<story><title>GitHub Outage</title><url>https://github.com/#2016-01-27</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Perceptes</author><text>Every time this happens people make clever remarks about how Git is distributed but we&amp;#x27;re all depending on GitHub for so much that we defeat the purpose. But once GitHub comes back up, everyone just gets back to work, trusting and relying on it as much as ever. Eventually it goes down again, and we come back to complain. Convenience is the only thing that we seem to value. (I&amp;#x27;m no different, which makes my comment completely hypocritical.)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>spb</author><text>&amp;gt; clever remarks about how Git is distributed but we&amp;#x27;re all depending on GitHub for so much that we defeat the purpose&lt;p&gt;Yeah, but they&amp;#x27;d be wrong about that purpose.&lt;p&gt;Distributed systems used by people (eg. email, BitTorrent) always have their major hubs (Gmail, The Pirate Bay). That&amp;#x27;s understandable: no product reaches critical mass without a main stream. The strength of a distributed system isn&amp;#x27;t that it has no points of failure: it&amp;#x27;s that, in the event of a significant failure in an established node (eg. TPB&amp;#x27;s downtime at the end of 2014), the community can retarget around a new solution (eg. KickassTorrents) at the point in which the inconvenience of the downtime outweighs the inconvenience of switching habits, without a significant dip in service associated with the switch.&lt;p&gt;In contrast, a truly centralized system like BitKeeper would just outright &lt;i&gt;block&lt;/i&gt; progress if the central node were to deny access (which was, of course, the purpose that led to devs like Linus Torvalds changing their focus for a few months, so they they could scale back to full kernel production as they constructed a workable alternative, in Git).</text></comment>
<story><title>GitHub Outage</title><url>https://github.com/#2016-01-27</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Perceptes</author><text>Every time this happens people make clever remarks about how Git is distributed but we&amp;#x27;re all depending on GitHub for so much that we defeat the purpose. But once GitHub comes back up, everyone just gets back to work, trusting and relying on it as much as ever. Eventually it goes down again, and we come back to complain. Convenience is the only thing that we seem to value. (I&amp;#x27;m no different, which makes my comment completely hypocritical.)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>niutech</author><text>Companies&amp;#x2F;people don&amp;#x27;t learn on their mistakes. Almost everything is on GitHub nowadays. This makes it a SPOF even if Git itself is distributed. More companies should host their projects on premises. There are good open source alternatives to GitHub: Apache Allura, Fossil, GitBucket, GitLab, Phabricator, and Redmine.</text></comment>