I've been starting to question this recently for Github. Github does let anyone put up code, but there's little curation (the stars give you a rough idea but don't let you really drill down to what is really useful and what was starred because someone did a show HN), which means there are plenty of not-so-useful projects and projects with questionable licenses (no license specified = trap)
I don't see the parallel between github and Stack Overflow. I can understand why programmers in certain industries and companies won't be posting their code on github. If all of the code you write professionally is proprietary, it makes sense that none of it would wind up in github public repositories. But even if I'm writing proprietary code, I can still ask questions about it on Stack Overflow, and answer other people's questions.
It's come up before on HN but I don't like the notion that GitHub is the place to show off your skill as a programmer. Not all of us can release work as open source :( For good and bad reasons.
I didn't really mean code though. I meant content as in it could be anything. That stuff could be code but it might just be a question, or the individual asking for advice on their startup. I'm not a frequent user of Github but it looks to be just for code.
I don't think that people are drawn to the specific github implementation (code), it's that they're drawn to github.com the domain where you can't do what you propose.
A lot of people (who may not even be professional programmers) are using GitHub for their hobby, i.e. "for fun". I don't think this is an invalid use case.
For many people Github is a tool to use for work and nothing more. For others it's almost a social network. Making something that happily straddles both those use cases must be really difficult.
> And for the posts on social sites, are they more often about the creator or what they created?
You hit the nail right on the head. Github is about sharing code. The code is the creation. Github's unique selling point is the webinterface to show the code: It's the best designed interface in the industry to show code in a browser.
> Does GitHub provide this feature better than SourceForge or others?
Various software is available to show code in the browser, but none works as well and is polished as well as Github. The creation (code) therefore can be best shared on Github. As such, others willing to check out the creation are, from the moment they arive at github, mostly busy this exactly that: check out the creation (code). Every time I visit repo's visualizing the code in html on other places then github, I get agitated by the annoying interface. Example: some interfaces require you to click on a file, after which the postback returns a site containing a list of revisions, and new buttons to 'view' a revision. This causes me to wait for a postback, and click, twice per file I want to view.
Github instead instantly shows the last revision.
All these small tweaks account for much better usability on Github compared to other sites.
I guess for scientists, there must be the same approach as Github approaches programmers. For programmers, it's about code, and for scientists, it's about data and the conclusions derived from it. Instead of showing code, show a paper with the possibility to drill down on data. The data being shared can then be treated the same as code being in a source repo, so the usual git stuff (branching, merging, pulling, pushing) can be applied on the paper+data.
People use github because it's free hosting first and foremost. 99% of projects on github are never fetched or forked by third parties, let alone maintained, so i'm not sure about what you're complaining about. Are you complaining about people publishing crap on free hosting ? nobody forces you to use all that code.
Depending on the type of work you do your code would not go on github. If you write code for drivers for IR cameras in C or fix bugs in FORTRAN you won't be putting your stuff on Github or contributing to stackoverflow. Github/stackoverflow is, in my opinion, more catered towards the mobile/web/C# community. Military, medical equipment and aerospace software developers prob don't use it either one very much.
An open source project is a community, but GitHub shouldn't be. Open source projects use lots of tools and services to help keep the community together. Version control, issue tracking, IRC/Slack, mailing lists, web hosting. Each of these are tools that the actual community (the open source project) uses. The project's leaders are free to adopt (or not) codes of conduct, licenses, and community norms. Some communities can be welcoming to newbies, others may require that one prove themselves before they are fully accepted. It's not the place for a site like github to mandate community norms for open source projects. Github itself is only one small piece of what makes an open source project tick, and they are overreaching with trying to control open source projects that happen to choose them to handle version control.
That makes some sense. I think GitHub projects are bad for just about all tracking purposes except code and I find them to be rather mediocre for that. I have people that push to use them all the time because it's built in.
I've been starting to question this recently for Github. Github does let anyone put up code, but there's little curation (the stars give you a rough idea but don't let you really drill down to what is really useful and what was starred because someone did a show HN), which means there are plenty of not-so-useful projects and projects with questionable licenses (no license specified = trap)
reply