11 ms·

GitHub lost $66M in nine months of 2016

540 points by mobee 10y ago

k0mplex 10y ago
"Lost"
- uiri 10y ago
  The opposit of a profit is a loss. It is unrelated to the non-financial meaning of the term. They had revenue of $98M, a loss of $66M means they spent $164M over that time frame.
mmastrac 10y ago
The thought of losing Github to the startup graveyard is kind of scary. It was bad enough to lose Google Code and when SourceForge had their "great purge" of inactive projects.
- lalos 10y ago
  That's what happens with centralized systems it is inevitable, from the Roman Empire to Google Code nothing is permanent.
  - kobeya 10y ago
    The laws of physics are.
    - lalos 10y ago
      The laws of physics are not centralized as governments, currency or google code / github, that aside they can and most probably are incomplete or expressed in a way that only applies to certain constraints (size, time, theory of relativity comes to mind)
      - ZenoArrow 10y ago
        The laws of physics aren't really laws at all, but rather the best guesses humans have for describing physical processes. There are also more than one set of laws, and they're not all compatible with each other, which is why efforts are being made to provide a unified set of laws. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_everything https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_everything
    - thesagan 10y ago
      I think those are what determines permanency. But let's not be pedantic.
    - knownothing 10y ago
      Right. That's why we never find out we were wrong about anything in science.
      - thebspatrol 10y ago
        The laws of physics aren't interchangeable with our understanding of them
        palunon 10y ago
        And in that case, maybe our understanding that there are laws of physics and that they don't change is false.
        knownothing 10y ago
        That's a philosophically naive view of how science works.
        thebspatrol 10y ago
        Claiming that our understanding of science 500 years ago is at all equitable to the way science works in 2016 is even more naive.
        knownothing 10y ago
        That's the opposite of what I'm claiming so maybe you should work on your reading rather than science. Our understanding changed over 500 years. And in another 500 years some moron will be saying the same thing you are, that we've always had perfect and final knowledge of science, and it will be just as stupid then.
    - s_kilk 10y ago
      Mindless pedantry.
    - betenoire 10y ago
      the laws of physics change each time our understanding does
- ZenoArrow 10y ago
  On the other hand, as Git is a DVCS even if GitHub went down the repos still live on local developer machines, so it'd be easy enough to move to a different Git hosting provider.
  - zitterbewegung 10y ago
    The features that github has would be pretty hard to migrate even to something that has almost 1:1 feature parity like GitLab. I don't know of an export tool they have for all the data associated with github.
    - palunon 10y ago
      They have an import tool : https://docs.gitlab.com/ce/workflow/importing/import_projects_from_github.html https://docs.gitlab.com/ce/workflow/importing/import_project...
  - dom0 10y ago
    Yeah, but you lose a lot. Issues, Wikis, Github Pages, CI, Reviews, Projects etc.
  - carbocation 10y ago
    I moved a bunch of repos to bitbucket, since they support free private repositories (which I need for a small organization that I'm part of). It was, as your comment alludes, extremely quick and easy thanks to the "D" in DVCS. That said, we don't use issues, the wiki, etc.
  - AceJohnny2 10y ago
    People keep bringing that up, but that's missing the bigger picture: GitHub is more than just a git host, it's also a "social hub" where people can fork repos and offer changes back (pull requests), a passable bugtracker (issues), even wiki, and even web host (github.io). Many people have warned that using these added-value features makes you dependent on GitHub (Linus Torvalds has a kernel mirror on GitHub, but for this reason refuses to use its other features). Migrating all that metadata is hard (is it even possible?).
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- Netcob 10y ago
  ...aaand no more OSS! Only half-kidding. So many big and small projects are using GitHub as their primary repository and sometimes their only homepage. And there's all those benefits of it being something of a social network as well, and an issue tracker and so on. I'm sure something else would take its place, but it would take a while before it gets as much momentum.
  - moritzplassnig 10y ago
    I wonder how much of a social network it really is. What's the value you get out of other people having their OSS projects on GitHub? Yes, it's all on one site/domain but if Google Search is your entry point, does it matter if the OSS code lives on Bitbucket, GitHub or GitLab? 4 years ago I thought that my GitHub account will get more important, the identity will matter but is that really the case? I don't see the typical network effects and behavior of a social network. I think all there's is the perception of GitHub being the default choice. That's powerful but far less powerful than truly increased value for me as an user because of the size of the network, you being an user too (eg. Twitter or Uber).
- minimaxir 10y ago
  Fortunately, GitHub Archive exists in the event things go south. https://www.githubarchive.org https://www.githubarchive.org
  - searchfaster 10y ago
    I was just trying to collect all issues raised on github, unfortunately anything before 2015 (the now deprecated timeline API) is not very useful.
- Analemma_ 10y ago
  If they can't stand on their own feet, I imagine somebody would/will buy GitHub at a firesale rather than see it disappear completely. For all their missteps, they have developer mindshare that is the envy of everyone. If we're lucky it would be someone like Google or Microsoft, if we're unlucky it might be Oracle or SalesForce. Whoever it would end up being though, GitHub won't just vanish.
  - ocschwar 10y ago
    I appreciate how GitHub's software platform makes migration elsewhere much easier, making me less leveraged by GitHub the company. That, ironically, makes me REALLY not want them to go under: they don't deserve to.
