I think you’ve got it backwards. GitHub is by far the market leader for hosted repositories and maybe for CI too. This is like asking “Why are companies interested in using AWS?”
When one firm is so dominant for so long, the question is more like “Why shouldn’t we just use GitHub like 80% of software companies do?”
The issues they’ve had are almost all very recent. Very few companies have reevaluated that decision, because moving a big and well-integrated part of infrastructure is a huge project that delivers no value to the business. Speculating that you’ll have fewer development-slowing outages is not the most convincing when asking for the budget to do this. Plus, self-hosted isn’t necessarily going to have better uptime - mistakes happen.
I think before Actions, it would have been a lot easier to migrate off GH though. You’d just need to change a lot of repo URLs and find a way to set up webhooks from the new place to poke CI. Now with Actions, a lot lives in GH and in a proprietary flavor that doesn’t just ‘lift and shift.’
I think I worked at one company that used BitBucket instead of GitHub but GitHub has been the main place for the internal company repos everywhere else I’ve worked. GitHub is quite popular for any sort of git hosting.
More than half the companies I have worked for use Github. The others used Atlassian tools which were at least as bad from a reliability perspective and much less nice to use (IMO).
> The issues they’ve had are almost all very recent.
It has been bad for at least 18mo, maybe longer? I recall multiple work impacting outages at my previous employer extending back into 2024. Maybe even earlier than that?
But on the timescale of tech it's a long time. When a service has serious availability issues for like 7 quarters straight that's.. I mean, it's why we're all talking about it.
> Honest question, why are companies interested in hosting on github?
Mostly boils down to marketing and easier to establish a community. Almost every developer has an account there, leading to network effects being much larger, so if you're a new FOSS project, finding contributors and getting your project in front of other's eyes is much easier when you're on GitHub compared to your own Forgejo instance.
With that said, I'd question if chasing "most external one-time contributors" or GitHub stars is the right way to actually run a FOSS project, personally I'd avoid thinking about those vanity-numbers as much as possible and focus on the project, code and contributors themselves.
But, I've literally heard those two arguments for "why GitHub" countless of times over the years.
Go with the flow, don't rock the boat and use what developers already know, are probably the most cited reasons I've heard.
I've tried so many times in the past to argue for self-hosted setup that you fully control if you can afford it, things just get so much smoother and if you're a software development company, you probably want to own the software development workflow E2E so you can actually ship as fast as you want.
I’ve argued the opposite most of the time in build vs buy. Buy in almost every case unless it’s a real competitive advantage to you.
I know developers love to build, but do you think:
1) self-hosting git provides any competitive edge to the business over letting someone manage it?
2) it provides so much value that you’re willing to fund engineers to build, secure, support this on an ongoing basis?
I’ve found the answer to those is No in both cases.
The same reason you wouldn’t build your own internal chat tool, you’d use Slack. And you wouldn’t bother self-hosting your own Jira or documentation.
Code hosting is code hosting, there’s no difference where it's hosted. There’s no slowdown in delivery with using GitHub - their March uptime was 99.5% which annoys some commenters but it’s fine. That’s 45 minutes downtime per month which is tolerable.
You would spend way more effort and money building a jenky self-hosted solution to end up with a worse result.
You don't have to 'build' anything. Just spin up a GitLab docker container. Bonus: If you put it behind a VPN, you never have to worry about updating it.
Edit: to be clear for anyone reading, don’t do this, it’s a really bad idea. You need to patch your stuff, even behind a VPN. If you’re unsure, just google: “examples of security breaches of unpatched software behind VPNs”
Yeah I literally work on that side of things, Platform/etc. Managing GHE, CI across so many CI platforms over the past almost two decades, etc. It's a disaster thinking you can "just spin up X". Sure, if you're a two person operation, but scale becomes a factor real fast. Too many people on HN are giving away they have little to no experience. And I'm the one that made the initial comment in this thread, lol. It's frustrating, but I don't want to go back to "managing build agents" and the control plane (aka whatever your central Git Host is) for everything and all jobs, etc. That's a pain in the ass and 90% of environments have no fucking clue how to maintain that shit.
If someone wants to pay me to do lead such an effort, I'd do it, and yes, it'll all be done and managed in code, and it will be done better than 90% of folks could do (I've seen the production build systems most environments have built, some big names too, and they're trash...in no small part because it's simply hard to do), but it'll take a while to smooth the experience out for all of your requirements. You're gonna be paying, and very well, for a while.
Usually, at large enough corporations, it's one of two things. Some random project gets open sourced, and it ends up on Github(see, for example, Salesforce) - or, more commonly, some subsidiary or acquisition had github and has either refused to migrate to the internal source system or the hassle of migration isn't worth it.
I don’t know why you would even really need hosted git or why you’d be affected by its downtime. Git is decentralized by design. One node going down should not stop development. You don’t need a “central hub” to keep working.
I guess it’s all the other non-git stuff like issue tracking and other (unfortunately) centralized products on GitHub that causes disruption when they go down.
Weird how GitHub built itself around a distributed VC system and then made all its other services centralized.
Yes, you want to run automated builds, unit test, end to end test, UI tests, make it easy for testers to deploy specific versions / tags to internal server. Also kick off builds for iOS on mac computers. We use Teamcity for that.
Tracking of issues, feature and epics. Maybe also knowledge base / wiki. We use Jira.
People always end up petitioning for them to be cutdown because tree litter inevitably falls on cars. The best solution for cars is dense multistory parking.
In South Korea, you usually don't see parking lots the size of several football fields like in the U.S., even around venues that generally attract a lot of cars, even in suburban areas. Instead, there are several stories of parking lots under every large building. Above-ground space is simply too valuable to waste on parking.
Unfortunately, you can't install solar panels underground.
In government you have to deliver, most of the time the mode of delivery is boring, small, conservative, and disjointed from other government groups because large efforts of work attract big budgets, oversight and doubt.
Consultants are magic, because they come with no baggage and promise the world. They take you hostage with sunk cost fallacy and then after years they deliver something.
At the end you're so tired you think that what they did was beyond your government agency and the cycle continues.
Its exactly the same as 10 years ago and being able to google and search well for odd support bugs. Junior people think it's easy and they don't see the massive skill in framing questions and filtering.
It just needs to be described in a more concrete way to people. Such as, You know how the podcasts you listen to keep getting updated on your phone? That's RSS. Imagine if other things you liked turned up when they were new and you had a lot of control over that process.
It's been the absolute worst thing for 10+ years that some podcasts have adverts, even their own website, but somehow fail to provide the RSS feed link anywhere - only app specific links for the biggest 2.
You also have people producing "podcasts" that only exist on youtube.
nah, open ai doesn't have a moat it has a brief window to get a lot cheaper to run or it's going to go pop when someone figure out how to do inference a lot cheaper.
