This is GitHub, not git.
Git is great, GitHub not so much ;)

As was mentioned, that has nothing to do with git. However, to answer your question:

Go back a level to https://github.com/Pathoschild/StardewMods and click "Clone or Download". Copy the URL and paste it after "git clone " on the command line (you will need git installed of course).

OR, go to "Releases" on that page (just above the green line) and download whatever the dev prepared as a release.

GitHub takes a bit of getting used to, of course, but it's usually all there. Gists are super handy too.

I've been much more of a Bitbucket user, but Github is fine.

git itself, on the other hand, is amazing for managing code as a dev. For me there's no good reason not to create a git repo and commit like a maniac even if I'm only working locally. I even use git on my iPhone and iPad for storing notes on bitbucket.

If what you're trying to do is check out ONLY that one folder (the value of which is usually questionable, given how interrelated most codebases are...), you want to do what's called a "sparse checkout". Possible, but probably not worth the effort.

Yeah we were like OhMiGod at work and thought what this might mean in the long run, even though MS plays like a good guy for now "yeah we care about the developers and open source and certainly it will stay open to all platforms blaa blaa blaa", and at the same time elsewhere MS is pushing Windows 10 S to laptops, trying to lock up the eco system...

Maybe GitHub will stay usable, but I proposed moving to e.g. GitLab or some other alternative... I already read somewhere that lots of projects have moved from GitHub to GitLab (and probably some others) due to this.

So didn't MS have a direct competitor before, CodePlex, but they shut it down (or put to read-only mode) last year? Yeah I guess they figured they can't compete against GitGub with CodePlex, so instead they closed down CodePlex and bought out GitHub. I guess when earlier MS suggested CodePlex users to migrate to GitHub, the smarter ones figured out MS is going to try to acquire GitHub.

One unrelated but interesting thing was also the fact that apparently GitHub was owned by a private company, and MS just bought it by showing enough money to the owner(s). This reminded me of some people here claiming earlier that Valve/Steam could never be bought out because they are a private company. I guess it just depends how much someone would be willing to pay for it. :)

But that's the key isn't it? Open source is supposed to be open. How can it ever stay open with big money thrown at it? Few pour money into something for philanthropic purposes. They'd want control and a return back on what was invested.

Well, advertising, for one... they now support a massive OSS platform they can point to that validates their company as contributing to the common good*.

Advertising is not cheap, maybe not $7.5B expensive, but they didn't just do it for the advertising, as GitHub has also always been a for-profit platform.

* They've been doing tons to promote this in the last 5 years or so. But OSS people are never happy unless a company gives it *all* away.

RIP Atom Editor.

Sure, companies will save the world. Just like nVidia did with Glide, Creative with Aureal 3d..
..and we'll be lead a happy life in a Microsoft Universe, where everything is (re)written in logo

If I learned anything from life, no money comes free.
I'll hold my stance, nothing good will come of this. Not for GitHub for sure ; p

rip

Yeah, Atom probably gets dumped now. I heard some of the Atom devs are moving to VS Code, I'm using that and it's pretty good.

Get me my tin foil hat...

Now seriously - that is a massive opportunity for industrial espionage for MS - many companies have private repositories there for their stuff... do we really trust MS not to use it? The company that has NSA backdoors in their OS since 1999?

There is no such thing a private on the internet, even things like safe harbour and such like are just words. If those companies have private repositories there then the privacy part should have been written into contracts with the legal provider, otherwise it's just broadcasting the information freely - which u fortunately is very common. It's always a trade off between virtualising your storage to get ease of access/admin/storage against losing ownership, and one that all companies struggle with. I am afraid the era of trust, and companies not using every bit of data they can get their hands on is long since gone. That ide your using, probably dumping a ton of data back to source, the browser browsing git, capturing all that, the os you are using, all reported back.

GitHub have had financial problems for years and the only way they were making money was from private repos and that hasn't really been working out. A lot of devs use self hosting for private stuff and GitHub for open source because that's where the users are. Also Microsoft have several open source projects and put a lot of work into open source, especially on GitHub for years. Microsoft stealing work is my least worries. Besides, Google have also been interested in buying GitHub and I would without a doubt prefer Microsoft over Google.

Microsoft have a lot to prove because of their history and there's been changes that has gained devs trust in them again. I will continue use GitHub, at least for now.

I fully agree. Microsoft is wasting their money and someone (the founder of Github Chris Wanstrath or the investors in Github) got quite rich.

As for the open source community. I guess they might concentrate more on Gitlab now.

Moving from one centralized company-controlled place to another of the same kind would be quite stupid.

Oh, but maybe you were thinking of Gitlab the software, and not gitlab.com the Gitlab instance?

Heh, the modern technology market is pretty fucked-up.