    - rajathagasthya 10y ago
      Isn't the migration easier because it's just a git repo? I'm curious how GitHub's software platform specifically facilitates easy migration.
      - connorshea 10y ago
        The comprehensive API helps, though that can theoretically be limited if a ton of people try to migrate.
      - palunon 10y ago
        The git repo itself is trivial to migrate (you already have a full copy, just push it somewhere else). The problems are issues, code comments, pull request discussions, etc, which may be harder, and their API helps here.
        mixedCase 10y ago
        Truth be told, an API is an easy way to get app developers to include support for your platform; you aren't going to save yourself from the reality of web scrapers in any case.
- Fiahil 10y ago
  We'll just move the code to gitlab. Git allow us to do it almost painlessly (well, with a missing issue backlog). It's not a big deal.
  - cperciva 10y ago
    99% of the value of github is the user interface, not the mere fact that it's a hosted git repository.
    - Fiahil 10y ago
      I believe gitlab's UI has gotten better lastly. Nevertheless, if 99% of the value provided by github comes from their interface, should we remember how much time they needed to implement the "+1" counters on messages?
      - munchor 10y ago
        Their UI/UX is still nowhere comparable to GitHub's. GitHub is so much simpler to use that GitLab and everyone I talk to seems to have the same opinion. GitLab is still lagging far behind when it comes to user experience, it's just not easy to find stuff.
        0x0 10y ago
        Well, I find both Bitbucket and Gitlab to be superior to GitHub in the UI department. I haven't even been able to find a graphical tree log of branches and commits on GitHub. ("network" on Gitlab, "commits" on Bitbucket). They also both offer unlimited private repositories (albeit bitbucket has a limit on the number of users granted access, but very cheap pricing if you need to bump the user limit.). GitHub only recently introduced unlimited private repositories on their pricing plans. For years GitHub priced themselves out of our reach (with 300+ private repositories, they didn't even offer this as an option beyond "call us")
        tcpekin 10y ago
- duskwuff 10y ago
  > It was bad enough [...] when SourceForge had their "great purge" of inactive projects. What purge? I'm personally aware of some projects which are still on SourceForge which haven't been touched in >10 years. If there was a purge, it must have been limited to projects with no activity whatsoever.
  - gamache 10y ago
    http://www.infoworld.com/article/2929732/open-source-software/sourceforge-commits-reputational-suicide.html http://www.infoworld.com/article/2929732/open-source-softwar...
    - duskwuff 10y ago
      I'm even more confused now. While the project monetization situation was certainly bad, it didn't result in the removal of any content that I'm aware of.
- unethical_ban 10y ago
  Maybe, just maybe, someday we'll have a decentralized web with a web-of-trust identity framework, and people can host their own email, code repository, and even website! P.S. to put a bit more effort into my post: I really do wonder if the discoverability problem of a decentralized web can be better solved for things like social networks, code sharing, etc.
  - dispose13432 10y ago
    You can host your own "GitHub". It's called "GitLab". For my use, it's just as good. The only downside is that for a toy project, you have to spend money and resources on it.
  - rogual 10y ago
    Startup idea for someone: A search engine that only indexes decentralized, self-hosted stuff. No Github, FB, etc. Hell, go ahead and delist all sites using Google Analytics.
- inthewoods 10y ago
  Or is it - to me Github is just another example of the developer tools market cycle. Reminds me a bit of the image hosting market - image hosting company is created and gains momentum, then has to monetize, so they add advertising and people start to drift away when someone else then creates the next image hosting site. In the developer space, it seems pretty much the same. SourceForge was good/cool until it wasn't, so people moved to Github. Now, as Github perhaps gradually loses steam or coolness (might not happen either), another company will emerge (maybe it's Gitlab) who will take share while Github perhaps spins into irrelevance. Wash, rinse, repeat - but each time the software tends to get cheaper and cheaper, creating a massive deflationary environment as the particular developer tool set becomes commodity. Or maybe AWS or Google step in with an actual good product (hasn't happened yet as far as I can tell in CI/CD but hey you never know), and they charge nothing for it because it's part of a basket of services. Margin for the standalone company goes to zero. Developers have, as far as I can tell, almost zero brand loyalty - and that probably makes sense - but it's very tough in my opinion to create great products for developers and make money as a company at the same time.
  - sumedh 10y ago
    > when someone else then creates the next image hosting site. If I am not mistaken Imgur is doing quite well for many years now.
    - camus2 10y ago
      How is Imgur making money ?
      - sumedh 10y ago
        Ads, they are making good money from the ads that they removed paid plans and gave all the features to everyone.
        nerdponx 10y ago
        Keep in mind that also have a superior product to just about every image host that came before them (other than Flickr), they are the de-facto favored image host for Reddit, and to top it off have their own social networking features with non-trivial market adoption. With that many eyeballs on your site it's no surprise that even their subtle advertising style [1] is profitable. I'd personally much rather see sponsored posts everywhere than pandering direct marketing and spying/tracking. [1]: http://www.imgurads.com/ http://www.imgurads.com/
- moritzplassnig 10y ago
  GitHub is a $100M ARR revenue company that is probably (2 VC rounds where they had a lot of leverage) still controlled by the founders. They are in a healthy state right now, regardless of the high burn compared to most VC-backed companies. They certainly made a lot of mistakes, had changes in the leadership team and are successful despite that not because of it, but I don't see them dying anytime soon. $60M burn over 9 months after raising $250M isn't horrible either. If they continue to grow which seems to be the case, they will be break-even long before they run out of money. The numbers aren't surprising to me; I'm more surprised why Bloomberg makes such a big deal out of it. GitHub's bigger problem is certainly that they stopped improving, had internal team issues, etc. but that's only a small part of the article (vs. a big focus on those numbers).
