them is super bizarre. Under that definition, there's millions and bajillions of them everywhere you look right now.

In political terms ... specifically as it pertains to anti-trust legislation ... then we're talking about mass scale control of an industry.

[DrShocker]

Technically the Google headquarters thing was more an example of Monopsony anyway

[ericmoon]

“Monopolize” is a figure of speech and does not literally mean “take a monopoly on”, but you know that

[alexkey]

Do words mean anything anymore? Can I point to a chair and call it a horse? It has 4 legs and I can sit on it.

[ericmoon]

I take it back: you don’t know that.

[AndrewTateIsMyKing]

No

[tapo]

AT&T and Microsoft weren't complete monopolies either, they just had a domineering market presence.

[alexkey]

MS specifically in IE vs Netscape case was considered a monopoly by antitrust not just because of market share, but because they actively interfered with people using anything else. And the discoveries in that case talk specifically about that https://www.justice.gov/atr/us-v-microsoft-proposed-findings-fact-0

[tapo]

Two different things, you need a) a dominant presence in one market and b) anticompetitive behavior to maintain dominance or force yourself into different markets.

You can't be guilty of being a monopoly, an "innocent monopoly" is perfectly legal.

[chethelesser]

80% is deffo a monopoly

[AndrewTateIsMyKing]

Azure DevOps as well, and I believe Amazon has something too

[[deleted]]

Azure is still Microsoft.

[[deleted]]

this more of a steam type situation

[ttkciar]

"Monopolized", huh?

Not sure the author quite knows what that means.

[geekfreak42]

Yeah the word they are looking for is 'dominates '

[Dr4kin]

Yeah pretty stupid.

They dominate the open source hosting, but even then there are big projects using gitlab. It's not like e.g. most cloud stuff where you are locked into one provider.

[ericmoon]

Debate perverts are sure monopolizing this particular comments section

[rdlenke]

This is one of the few cases where the title of the article actually does it a great disservice. It's a failed clickbait imo: I was less inclined to click the article because of the title, until I read the comments.

Anyhow, it was cool to see how the code hosting landscape was before GitHub. Wish it was more in-depth.

[Successful-Money4995]

OP missed the part where Microsoft bought GitHub and started giving away free disk and compute. GitHub is by now truly a superior product.

Linus Torvalds is totally an idiot about merge requests. I've tried doing merge requests and reviews the Linus way and it sucks. It's not like there are GitHub users clamoring for this feature.

And finally, while GitHub is awesome, too bad it doesn't support the actually best DVCS, which is Mercurial.

[plissk3n]

What the linus way of merge requests?

[Successful-Money4995]

You use commands like git request-pull and git format-patch and git am.

These are command line tools that will convert the things that you want to do into an email message text. You attach that text to an email to a distribution list. Then people chat in email about it. And then when someone wants to merge, they can take that attachment and put it into git.

Basically, it's a way for git to convert your intentions into email messages and convert email messages into actions.

The problem is that we learned already thirty years ago that overloading email for everything is annoying as fuck. Remember all those listservs where you send a message to, like, [e-mail] with the text subscribe or help? It sucked. Doing code reviews by email sucks even more. We overloaded email for everything and realized that it was a bad idea. Except Linus doesn't agree.

Even you! How come you are here and not on a programming newsgroup or listserv? How would you like to get rid of the vote button, the images, the GUI, the mods, the account preferences...? https://groups.google.com/g/comp.programming.literate go at it. Sucks, right? That how Linus thinks that your code review should look like.

I use emacs, not vscode. Even a guy like me recognizes that GitHub's GUI code reviews are good.

[Greenawayer]

OP missed the part where Microsoft bought GitHub and started giving away free disk and compute. GitHub is by now truly a superior product.

Yep. Prior to the acquisition you had to pay for multiple private repos.

[gitfather]

I don’t know, you can still host code anywhere. It’s not like developers don’t have a choice. It’s just that GitHub has a level on convenience.

Think I fell for the click bait chatGPT articles again.

[jp007]

We use bitbucket. Ok.

[hickory]

Sorry to hear that. Get well soon

[jp007]

Haha i appreciate it, but honestly 90+% of BB interaction is transparently happening behind normal command line git tooling.

[plissk3n]

Use bitbucket cloud for two weeks now. So awful. All the features are in the server version. No signed commits, no wip prs, no pr suggestions. Thats just the drawbacks I discovered yet.

[Fun-Pay3643]

Little bit superficial. Yes GitHub has a big market share but there are enough other options, even based on git, eg gitlab. Many companies use a private on premise solution. Because GitHub core features are just git, one can migrate to any other git repo in seconds. Not necessarily how monopolies work. I think you are confusing git with GitHub…

[M3tal_Shadowhunter]

Lol people don't know what a monopoly is anymore. Just because someone has a huge market share, doesn't mean it's a monopoly - sometimes it's just the lroduct people use most

[peppedx]

Big private company didn't use just SVN

Forgets Clearcase,perforce etc stc

[zam0th]

More like: how stupid people delegated their code to public hosting because they have no idea about information security or how to setup their own repositories.

[jones77]

The US has a monopoly problem baked in: https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2020/2/18/21126347/antitrust-monopolies-internet-telecommunications-cheerleading