GitHub has added features, and made their product better for their customers, but have not yet made it possible to use from everywhere on their platform.
Perhaps that is a big deal (I don't use LFS and until recently neither did anyone else), but it's a far cry from what you said in your original comment, such as "I do believe it is foolish to assume that the github we know today will be the github of tomorrow."
They implement a feature in a restricted manner and all of a sudden they're evil?
No, of course not. I have nowhere said github is evil. I've said it would be foolish to believe they never will be, because we have seen on a number of occasions that good companies turn bad (with varying definitions of "good" and "bad") when given sufficient monetary motivation to do so.
SourceForge is the best past analog for github, and I think it's worth learning from history. SF.net didn't start out evil and untrustworthy; they started out good. Who's to say github won't do the same?
Its not that I believe good forever, but rather that I think it (it being your first comment) was a weird way to take the conversation. Like, why did that even occur to you in this context?
I left some of the early parts of my thought process out of the conversation.
My thought process went something like this: "This is a feature that is currently, probably accidentally, causing vendor lock-in for github users, as there is no easy way to take a project in its entirety back out of github, if it has enabled this feature. That kind of lock-in has been used in the past, by vendors across a wide spectrum, for evil purposes. Github, were it ever to become evil, would find this the kind of thing that would screw users and produce profit."
I don't believe github today has evil intent (though the author of the article seemingly does believe that), but I reserve the right to be skeptical of what the company's intentions will be in the future. Just as I should have been more skeptical of the the future intentions of SourceForge in the past. I think my position on this is entirely fair to github (which is a company and product I like), but I'm also trying to not to be a total sucker and make the same mistakes over and over again.
I wouldn't have characterized that as evil per se, but the fact that they are just not disclosing these restrictions is at the very least a communications failure, if not a shady business practice. It would have been completely understandable if they had just mentioned the existence of these restrictions, but they haven't.
If you start using LFS, you are effectively losing features and the product becomes worse for a lot of their users, a lot of them paying customers.
The question is not whether this was being just inflammatory (it was) but rather whether it was unwarranted criticism.
Comments
GitHub has added features, and made their product better for their customers, but have not yet made it possible to use from everywhere on their platform.
Perhaps that is a big deal (I don't use LFS and until recently neither did anyone else), but it's a far cry from what you said in your original comment, such as "I do believe it is foolish to assume that the github we know today will be the github of tomorrow."
They implement a feature in a restricted manner and all of a sudden they're evil?
No, of course not. I have nowhere said github is evil. I've said it would be foolish to believe they never will be, because we have seen on a number of occasions that good companies turn bad (with varying definitions of "good" and "bad") when given sufficient monetary motivation to do so.
SourceForge is the best past analog for github, and I think it's worth learning from history. SF.net didn't start out evil and untrustworthy; they started out good. Who's to say github won't do the same?
Its not that I believe good forever, but rather that I think it (it being your first comment) was a weird way to take the conversation. Like, why did that even occur to you in this context?
I left some of the early parts of my thought process out of the conversation.
My thought process went something like this: "This is a feature that is currently, probably accidentally, causing vendor lock-in for github users, as there is no easy way to take a project in its entirety back out of github, if it has enabled this feature. That kind of lock-in has been used in the past, by vendors across a wide spectrum, for evil purposes. Github, were it ever to become evil, would find this the kind of thing that would screw users and produce profit."
I don't believe github today has evil intent (though the author of the article seemingly does believe that), but I reserve the right to be skeptical of what the company's intentions will be in the future. Just as I should have been more skeptical of the the future intentions of SourceForge in the past. I think my position on this is entirely fair to github (which is a company and product I like), but I'm also trying to not to be a total sucker and make the same mistakes over and over again.
I see. Yes, lock in has been used for evil in the past.
I thought the OP noted that MS also offers git+LFS (and for free)!
I wouldn't have characterized that as evil per se, but the fact that they are just not disclosing these restrictions is at the very least a communications failure, if not a shady business practice. It would have been completely understandable if they had just mentioned the existence of these restrictions, but they haven't.
If you start using LFS, you are effectively losing features and the product becomes worse for a lot of their users, a lot of them paying customers.
The question is not whether this was being just inflammatory (it was) but rather whether it was unwarranted criticism.
Disclaimer: I am the author of the article.