  - justinclift 10y ago
    > I'm more surprised why Bloomberg makes such a big deal out of it. They're probably sounding alarmist to try maximising attention. :/
    - moritzplassnig 10y ago
      Could be or they probably don't know the details of GitHub's business, product, etc. If you aren't an engineer, writing for Bloomberg and getting the financials of a hyped startup like GitHub, that article is the outcome in most of the cases. Imagine them writing about Docker - I doubt it would be different. Which is a bummer. I wish there would be somebody more closely analyzing the industry. There's so much going on and I believe that surfacing more of that to the broader community would be beneficial for all of us and result in stronger companies. I think nobody wants to see GitHub going out of Business. We need health competition (as consumers of their products). That GitLab forced pressure on them to improve the product is awesome. I wish Bloomberg would have put more focus on the cultural/leadership issues because a more diverse/inclusive GitHub, again, is better for all of us.
      - monkmartinez 10y ago
        > If you aren't an engineer, writing for Bloomberg and getting the financials of a hyped startup like GitHub, that article is the outcome in most of the cases. Imagine them writing about Docker - I doubt it would be different. And it shouldn't be different. If the financials are not well, then the financials are not well. Docker, like github, DOES NOT have their future "locked up" 100%. There are a lot of reasons why both could ultimately fail and burning piles of cash seems pretty darn relevant despite the echo chamber that is Silicon Valley.
dijit 10y ago
Part of me is glad the "inclusive" practices of only hiring women and minorities isn't being rewarded. At the same time, GitHub really is at the centre of opensource- how can they be losing money when they are literally the defacto code hosting site? And if they go under, who could replace them?
- jjawssd 10y ago
  Gitlab is a fully featured and ready full replacement for Github. Additionally, the Gitlab team is far more competent and listens better to user feedback.
  - enraged_camel 10y ago
    I have never used GitLab, but I keep hearing lots of positive things. Is there anything they don't do as well or better than Github?
    - asb 10y ago
      Site responsiveness, though they're working hard in that.
      - sanswork 10y ago
        It's pretty ok if you host yourself(which is easy to do(on DO) thanks to the omnibus package).
    - speg 10y ago
      Although it's made a lot of progress the past few version the design/UX of Gitlab is a bit lacking.
      - awhildy 10y ago
        We are working really hard on improving the design and UX of GitLab. We'd love to learn what we can do to make the experience better for you. Please let us know if you have any specific suggestions or problems that we can tackle. Feel free to comment on this issue (https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/25752 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/25752) create an issue if that is easier (https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/new https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/new). Thanks!
wjossey 10y ago
I hope this is a temporary blip on the radar for Github, and that they return to profitability very quickly. Github should be a pillar platform in our community for the next decade, and the only way for them to become that is via profitability.
- was_boring 10y ago
  Why should it? They weren't responsive to user demands for years, routinely break features (checkbox saving is broken right now), and have terrible discovery and search. If anything we should be cheering for gitlab. Atleast we can modify it locally.
  - wjossey 10y ago
    Because we should be cheering for Gitlab, and Github, and any other major competitor in the space to perform well and be stable (and independent, ideally). Competition & long term stability means that they can focus on the features that are most meaningful for their user base. If their revenue stream continues to be poor, they may begin making short-term decisions to prop up revenue, which ultimately will lead to a much poorer product over the long term.
  - dom0 10y ago
    Just anecdotal evidence: I contacted support twice, the latest incident just a couple days ago, and they fixed it in both instances in one or two days.
kumarski 10y ago
I always freak about some other country attacking github. The world would crumble/ it's probably some sort of weird national security scenario.
- Asparagirl 10y ago
  An attack on StackOverflow would be as bad or worse. These sites should probably be protected as areas of national strategic importance, like how the US protected the NYC docks during WWII.
  - rm_-rf_slash 10y ago
    I agree completely. Informational infrastructure is not taken as seriously as it should be.
  - untog 10y ago
    Not really. StackOverflow is mirrored and archived everywhere, like in the Google Cache. Github is read/write, and can't be mirrored anywhere near as easily.
    - BuuQu9hu 10y ago
      These folks are archiving all non-fork github repos: https://www.softwareheritage.org/ https://www.softwareheritage.org/ There are other github mirrors too.
  - abraae 10y ago
    Perhaps the federal government should take over IT security for github and SO? )
  - hguant 10y ago
    It will be very interesting to see what entities are labeled as national security assets as the DoD begins to view 'cyber' a core battleground. What's the programming equivalent to a national strategic resource? How do you write the spec on that - "We must be able to immediately have access to 100,000 programmer-hours per 16 day period, at a skill level of no less than x% of industry average"? How do you implement that? My thought is that, apart from core infrastructure, and expanding internal capabilities, there's not going to be governmental protection of businesses/American internet entities (aside from what protection already exists in the form of legal code), if only because it would compete/displace with already existing businesses (CloudFlare, Akami, etc) which is something the US is loathe to do (which is part of the reason why flood insurance is so messed up - there exists a program to help homeowners get flood insurance, but it's by law required to not displace existing insurers).
sergiotapia 10y ago
>The new digs gave employees a reason to come into the office. Visitors would enter a lobby modeled after the White House’s Oval Office before making their way to a replica of the Situation Room. The company also erected a statue of its mascot, a cartoon octopus-cat creature known as the Octocat. The 55,000-square-foot space is filled with wooden tables and modern art. The Sillicon Valley episodes write themselves it seems haha. This is hilarious.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- niftich 10y ago
  I'm hesitant to call this, and their hotel retreats and jet-setting travel 'opulence' out of a sense of decency, but... I guess I'm just a lot more frugal, and mostly isolated from this culture.
