Ctrl-f search doesn't work anymore because it lazy loads the file as you scroll, with a very noticable lag at that.
Some repos are inexplicably limited to 50KiB/s.
And yes I have a powerful computer, very good Internet connection with low latency to GitHub.
For recent events, you could look at stuff how VSCode is supposedly Open Source and yet fully ridded with spyware and also propietary plugins...
On github, having MS at the realm has certainly affected too how DMCA's and such are deal with vs the old Github.
As for DMCA, I think you have to talk to the government officials about how badly it works.
Are there any other recent events that I'm forgetting that make MSFT the biggest enemy of FOSS?
How are they an enemy?
CSS can famously be made turing complete.
- You can't retry a failed action, be it manually in the UI or automatically under certain conditions.
- workflows have a pretty low limit for number of jobs - 250 or so. We already split our rspec tests across 300 parallel jobs.
- the UX is full of jank. If I click into an in-progress jobs I often can't see prior logs for the in-progress step until the step completes.
There are also some annoyances that aren't really half-baked, but annoying for Monorepos:
- workflows have to be defined under the .github folder. This means workflows can't be collocated with the code they relate to.
- workflows can't be generated dynamically. At best, you can dynamically trigger predefined workflows, but I don't think they get associated with the PR that triggered them. This makes patterns like dynamically dispatching workflows based on, say, a bazel query for affected rdeps more challenging, if not entirely infeasible.
GitLab was drastically cheaper, offering free private repos, and interesting features ahead of GitHub (although IMO always slightly less "sexy" than GitHub, using Ruby on Rails, etc.).
But at the time they gathered (1) serious funding money and (2) influx from MS-asylants their priorities started to change. But they were still the cheaper option for quite some time IIRC. The pandemic and the associated gold-rush/growth in IT pushed the dynamics over the edge I think.
Now their position is not really that different from GitHub's, and I think it is kind of a preference thing.
I can do with both, but I kind of still like the appeal and UX in GitHub. GitLab will always be in my heart, just like ever "Underdog" (even if that was a long time ago).
I could further see myself immediately falling for a third alternative, if it was sexy/unique enough with drastically better UX, and I think that is not even too far fetched.
But there is the thing, GitHub is a platform, not (just) a tool. GitLab still managed to take ground - kudos! That would be the hard part.
If anyone else remembers this incident and can link to a source that'd be great for my sanity.
Maybe similar to this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17214257
I do have a love-hate relationship with MS, but I don't love the fact that they own 80% of my stack (Yes, I know, my choice) between TypeScript, VSCode, NPM, Github, etc..
Also on VSCodium, it only fixes the telemetry bullshit, the custom LSP Plugins that microsoft keeps for themselves or whatever are not available there. so If you want to use for example copilot or other -microsoft official- plugins you can't do so on VSCodium
Also let's add the whole Github Copilot WhiteWashing non-FOSS proprietary code into anyone to steal. Basically breaking the current status quo in favour of the megacorps that can steal it all and respect no licenses
Let's say we have 40 employees who code and 30 employees who create tickets, and we want to get all of the security scanning features that the platform has to offer.
For GitLab, we need the $99/user/month plan because the security features are only available in that subscription. Guest users are completely free, but they're extremely gimped when it comes to issues, so most likely you'll have to have most if not all of your non-coding employees at the $99/user/month tier. Final price is $6930/month (or $3960/month if you can really handle the gimped guests).
For GitHub, you need to pay $19.25/user/month plan for every user and $49/month for every person that commits code for the security features. So that's $1347.50/month for user accounts and $1960 for security features for a total of $3307.50/month.
GitHub is not even half what GitLab wants. It's even less than the gimped guest user experience that you can subject yourself to with GitLab.
Plus, I greatly appreciate the transparency of many of the features that Gitlab sells around security outlining exactly which open source tools they use so that you can just go do it yourself on the CI pipeline. The real value for the premium security tier is when you have a team coordinating multiple projects.
I've seen Github try to upsell to enterprise with features that I can just install in a few minutes using the tools that Gitlab tells me about.
They're also buggy, and in my experience I keep hitting bugs that are long-tail and therefore never prioritized to actually fix.
That's a great example, actually, because they'd like you to think that VSCode is open source... but then if you actually use that you can't access a rather lot of the most useful extensions, which is a completely artificial limitation that appears to be there only to prevent people from actually using any fork.
This incident was Casey Muratori raising an issue about Windows Terminal performance:
https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/10362
https://twitter.com/cmuratori/status/1522471966929653761
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1687287343&dateRange=custom&...
Not really. It was a good point but it wasn't clearcut.
Of course I don't think the VScode situation is great but it's far from being "the biggest enemy of FOSS".
That's why I was wondering if there were any other recent events. I've not been keeping track, truly.
https://www.itprotoday.com/windows-78/inside-story-how-microsofts-open-source-code-theft-was-discoveredWorkflows can also be (sort of, depending on what you mean?) dynamically generated by using tojson and fromjson to feed the output of one job into a matrix.
Full disclosure, I work at Microsoft but nothing to do with GitHub.
I'm not sure if/when this changed, but you can definitely do this now.
> You can only use success or failure states to trigger other jobs, you can't pass values.
This is also not true: you can pipe environment variables to $GITHUB_OUTPUT which can be referenced by future jobs.
If anything, the main issue with GitHub Actions is that it's confusing, and the docs don't make it easy to understand how to do things at a high level.
I wouldn't trust MS with my business as an indie dev, that's all
And I wouldn't trust their -true- intentions on FOSS beyond how their incentives align currently with the space
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Microsoft
What surprises me is that the tech crowd is so ready to bend over for one of the worst companies on the planet in the software domain. These are the very same people that abused the legal system in every way that they could in order to slow down the adoption rate of open source. They are still doing this today but quietly, for instance by incentivizing municipalities and other government layers to use their software (for free if necessary) just to stop adoption of equivalent open source solutions.
What specifically?
I'm not trying to be difficult, but linking to a lengthy Wikipedia page is not an argument. From a quick glance a number are old, and a number are just non-issues (e.g. "Mono patent concerns", which was just some baseless FUD mentioned by Stallman once almost 15 years ago), but I didn't read the entire page. "Incentivizing municipalities and other government layers to use their software" could just be normal business practice (or something shady – much depends on the details).
Github Actions might not be the best but so is Buildkite. It's not exactly strictly better in every way.
Having used all 3 mentioned, it'd be Gitlab > Github > Buildkite for CI/CD for me.
Github wins at least by the sheer community support. Every vendor has an action.
As far as incentivizing municipalities is concerned, they are currently in the docket for anti-trust violations just like they were in the past. Historically MS would swoop in on any governmental org in Europe that would successfully implement FOSS solutions instead of MS based stuff. Not to make money, but just to maintain dominance, another anti-trust play. And they never stopped doing that.
You mention buildkite as something you think is a lot better than GH Actions. I'm curious if you've also used the Gitlab equivalent and can compare (I haven't, really).
I've not tried Gitlab.