Or, more cynically, it took them 6 days to find a way to respond to some of the problems raised by the Business Insider article on GitHub without addressing the article directly.
"Dear GitHub" paints a picture of feature requests going unanswered. To a software developer userbase that isn't damning on it's own. We all understand the realities of software project priorities, and users can be accommodating to their timeline (and changing development platforms isn't a trivial task). But that accommodating attitude is severely damaged by learning the business doesn't care about serving that userbase anymore.
I don't think anyone was expecting a list of specific measures, but more something like what they published today. "We heard you, we'll report back in a month once we figured out what we can do" is (IMHO) better than silence.
It's almost as if they did that, then we would be reading a post on why it is taking so long, and why didn't github supply realtime daily blog posts on exactly what every single engineer is doing every day.
They are damned either way since everyone now days believes they deserve every question they post answered immediately and if they don't they are ignoring their customers. If they do, and then don't turn around and immediately release a product they are also shunned. But the sentiment here these days is pretty needy and entitled so I understand...
What's being asked for here isn't exactly onerous, you know.
It's not unreasonable to expect a response to an open letter, signed by some very nontrivial names, in less than a month.
It's not unreasonable to expect something other than bullshit hand-wavy corpspeak.
It's not unreasonable to address the letter, point by point, and lay out why they're doing or not doing something.
If the organization has grown so bureaucratic that they can't manage these simple few things in a timely manner, that's another huge point against them.
It's always more complex than most on HN think. I've seen it firsthand after AWS outages and the laughably simplistic solutions or complaints offered up here.
So they respond immediately that they are looking into it. Then this post would be raging that it has been 30 days without any updates.
So they should reprioritize everyone who needs to be involved and sideline their current work, move to this project and start tossing updates over the wall to satisfy the mob? There are a lot more people involved with big websites/infrastructure when you have millions of customers and everyone here seems to happily ignore that fact when it is something they believe they are entitled to have because "its easy". They shouldn't be responding w/ hand-wavy answers just to get the enraged masses something to chew on, what happens if they don't come through?
Everyone should just calm down and stop whining. They've responded that they are working on a solution, it will take a while to implement.
> Everyone should just calm down and stop whining. They've responded that they are working on a solution, it will take a while to implement.
As someone who's actually involved in the Dear Github movement and not just some commenter on HN, not a single one of us wanted them to respond immediately with "We're doing this, and this for you RIGHT NOW" and stop everything their doing.
While today's response is a good sign, it does nothing more than satisfy what you should have done from the start. Respond that they are aware of the situation and will have a better response in time. That time could be 3 days, 3 weeks, or 3 months. Just acknowledging that they seen it and are addressing it is good enough.
Their support has been notorious (we've outlined it on the letter) for not being responsive... So the best response is quietness for almost a month, just to say "We see your letter, we will prepare something soon."?
> But the sentiment here these days is pretty needy and entitled so I understand
Don't be so silly. Plenty of people pay for the service, to ensure it serves the purpose it advertises. They're utterly entitled to complain if it doesn't.
Aspiring to communicate with developers as well as Apple does is a perverse goal. Microsoft for example has a status page for their browser work [1] just like Google does for Chrome [2]. (The Microsoft page lets people vote for their favorite features, the Chrome one does it via stars on their tickets.) Something like either of those from Github would be great.
Dunno, the ocean can send back your tennis balls. They'll be went, they may take a long time and they may come back on a different beach altogether, but there's a chance.
ROTFL. I report only when they have really annoying bugs and still don't condone their way of hiding issues from other (paying) users inside a private system. They answer after weeks, if they do, and then they expect me to retest next day. Sorry, but that's not gonna work.
Not true, sometimes they respond with "we'll look at it for the next major release in 2 years". I've seen that on a lot of 5-year-old items that are still broken.
I will grant you that. At the same time, it is a horrible benchmark and it is even more deadly when you compare github, a company, among many, that offers hosting to a monopoly that you can't easily move away from.
But Apple has a reputation of not saying anything outside of the big releases and for the most part didn't have to be responsive because the periodic hype usually drowned out any criticism.
GitHub on the other hand largely owes its reputation to how it is perceived by open source communities. Their perceived value is based less on the quality of their product(s) and more on being the place all open source projects live (moreso than even SourceForge ever was -- even companies like Google and Microsoft have moved their open source projects to GitHub simply because that's where developers expect open source projects to live).
Apple can get by largely on marketing and the perceived quality of their products. GitHub relies on open source projects, even if they don't make any money of them directly. Hosting open source projects is just an advertising expense.
If the majority of noteworthy open source projects left GitHub (especially if they left to the same platform, e.g. GitLab.com or BitBucket) their reputation as "the place where open source projects live" would evaporate and they'd have to fight the same friction for new users as their competitors. Additionally they'd probably become less interesting for third-party integrations as they can no longer serve as a cheap showcase for those products/services. This would again harm their appeal to paid users.
Non-paying customers? I pay for a private repos on my account, and for repos on 3 orgs. That's $82/mo. Many others also pay for private repos. Hardly non-paying customers.
Or, they got the original letter and only then decided to implement some changes. It could take 29 days to get management level approval for switching developement to issues, and to get an idea if all those issue changes are possible, before they are willing to publically announce it
They could have acknowledged the problem quickly, but without an actual plan to implement something useful in a close time frame someone would have called the bluff.
Insulting customers with empty, insincere declarations is worse than working in silence.