  - BurningFrog 10y ago
    I don't begrudge anyone all the opulence they can afford. But when they can't afford it, my eyes start rolling pretty hard.
  - crucini 10y ago
    Back in the dotcom boom, I think Philip Greenspun leased a Ferrari and lent it to employees in rotation. That looked insanely wasteful (since most people thought the company owned it) but was probably way cheaper than this stuff - and more awesome too.
- dawnerd 10y ago
  Their CEO looks like he comes right from the show.
  - MaxLeiter 10y ago
    https://i.imgur.com/s5Bonrs.png https://i.imgur.com/s5Bonrs.png
drchiu 10y ago
I can't find the blog post, but some blog wrote a while ago why VCs invest in companies like Github. TL;DR -- basically it provides infrastructure for other startups. The business itself may not be a great business due to the amount of cost it takes to run it -- but it's necessary for the running of other ventures. Sort of like highways and non-toll bridges.
- ktamura 10y ago
  >The business itself may not be a great business due to the amount of cost it takes to run it -- but it's necessary for the running of other ventures. The latter half of the statement applies to Stripe as well. The big difference between GitHub and Stripe is that Stripe's business model is more directly tied to the growth of entrepreneurship economy: the more money goes through Stripe-powered businesses, the more money Stripe makes. In GitHub's case, the correlation is less direct and less predictable.
- cperciva 10y ago
  Are you saying that VCs are investing because they see companies like GitHub as being public goods? That's contrary to normal investing principles, unless there's some reason to think that a VC investing will result in their portfolio companies having superior access.
  - LiamMcCalloway 10y ago
    As a natural monopoly seems closer to the GP's argument.
  - stock_toaster 10y ago
    This could be the article the parent was referencing: http://words.steveklabnik.com/is-npm-worth-26mm http://words.steveklabnik.com/is-npm-worth-26mm
  - joering2 10y ago
    Actually... without any proofs whatsover, who knows who is really glancing over private repos parked at GitHub. I bet there are many projects with multi-million dollar source code (aka secret sauce) that many would love to look into.
pep_guardiola 10y ago
please guys get your shit together. I guess I would be able to figure out an alternative but a big chunk of my life as a programmer is centered around Github. It would be a major let down to see them perish.
- h1d 10y ago
  Maybe someone said that about SourceForge 10 years ago.
pinkrooftop 10y ago
Maybe they'll be the next Verizon aquisition
Longhanks 10y ago
That and their open racism (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11049067 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11049067). Hopefully, they wake up soon enough and stop this bs.
- st3v3r 10y ago
  I'm not seeing a shred of racism there. I'm seeing a white, straight male not being treated like he's special, and interpreting that as racism.
  - OJFord 10y ago
    > I'm not seeing a shred of racism there. How about: > it is very hard to even interview people who are 'white' which makes things challenging, > Some of the biggest barriers to progress are white women > This is not work for white folks to lead I think maybe you read only the comment, and not the article it was commenting on: http://uk.businessinsider.com/github-the-full-inside-story-2016-2 http://uk.businessinsider.com/github-the-full-inside-story-2...
  - gpm 10y ago
    Read the article linked, some key quotes > "it is very hard to even interview people who are 'white' which makes things challenging" - anonymous insider, presumably someone in a position to interview people > "Some of the biggest barriers to progress are white women" - Lead of social impact team > "This is not work for white folks to lead." - Slide in talk given by above lead > "We need solidarity with our Asian friends and colleagues" - Same slide (This one is especially odd, Asian's are over-represented in tech as a percentage of the population) > "Some of the biggest barriers to progress are white women" - Same slide > "don't think we'll succeed teaching white, male middle managers empathy and compassion any time soon [new paragraph] so let's limit their scope of damage" - Social impact team technical director via twitter
    - st3v3r 10y ago
      Not seeing racism. Again, just seeing white men not treated as the default standard, and white people here seeing that as racism.
joeax 10y ago
The takeaways from the article: (1) They went on a hiring spree in 2015-16, dramatically increasing their costs before their revenue was able to keep up. Something to keep an eye on in 2017. (2) Half the team is remote! Kudos to them for making this work.
- jimmywanger 10y ago
  > Half the team is remote! Kudos to them for making this work. FWIW, I believe they're retrenching heavily on this. I remember reading articles about how they're trying to centralize management, and if you look at their jobs page (https://github.com/about/jobs#positions https://github.com/about/jobs#positions) most of their eng positions are SF only, at least the three or so I looked at. Only their support positions seem to be remote.
  - johnward 10y ago
    They still had remote positions the last time I looked but they were more client facing roles. Sales and tech consultants.
    - jimmywanger 10y ago
      From looking more closely at the job descriptions, it seems most of them are tied to a geographic location, as opposed to previously, where remote was always an option. Seems like now remote has to be offered explicitly for your position.
