Photo by Yasa

After my post last week about OpenHeatMap’s removal from Github, I’m very pleased to say that it’s back up! The Github support team got in touch quickly after my post. We never did figure out what happened with my emails, but they worked hard with me over the weekend to get all the file removal issues straightened out. As I mentioned in the original article, I’ve been fond of Github for a long time, so I’m very pleased to that we could get this sorted. Thanks to John Greet especially for collaborating with me on the technical side of the removals, on a Saturday afternoon!

I’ve also had a lot of questions about why I didn’t just move to an alternative provider like BitBucket? OpenHeatMap is a niche project that’s only useful to a small, scattered group of people. I open-sourced it so as many of those folks as possible could find it, and in my experience Github’s overall popularity and social hooks make it the best place for projects like that to be discovered. I do think there’s a future for self-hosted alternatives, the way WordPress works with commercial and open off-shoots, but projects like Gitlab still feel very clunky compared to Github right now.