Replacing Git with Git (Interview)

The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source

This week we’re talking to Scott Chacon, one of the co-founders of GitHub, to discuss the history and future of Git and Scott’s new project Git Butler, a branch manager tool that’s aiming to improve the developer experience of Git using Git. We also touch on the contentious topic of open source licensing and the challenges of defining “Open Source”, FSL vs GPL, and more.

Leave us a comment

Changelog++ members save 2 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join today!

Sponsors:

• FireHydrant – The alerting and on-call tool designed for humans, not systems. Signals puts teams at the center, giving you ultimate control over rules, policies, and schedules. No need to configure your services or do wonky work-arounds. Signals filters out the noise, alerting you only on what matters. Manage coverage requests and on-call notifications effortlessly within Slack. But here’s the game-changer…Signals natively integrates with FireHydrant’s full incident management suite, so as soon as you’re alerted you can seamlessly kickoff and manage your entire incident inside a single platform. Learn more or switch today at firehydrant.com/signals
• CrabNebula Cloud – CrabNebula Cloud is here! Distribute Tauri apps and Electron apps with best in class updater. At the heart of CrabNebula Cloud is a purpose-built CDN ready for global scale, and secure updates as a first-class citizen. Learn more at crabnebula.dev/cloud
• Coda – Your all-in-one collaborative workspace. Coda brings teams and tools together for a more organized work day.
• Fly.io – The home of Changelog.com — Deploy your apps and databases close to your users. In minutes you can run your Ruby, Go, Node, Deno, Python, or Elixir app (and databases!) all over the world. No ops required. Learn more at fly.io/changelog and check out the speedrun in their docs.

Featuring:

• Scott Chacon – Twitter, GitHub
• Adam Stacoviak – Mastodon, Twitter, GitHub, LinkedIn, Website
• Jerod Santo – Mastodon, Twitter, GitHub, LinkedIn

Show Notes:

• GitButler
  The post “GitButler is now open source!”
• The Merge

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Bab

1. This week on The Changelog (00:00:00)

2. Sponsor: FireHydrant (00:01:51)

https://firehydrant.com/signals

3. Start the show! (00:04:26)

4. Before Git (00:07:39)

5. What's next? (00:13:50)

6. Specialization vs Generalization (00:20:51)

7. Virtual branches (00:27:53)

8. Sponsor: CrabNebula (00:32:27)

9. Branch naming is a chore (00:35:18)

10. Replace Git with Git (00:38:58)

11. Getting involved in GitButler (00:51:34)

12. Very much decentralized (00:53:37)

13. GitButler server? (00:58:59)

14. Sponsor: Coda (01:03:18)

https://coda.io/changelog

15. Could you partner with GitHub? (01:04:30)

16. FSL vs GPL (01:09:11)

17. The marketability of "Open Source" (01:23:19)

18. Thankful you care enough (01:30:13)

19. "Functional Source" (01:34:35)

20. Getting involved (01:36:27)

21. Attend The Merge (01:39:14)

https://merge.berlin

22. Is this the end? (01:41:34)

23. Outro (01:41:55)