- noobermin 10y ago
  >Half the team is remote! Kudos to them for making this work. Are you being sarcastic (esp, in light of your point 1) )? Out of curiosity from someone not in the know, would remote employees cost more or less than ones made to come in every morning?
  - tqkxzugoaupvwqr 10y ago
    joeax means managing / coordinating remote workers is often harder than on-site workers because of different time zones and conference software problems.
partycoder 10y ago
If you are an investor, you want to invest $1 to get $2 back (aka shareholder value). If your dividends are not growing, you divest and invest somewhere else. Now, the thing is very competitive, and many companies offer "exponential growth". If your growth slows down, if the perspective is not good, divestment starts and that is a downwards spiral. To stay competitive and to prevent an investor run, companies are forced to take massive risks. And risks materialize into huge disasters... like this one apparently.
antirez 10y ago
It's a few years now I can not see Github focused, from the external POV at least, to provide good coder tools. All the new things only marginally improve on what we used to have. I would worry more about that than about the losses themselves, since I feel the losses mostly reflect the fact the company has no clear direction so is spending money on workforce in the hope to have larger effects. Perhaps they don't need more people but more focus.
- politician 10y ago
  Agreed; they need less people and less money. Look at what GitLab's achieved! Maybe it's time to leave the posh accommodations and go back into the wilderness. That said, I feel for the engineering staff that has to deal with the availability requirements and the DDoS events. Those folks are heroes.
camus2 10y ago
Fortunately it is easy to push the same repo to multiple hosts with git. So people, use mirrors instead of putting all your eggs in the same basket. Git is a distributed CVS, relying only on github means you are using it just like SVN.
josho 10y ago
This is an example of how VCs distort the market for other businesses. I had a recent conversation with a prospect and they took issue with the price of our software. Our app is in a specialized industry (ie. a smaller market). We charge a per use fee of $35. This fee enables our customer to immediately earn nearly $200 (a 5x return with no risk to them). Despite the significant benefit and profitability of using the app the prospect took issue with our price and referred to the cost of other apps. It was that conversation that made me realize how we've become accustomed to the quality and price of software that's been heavily subsidized by massive VC investments.
- bbcbasic 10y ago
  > It was that conversation that made me realize how we've become accustomed to the quality and price of software that's been heavily subsidised by massive VC investments. Not to mention open source, sponsored by big companies, universities and passionate individual contributors. E.g. try and sell a compiler, a JS framework or an IDE.
  - danmaz74 10y ago
    > or an IDE I think JetBrains is doing fine...
    - mark242 10y ago
      Didn't they switch to the subscription model because people weren't upgrading enough to sustain the business?
      - stuartaxelowen 10y ago
        And it worked.
    - tajen 10y ago
      and Atlassian is selling fine when there are heaps of open-source bugtrackers, wiki, git hosters, build engines and chat tools.
andrewbinstock 10y ago
GitHub has some significant challenges ahead that are not mentioned in this article. As companies move to the cloud, they will run their own development ecosystems--SCM, CI, defect tracking, etc.--in their own cloud; and hosting services like GitHub and BitBucket will have a hard time competing. Already Oracle (and surely other vendors) are offering developer cloud instances that provide these services all wired together.
- hinkley 10y ago
  BitBucket is owned by Atlassian now. Stash is rebranded as BitBucket and while it has its issues, its integration with Confluence and Jira is at least as good as any of the other Atlassian integrations. So if you're hosting your own tools, BB still gets paid and you don't have to switch vendors. (my personal feelings about Atlassian rank somewhere between dislike and dread, but the BitBucket integration is one the least offensive bits).
throwaway2222c 10y ago
I once met Chris Wanstrath. He is the most arrogant guy I ever met. I travelled for an hour and he sat there staring at his phone between looking at me like something he had trodden in. At least pointing tens of companies at Gitlab has made me feel better.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
etnos 10y ago
The whole VC structure in Silicon Valley sounds closer to "Planned Economy" than socialism does. Just a handful is deciding what is to be "disrupt"
ThePhysicist 10y ago
Considering the piles of venture money they received it sometimes startles me how few new features they have pushed to production in the last two years. Gitlab, on the other hand, seems to push a new major feature every other month. Of course it helps that they don't have to worry about running a SaaS service for several tens of millions of users, but still it seems that Github is too focused on minor improvements and might just lose the game against the open-source approach of Gitlab.
therealjohn 10y ago
Am I the only one the tone in this article bothers? The author keeps criticizing and belittling the CEO, who is obviously significantly smarter than him. There might be correlation there.
bootload 10y ago
"GitHub quickly became essential to the code-writing process at technology companies of all sizes and gave birth to a new generation of programmers by hosting their open-source code for free." How much would you be willing to pay to store your open-source code at github?
- wcummings 10y ago
  $0
- cyphar 10y ago
  $0. I would consider paying ~$30/mo for GitLab though, because it's free (as in freedom) software.
  - romanovcode 10y ago
    Agree, I would not mind paying for Gitlab private repos some sum of money (probably not 30/mo tho). Gitlab is superior in every possible way than Github except for it's speed.
