GitHub to devs: 'We ignored you but we never stopped caring'

GitHub has promised to pay better attention to the concerns of users.

In January, more than 1,100 project maintainers complained the popular code-host was ignoring them.

Now, GitHub's Brandon Keepers has taken the first tentative step to try and soothe the seething masses.

Here's his letter in full:

Dear Open Source Maintainers,

We hear you and we're sorry. We've been slow to respond to your letter and slow to respond to your frustrations.

We're working hard to fix this. Over the next few weeks we'll begin releasing a number of improvements to Issues, many of which will address the specific concerns raised in the letter. But we're not going to stop there. We'll continue to focus on Issues moving forward by adding new features, responding to feedback, and iterating on the core experience. We've also got a few surprises in store.

Issues haven't gotten much attention from GitHub these past few years and that was a mistake, but we've never stopped thinking about or caring about you and your communities. However, we know we haven't communicated that. So in addition to improving Issues, we're also going to kick off a few initiatives that will help give you more insight into what's on our radar. We want to make sharing feedback with GitHub less of a black box experience and we want to hear your ideas and concerns regularly.

We'll be in touch next week. Sorry it's taken so long, and thank you for everything.

—GitHub

The behaviour of Issues on GitHub was the first item on the insurrectionists' list.

GitHub's woes were compounded by outages in late January after a power outage in its main data centre, which required a red-faced mea culpa.

DevShare now officially A Dead Parrot

In other dev news, the new owners of SourceForge have attracted applause for killing off its hated DevShare program, announcing: “As of last week, the DevShare program was completely eliminated”.

DevShare was a revenue-sharing bundling program that led to embarrassment last June, when advertisements were wrapped around the famous open source image-wrangling program The GIMP.

That led other open source maintainers to look elsewhere to host their files – including GitHub.

SourceForge Media president Logan Abbott writes that the platform wants to “restore our reputation as a trusted home for open source software, and this was a clear first step towards that”.

Abbott also says SourceForge and Slashdot will soon get full HTTPS support, and the company will focus on “building out our site features and establishing community trust”. ®