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.
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
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.
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.
They've agreed to deprecate the program but once the post was out and got terrible feedback, they realized that deprecating a developer program is not the best idea for something like GitHub, let alone announcing it as such. So instead of admitting they've made a mistake in deprecating the program, they're blaming the messenger and pretending it never happened. They went as far as getting the archive.org pages blacklisted/hidden apparently, which shows somewhat clearly the mindset involved.
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.
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?
The calendar view on archive.org shows the page was archived 6 times while active, but all of those copies seem to have been manually deleted from archive.org (or perhaps hidden/blacked out?), or something else weird is going on.
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.
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.
Readit News
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
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Dead Comment
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.
[1] https://about.gitlab.com/partners/integrate/
Disclaimer: I work in the space (@ Sourcegraph) but the words/thoughts here are my own, I'm not a corporate shill (I hope) :)
Worse than that, it looks like Twitter's pattern of acquiring successful businesses using their API, before significantly locking down access.
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.
Many market dominating companies/products aim for the exact opposite: try to be "platform" instead of "product". For example Google Apps and Salesforce.
Dead Comment
https://web.archive.org/web/20191205225751/https://developer...
The Wayback Machine has not archived that URL."
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.
Savannah: https://savannah.nongnu.org/
GitLab: https://www.gitlab.com
BitBucket: https://www.bitbucket.org
SourceForge: https://www.sourceforge.net
If you don't want to be on GitHub, you don't have to be. If you want to avoid a transitive dependency on GitHub, that might be difficult.
If you're looking for self-hosting options:
Gogs: https://gogs.io/
Gitea: https://gitea.io/
Also, Sourcehut, Savannah, and GitLab from the service offerings can be self-hosted.
These are literally off the top of my head, and based primarily on osmosis from browsing HN. I am sure there are many more.
The only reason I can think of is that microsoft wants to provide these features themselves, maybe as a payed option?
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.
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