    - cyphar 10y ago
      I'd pay for public repos (I don't need private repos, all of my code is free software). In fact, I would _donate_ $30/mo to GitLab if I used their services enough (unfortunately the projects I maintain live on GitHub and I don't have the authority to change that). I have no problem donating to free software (I donate $10/mo to Neovim, $10 to SirCmpwn (sway), and other bits and bobs here and there -- as well as donating my time to openSUSE, runC and the OCI). The only condition is that I have to use it enough that I feel that they are owed some money to make the software even better.
    - sytse 10y ago
      I hear you. GitLab self hosted is fast but GitLab.com is too slow. From Monday we're having a daily 50 minute call to coordinate our efforts around https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitaly https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitaly We'll try to reduce IOPS and make GitLab.com fast.
kristopolous 10y ago
Staying in an annual budget of $98 million sounds feasible for a place like github. That's an $8.1m/month burn. Just be a little less elaborate, I'm sure this is doable.
cyphar 10y ago
I'm surprised that they actually have a recreation of the oval office in their office. How arrogant and self-important do you have to be to honestly believe that such a parody is in any way justified? No, GitHub, you're not in charge of the free software world. You were just the first decent choice for code hosting. GitLab is eating your lunch and you're pretending that it's not happening.
- bswinnerton 10y ago
  The oval office isn't around anymore.
  - cyphar 10y ago
    I mean, that's an even more frugal waste of money. Still, the fact they even had something like that is the problem. It's like something from an episode of Silicon Valley.
Animats 10y ago
Uh oh. So much is dependent on Github. Is there a full mirror?
- markdog12 10y ago
  You can easily mirror with Gitlab: https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/workflow/repository_mirroring.html https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/workflow/repository_mirroring.htm...
  - Animats 10y ago
    That's not the question. I'm not concerned about mirroring my stuff. I'm concerned about the disappearance of other people's stuff, perhaps forgotten by them but still used by others, if Github tanks.
- BuuQu9hu 10y ago
  Not a complete one, but: https://www.softwareheritage.org/ https://www.softwareheritage.org/
bsder 10y ago
Apparently "git cash" isn't working very well ...
- flukus 10y ago
  git rm -r --cached . This is apparently working very well.
- tomschlick 10y ago
  More like "git spend" is running in an infinite loop on frivolous bullshit. 600 employees is pretty crazy for what GH is.
234dd57d2c8db 10y ago
You know, I can't say I'm surprised. When github first started, it was just about code. Nothing else. Then they started with all the identity politics crap. As soon as a company starts parroting political messages like "white middle managers have no empathy" instead of, you know, building good tools, I know it's time to find another solution. I was a paying customer, and when github got into the political game, I dropped them like a bad habit. I'm not screwing around here, I'm trying to build a business and your political aspirations do _nothing_ for me as a customer, so why don't you take them and shove em. Happy customer at bitbucket ever since.
- Girlang 10y ago
  Bingo. Let "DailyKos" deal with "Social Justice". Let GitHub deal with source code management.
dkarapetyan 10y ago
This is why the mania around unicorns is not sustainable. The best part is that github isn't even burning money that fast compared to some of the other ones.
nunez 10y ago
SIX HUNDRED EMPLOYEES?! I don't care how advanced GitHub is; that is an INSANE number of employees for this kind of business!
- pm 10y ago
  ~4000 for Twitter (although I vaguely recall a culling recently, not sure how many they let go).
  - camus2 10y ago
    I'm curious what does these 4000 employees do at Twitter ? let's say half of them are engineers, what are these 2000 engineers working on ? Twitter is mostly CRUD and messaging.
    - LeonidBugaev 10y ago
      Analytics, Reporting, Ad management and Biding platform, Fraud detection, and way more. This basic CRUD app is just user-facing thing, and now remember that they are making money not because of you, but because of publishers. This is where main functionality is.
    - pm 10y ago
      There'd be more than the consumer-facing systems. Whether they require 4000 people to run it all is another question, but without a deeper look into what's running, it would be hard to surmise.
    - indexerror 10y ago
      This is fitting here: http://danluu.com/sounds-easy/ http://danluu.com/sounds-easy/
- camel_Snake 10y ago
  Why?
  - deleted 10y ago
Girlang 10y ago
Maybe if they cared about source code management instead of "social justice" they'd have a product.
tim333 10y ago
It's funny reading Tom Preston-Werner's write up on GitHub in Dec 08: >You Don’t Need Venture Capital >A lot has been written recently about how the venture capital world is changing. I don’t pretend to be an expert on the subject, but I’ve learned enough to say that a web startup like ours doesn’t need any outside money to succeed. I know this because we haven’t taken a single dime from investors. We bootstrapped the company on a few thousand dollars and became profitable the day we opened to the public and started charging for subscriptions. I guess VCing up and losing money is a choice. They probably figure the odd $100m cash loss will end up as $1bn+ on the market cap. He looks quite cheerful in his rich list write up http://www.forbes.com/profile/tom-preston-werner/ http://www.forbes.com/profile/tom-preston-werner/
- sleepyhead 10y ago
  He was right though. They didn't need it. But it was just too much money for the founders to say no to. I'm also in the bootstrapping camp but I don't blame them for filling up their bank account.
huntermonk 10y ago
> "The income statement shows a loss of $66 million in the first three quarters of this year. That’s more than twice as much lost in any nine-month time frame by Twilio Inc., another maker of software tools founded the same year as GitHub." These sort of statements are a little annoying. I understand that Bloomberg has to write for a less technical audience, but the writer must know this isn't an accurate comparison.
