Hi all, this is Shanku Niyogi. I run the Product team at GitHub. I sincerely apologize for this post. We screwed up. This post was made in error, and we are retracting it. We are always looking to improve our programs for developers, and are working on improvements. But this is not the way to make changes. And it is NOT a goal to end our program. Sorry for the confusion.
Disappointed the link now 404s. You could have at least put up a placeholder page saying it's being rewritten. As it stands this only confuses your stance further.
Very relieved to hear this, thank you for clarifying. A lot of us would've been very disappointed to see this program go.
Speculating a bit, I am guessing it was something like this that happened?
1) You are planning to take down the GitHub Developer Program (not the regular API as many in this thread are mistakenly thinking, but just the part where you provide enterprise licenses to developers to test their integrations on GitHub Enterprise)
2) You are potentially bringing back a way for developers to get enterprise licenses in a better way in the future(?)
3) This post was written in anticipation of that inevitability, but poorly communicated the two key points above and perhaps was published early by accident
Otherwise if the program really isn't intended to go away at all, I would be surprised this post was written in the first place
If possible, it might be helpful to share a little detail on how it happened. You can imagine that it did happens signals at the very least that someone with power/influence got this post out there in the first place.
That is a very reasonable ask. I'll be doing a post-mortem, and talking to all the individuals involved - and will do a followup post on it on the same blog. Please stay tuned. And, again, our sincere apologies.
As an FYI, I have heard from a moderator that enough flags will move a post back a couple hundred places so that it is effectively buried. So aside from upvoting this comment for visibility, flagging the submission may help to prevent further disinformation.
GitHub appears to be slowly but surely ensuring anyone who extends their ecosystem is either acquired by GitHub or extinguished -- something I am pretty sure everyone who works in the space has known for a long time.
It is no coincidence that many of the companies that have used this developer program: Pull Panda, Dependabot and others like Semmle, Spectrum, etc. have been acquired by them. It starts looking a lot like going in the trajectory of an Apple App Store-esque developer platform in terms of lockdown to me.
I know GitLab isn't perfect, but I truly appreciate their openness[1] and willingness to partner with others in this space that are trying to improve developer tooling. If we want better developer tools, we need open platforms for those tools to exist.
Not trolling, just curious why you think one is open and one is not when they both provide ways to get a stamp of approval when you write apps to a public API.
It used to be the same case with GitHub Enterprise, they would give you a development license to test your integration. After this, you will need to purchase a GHE license which is $2,500/yr (you must first go through their sales team).
Basically, this shuts out people from developing integrations that can be sold to other enterprises from what I understand.
is the second link not the thing they just announced the shutdown of? Unless i'm missing something, the big material differnce between gitlab's developer program and github's developer program is that gitlab's version isn't deprecated.
This is standard incumbent behaviour, it’s been happening forever. Any company that gets to a significant size or scale will behave in the same way, and that includes Sourcegraph, gitlab and anyone else.
Many market dominating companies/products aim for the exact opposite: try to be "platform" instead of "product". For example Google Apps and Salesforce.
Google is historic about closing off Dev and API Access (See Nest product line), Removing Open protocol from services (i.e removing XMPP from Chat and Hangouts), and killing products that have more open API's replacing them with less open ones
But i wasn't talking about Google. I was talking about Google Apps. Your examples are about other divisions of Alphabet/Google...
...When you deal with the tech giants they are so large that different divisions commonly have totally different goals and ethos; some divisions are transparent and great to work with, others are pure nightmare.
None of the acquired companies were forced at gunpoint to sell to Github. Very few technology companies are created with the intention of being an ongoing profitable concern. If they are investor backed, almost by definition they are looking to be acquired. A statistical minuscule number of technology companies ever become profitable.
I would think almost every acquisition ever has been voluntary, among companies that aren't publicly traded. But we were talking about Github's/Microsoft's acquisition strategy. The companies being acquired don't drive that, even if they enable it.
Seems rather abrupt, and poorly written as far as output from Github goes. Anyone have inside gossip on whats going on? Smacks of some sort of internal dispute or a security/liability issue?
It could either be competing products or a wish to re-work the policy terms to allow them to carve out some enterprise-contract type flexibility. My experience with Microsoft is that they are consummate enterprise account managers. They hold the hands of enterprise buyers and their sales teams seems to love to have special enterprise features/integrations.
My prediction is we will see a newly defined developer program with consumer tiers which will be the tip of an iceberg of enterprise-ready configuration below the surface.
Given the ongoing GitHub / ICE controversy which is ever prevalent on Twitter.. I have to wonder. Is there a viable alternative for open source projects with enough of a network?
I see people who are very outspoken on the subject that are maintainers of projects on GitHub.
Seems rather hypocritical, but maybe there isn't a better option.
Sourcehut is one I especially enjoy using, and I really admire the grit + dedication of its developer[s]-- as I mentioned in a related thread a few weeks ago, I intend to migrate my personal projects to Sourcehut.
Thanks for letting me know. As I said, most of my knowledge of these is just osmosis from comments here.
I've used TFS, Visual Studio Online / Azure DevOps, GitHub, GitLab, and SourceHut. My knowledge of the others is purely from people like you. I appreciate it.
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