I Don't Think The World Needs Github.

In their article “I don’t think the world needs a new GitHub”: What GitHub’s leaders really think about their new rivals on The New Stack the author is privy to a little spat between two platforms who I just kinda hate. In the long winded treatises these guys give at their talks they go over how "agents are changing the way we build" and "we've added a gorillion gooberbytes and gublion eebeeflops to our compute infrastructure" and it's still not enough to maintain consistent 9s.

Now I know it's a bit unfair to point at the globogigacorp platform and their trillions of serves a month and say "wow seriously 98% uptime?" They are serving many orders of magnitude more individuals than I ever will, so sure. You got me. They are doing a pretty bang up job being pointless and adding to the electrical costs of Northwestern Wisconsin.

But recognize that there really isn't a fundamental need for a platform to host every single repository of code on the planet. I've made it plain that you can read my open source code at my own source forge. I don't have to serve gigglebytes of funnyflops every day because my scope is tiny and my system requirements are small. I can provide very simple read and fork optionality for users, host the systems I want to host, provide them through package providers like Packagist for versioned composer serving, and all for the miniscule cost of my own VPS.

Git is an open source algorithm that is simple to install and simple to run. Ubuntu is an open source hosting operating system that you can very quickly provision and run, even without LLMs or particular devops knowledge. There are some basic security considerations and server management tooling you may want to figure out before you do your own hosting, but why would you allow for the goobercompany9000 to serve your source code? So you can attach to their half-cocked social media system and LARP as a software dev making commits to side projects that you use to impress some HR recruiter?

Or are you interested in actually owning your work? I have projects hosted somewhere on Github. I've contributed to open source and closed source projects on Github. But there really isn't any reason for me or anyone to use these goofy, centralized platforms that can barely maintain their infrastructure under the sheer volume of slop being dumped into their ever-expanding data centers.

Hats off to the guys in the trenches solving the problems, I just think HTTP and a small server is plenty for the vast majority of projects. If the problem is discovery then github operates as a useful central platform you can mirror your code to, but I would not trust them to be your only source control.

Don't even start with me on Entire. It's all just silly.