DeBraid 10y ago
Short-selling companies that make very popular and effective developer tools is low expected value play.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
christop 10y ago
Interesting to read there (and nowhere else that I could find) that GitHub co-founder Scott Chacon left the company this year.
nikcub 10y ago
Interesting that 600 employees sounds like a lot, but it works out that revenue/employee p.a is $230k+ - which is above average for enterprise SaaS[0] - and you have the 25%+ annual growth on that That said, they should be doing better margin-wise since they would have relatively lower customer acquisition costs compared to the market since they have so much developer recognition. [0] http://tomtunguz.com/revenue-per-employee-trends/ http://tomtunguz.com/revenue-per-employee-trends/
moritzplassnig 10y ago
I'm surprised that the author doesn't focus more on the other numbers (the burn numbers aren't surprising to me - see here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13190371 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13190371). According to the author's data, GitHub had $25M in ARR in Sep'14. That's 2 years and 2 months after they announced their $100M round, so probably 28 months after they signed a term sheet. If you calculate back from there, let's say $12M in ARR in Sep'13, $6M in Sep'12 and $4-5M in May'12 - that's insane (them raising $100M). Not sure if Bloomberg's data is correct but if we look at the other data points (probably same source data), $90M in ARR in Sep'16, it seems to be accurate. Sep'12: $6M (assumed) -- raised $100M a couple of months earlier Sep'13: $12M (assumed) Sep'14: $25M (according to Bloomberg) Sep'15: $50M (assumed) Sep'16: $90M (according to Bloomberg)
stefek99 10y ago
How come such a fantastic product is not massively profitable?
Shorel 10y ago
Everyone is comparing GitHub with GitLab in the comments, but they are ignoring the other competitor. I think Atlassian is the company that makes the most out of the git marketplace, even if they have fewer customers. They are simply more efficient, and are ready to take over with Bitbucket if GitHub fails. Also, many companies pay for Jira+Confluence even if they use GitHub.
- taspeotis 10y ago
  If you're looking for a dark horse, look at Microsoft's offering [1]. Those are some deep pockets that aren't going to run out. [1] https://www.visualstudio.com/team-services/ https://www.visualstudio.com/team-services/
  - duiker101 10y ago
    I wasn't actually aware of this, looks very nice! I should probably take it for a spin! Has anyone tried it?
    - Sacho 10y ago
      We use visual studio team services(previously visual studio online) for all our projects. The main pro is integration with all other MS stuff(something you expect as a MS-based dev). MS has also been working hard into making it usable with a Git repository instead of TFVC, in fact, there's a lot of features and workflows that only work with Git - e.g. branch for work item, pull requests, etc(I'm debating switching from TFVC to Git because of this). It has a lot of the features you'd expect from an issue tracker - projects, teams, kanban boards, iterations, a dashboard, the "work item" with all its configurable fields.. since it uses TFS as a backend, there's also the awesome query builder which gives you tons of ways to create queries and filters to dig into your work items - this is probably great for management. There's also a very complex permissions system(I assume, again using the TFS backend). The main con for me however is the abysmal UI around discussions on work items. The discussion by default is stuck in a tiny part of the already cluttered work item screen(this has changed recently as they introduced the ability to fully customize the layout). There's a single textbox with a "smart editor"(ugh) where you can type your comment, and some limited hyperlinking(you can address team members and link work items), and you need to press "save"(which is actually under the default option "save and close") for the work item to add your comment. It's pretty clunky to monitor conversations(email notifications) vs github's notification hub. Oh, and they're a bit light on various smaller features, but they've been churning out new updates constantly, so I think they'll catch up. As a top-down, management-heavy approach, TSVS is probably a fine system. As a collaborative workspace for a small dev team with very little management, I find it lacking the killer feature of rich discussions that Github has.
rexreed 10y ago
It seemed that Github was doing just fine accomplishing their mission and goals when they were bootstrapping, but things got ridiculous with a massive (and possibly unneeded) VC investment. Or at least an investment of that humongous sum of money. Can someone explain the rationale behind pumping all this money into firms that clearly don't need such vast amounts of it, which only spurs exorbitant and unnecessary spending? Is it some sort of non-obvious game of unicorn musical chairs hoping for a hyper inflated exit before the music stops?
- fredsters_s 10y ago
  It's opportunistic investment from investors who predict continued growth. The hook for the founders? Who knows. My guesses: - assumption that eventually the enterprise play will win the majority of the $ in the market - that there is possibly a winner-takes-all dynamic in the market, given the strong ecosystem benefits Also, it's very expensive to sell top-down to enterprises. In SaaS your cost of sale is up-front (sales salaries, commissions, acquiring the customer etc) whereas the payout is typically over time. Even if the contracts are mostly paid up front, you still have to build the enterprise sales team and ramp the reps, which can take around 6 months. So it's possible that the logical premise "pumping all this money into firms that clearly don't need such vast amounts of it" may be incorrect if enterprise sales success is required for long term success and they don't have the cash to 'go enterprise'. Will be fascinating to see how this market plays out. My money is on Sid.
- nslindtner 10y ago
  From the outside it looks like a land grab game. Competetion is heating up (bitbucket, gitlab, tfs online, etc).
  - rexreed 10y ago
    but is throwing all this money at a company who clearly doesn't know how to effectively deploy it to grab that land (those expenditures are ridiculous) the best way to do it?
