On Mutualism of tech (SCM/VCS) giants
Tags: attack, gitlab, bitbucket, github
Published: 2019-06-06 14:33:22

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title: On Mutualism of tech (SCM/VCS) giants
published: true
tags: attack,gitlab,bitbucket,github
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---

Close your eyes, and take a deep breath for, we’re going to have to consider a _holistic_ perspective on something that’s controversial from a lot of perspectives.

I believe you’ve all seen **Game Of Thrones** (For those who haven’t, I’ve added a gist on the next paragraph. Read along and you’ll understand). The last season was… well, in short, not up to a lot of people’s expectations, I give that. But then again, I personally don’t like to see things just for what they are hyped for. I mean, what good is something if you can’t derive some kind of insight from it? Especially that of one, which you can utilize to look at life from a different perspective? Yea —  **_Perspectives_** , that’s what keeps me hooked onto something. That’s what I believe everyone should be hooked to, despite their differences in opinion.

It’s the sequence of events that lead to the different kingdoms to come together to fight a common enemy that I want to bring your attention to. Despite wanting to slash each others’ throats at the sight of one, they were convinced that they need to keep those aside given the importance of the issue at hand — That which will destroy all the kingdoms if not taken care of.(Almost all the kingdoms come together to fight a group of frozen zombies) And I think that that’s something we need to pay closer attention to. _Differences of opinions are going to always exist._ No matter what you are talking about, or considering about — Games, life, your favorite actor, a person, a role model, politics, religion, etc.

And I’m trying to understand how to better handle such differences of opinions — In the ever-changing tech industry. Especially on the developers’ platforms.

I have a lot of criticism on the way we are living — especially that of the tech-dependent community of people that we are. I do understand that there are multiple ways to look at it, of course. **And it’s never black and white — innately grey almost always.**

As a _software developer_, I happened to notice something recently that made me smile, despite the view that I have, on incessant competitions of tech giants. Of course, I understand that competitions are healthy (_that is if carried out in a healthy way_). From an evolutionary perspective, it’s something that’s always going to be there, whether or not we wished they were.

And before I proceed, here’s the list of things you might need to know to get the gist of what I’m rambling on about(You don’t need to know them to understand what I’m trying to say, though).

- SCM/VCS:   
 [Source Control Management](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source_control_management), is a way for developers, to maintain a versioned repository of their code/work. They are now more readily known as VCS (Version Control Systems)
- Github/Gitlab/Bitbucket:  
 These are the tech giants I’m talking about. Simply said, they are the big guns in the VCS ecosystem.

So now that that’s taken care of, here we go.

Github has a really long history. It was the first of the lot. They are, in a lot of ways, a pioneer in an online hub for git repositories. Then came Atlassian’s Bitbucket. They had their own share in the market. And then… Gitlab is a recent giant but its feature set will blow away your mind if you are a developer. (I personally love Github and Gitlab for a variety of reasons!)

But what’s a given is that they are undoubtedly, **competitors**. And fierce ones at that. Far too fierce given the recent surge of open source projects, the ready availability of resources for people — even beginners, and for a lot of other reasons including the ease of use to marketing. Let’s take an evolutionary perspective on this now, shall we?

Those who work in the tech industry, software companies, can never deny the inherent competitions in our domain. It’s the proverbial _survival of the fittest_ way of dealing with things. You either (un)intentionally eat others or get eaten. But then, very few, and I mean this with utmost sincerity — very few actually are ready to face the fact — about their competition and respect their own differences despite being on the same family.

Now that it’s established that competition exists whether or not it’s intended to, let’s take a look at what happened, and why I brought up the analogy of Game of Thrones.

On Thursday of May 2, there was an incident that spanned over all of the above services — Github, Bitbucket, Gitlab. It was an attack on the user repositories by some unknown party. What’s interesting here is, all of them have been attacked in a similar way. The software industry in the modern day is unabashedly surviving on the aforementioned services (for good or _worse_)

What do you do when something like that happens? Specifically, what would you do if you’re affected, and your competitor is affected too? The obvious solution is to fix yourself and let your competitor figure it out themselves. But…

There’s a _moral obligation_ to what one should be doing here. All of the services are primarily user-based(as should be for any successful business for that matter) and it’s more important to get to the solution _faster_ than succeeding in getting to the solution alone _but_ slower. At the end of the day, what matters? **People(_Users,_ if you’re a developer).**

So all these three tech giants did something that’s **highly commendable** and makes me(and millions of developers) smile at the software industry as a whole.

_When you and your competitors are faced with a common enemy, it’s better to keep your differences away and get rid of the enemy first._

Like the famous saying,

> _A friend is one who has the same enemies as you have._

> _— Abraham Lincoln_

And that’s what they did. Isn’t that fantastic? The moment they noticed that their competitors have been attacked as well, they didn’t choose to put their business over their customers. They shared their intelligence, findings so that they could resolve it as early as possible. This is a lesson I wish all of us(developers especially) learn from this incident(Apart from the technical aspects of it).

Even if you have differences of opinion in terms of tools, languages, politics, religion, none of that matters if you look at the bigger picture. And that’s what matters at the end of the day.

Evolutionarily, competitions exist for a variety of reasons. And if you have the [slightest idea of what I’m talking about](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competition_(biology))[1], you’d know that a healthy competition is an essential means of bettering each of the species. But then, if you dig deeper into what a healthy competition is all about, you’ll encounter what is called as a [**_Mutualism_**](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutualism_(biology))[2]. Whether or not the tech giants were aware of it, isn’t the point of it all. It’s whether it is happening despite them knowing.

I’m going to stop here so you have a chance of reading the actual blog(which I highly recommend you read) so you understand what kind of collaboration went on in resolving this ransomware attack. And they have remedies discussing how to revive your repositories if attacked (and links to all the three services!). Have a read.

For more info on the incident, [here’s Github’s Blog](https://github.blog/2019-05-14-git-ransom-campaign-incident-report/?utm_campaign=1557850295&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter&utm_content=1557850295)

P.S: If you look at the blogs of Atlassian Bitbucket and Gitlab you’ll see the same info. They collaborated in writing the blog too! :)

**_[Footnotes (TL;DR for those who hate hyperlinks, courtesy of Wikipedia)]_**  
1. **Competition** is an [interaction](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_interaction) between organisms or species in which both the organisms or species are harmed. [Limited](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limiting_factor) supply of at least one [resource](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_(biological)) (such as food, water, and [territory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Territory_(animal))) used by both can be a factor

2. **Mutualism** describes the ecological [interaction](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_interaction) between two or more [species](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Species) where each species benefits. Mutualism is thought to be the most common type of ecological interaction, and it is often dominant in most communities worldwide.

P.P.S: Now that I’ve covered the optimistic perspective of this, it’s only fair that I also notice the pessimistic perspective of it all. Of course, there’s always two sides to a coin. And I am indeed aware of it. But should we be discussing it? Isn’t the point of the post to be whether there is a coin in the first place, or whether we look at the two sides of it? You tell me, and I’ll heed. :)