    - 10y ago
alistproducer2 10y ago
The subtext to this (at least why this made it to the front page) is "github is lighting money on fire, can't last forever, but github is infrastructure-status now what if it disappears?" I think this anxiety is why there's a lot of work being done in the decentralized space right now. The UX-side of "web 3.0" is sorely lacking but I think it's only a matter of time before people begin to crack it. I'd love to see some research into what it would take (in terms of network size) to provide robust, decentralized replacements for service-as-infrastructure products like Github.
- daveguy 10y ago
  Wait. We're on web 3.0 now? What does this version add?
  - pvdebbe 10y ago
    Hard dependencies to JS
  - cr3ative 10y ago
    About two meg per page
  - alistproducer2 10y ago
    Decentralized applications and infrastructure.
vacri 10y ago
> The company paid to send employees jetting across the globe to Amsterdam, London, New York and elsewhere. If a company as vitally important to an industry as Github is to software can't do this... it's time to really worry.
tscs37 10y ago
I personally moved away from Github, mostly due to political issues, secondarily because of this funding issue. Can't keep burning money forever. I put my private stuff on my own Gogs instance or on Bitbucket, tho I like Gogs UI much better, it's closer to github. The community fork of it, Gitea, is also making progress to enable pull request federation. Would be awesome if I could work together with people using Gitlab, Github or Gitea without them having to sign up to my site. They just fork to their own site, make their patches and submit the pull request to my upstream. GitHub has little value to me, the social network they built can move elsewhere like it is for many programmers and coders.
- new299 10y ago
  Which political issues? I'm honestly curious.
  - tomp 10y ago
    I'm guessing parent is referring to stuff like the "meritocracy rug" and "code of conduct".
  - tscs37 10y ago
    I'm not particularly comfortable with how Github has handled their community and executes takedowns of repositories. I don't feel like my code would be safe on github.
pavlik_enemy 10y ago
It feels that GitHub failed to create an ecosystem and did little innovating it just turned a single-tenant application to multi-tenant (which sometimes is no small feat). They could've created other developer-oriented products - issue management, CI, code review etc and they could've innovated more in their primary area that is storing code like providing better tools for code exploration than simple search (see GitQL project).
galfarragem 10y ago
Github is too good to fail IMHO: if they raise a bit their prices, all their paying costumers will still stay and their money problems will mitigate. By the other hand, Atom is clearly a long term loser and they should let it go. Their contribution to the text editing world was terrific but now they should focus where they are the best.
- h1d 10y ago
  Atom lose against which ones?
rampage101 10y ago
I remember reading a few years ago how GitHub and StackOverflow were the new resumes. You needed a good profile on both to have any chance of getting hired. It just goes to show that having a profile on a website does not define who you are as a developer. Websites go under, and better ones will rise up. I hope GitHub does stay around... I do not care for their "politics" but I like their service.
- iso-8859-1 10y ago
  What do you consider politics? If they insert relevant ad links in the comments of your code, would you mind?
throwaway1892 10y ago
A blog that could be relevant http://hintjens.com/blog:111 http://hintjens.com/blog:111
compsciphd 10y ago
The thing not mentioned is that Bloomberg is a Github Enterprise customer. They ran their own git server for a bit and then transitioned the whole company to github and the pull-request model (relatively quickly too)

540 points by mobee 10y ago

k0mplex 10y ago

"Lost"

uiri 10y ago
The opposit of a profit is a loss. It is unrelated to the non-financial meaning of the term. They had revenue of $98M, a loss of $66M means they spent $164M over that time frame.

mmastrac 10y ago

The thought of losing Github to the startup graveyard is kind of scary. It was bad enough to lose Google Code and when SourceForge had their "great purge" of inactive projects.

lalos 10y ago
That's what happens with centralized systems it is inevitable, from the Roman Empire to Google Code nothing is permanent.
- kobeya 10y ago
  The laws of physics are.
  - lalos 10y ago
    The laws of physics are not centralized as governments, currency or google code / github, that aside they can and most probably are incomplete or expressed in a way that only applies to certain constraints (size, time, theory of relativity comes to mind)
    - ZenoArrow 10y ago
      The laws of physics aren't really laws at all, but rather the best guesses humans have for describing physical processes. There are also more than one set of laws, and they're not all compatible with each other, which is why efforts are being made to provide a unified set of laws. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_everything https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_everything
  - thesagan 10y ago
    I think those are what determines permanency. But let's not be pedantic.
  - knownothing 10y ago
    Right. That's why we never find out we were wrong about anything in science.
    - thebspatrol 10y ago
      The laws of physics aren't interchangeable with our understanding of them
      - palunon 10y ago
        And in that case, maybe our understanding that there are laws of physics and that they don't change is false.
      - knownothing 10y ago
        That's a philosophically naive view of how science works.
        thebspatrol 10y ago
        Claiming that our understanding of science 500 years ago is at all equitable to the way science works in 2016 is even more naive.
        knownothing 10y ago
        That's the opposite of what I'm claiming so maybe you should work on your reading rather than science. Our understanding changed over 500 years. And in another 500 years some moron will be saying the same thing you are, that we've always had perfect and final knowledge of science, and it will be just as stupid then.
  - s_kilk 10y ago
    Mindless pedantry.
  - betenoire 10y ago
    the laws of physics change each time our understanding does
ZenoArrow 10y ago
On the other hand, as Git is a DVCS even if GitHub went down the repos still live on local developer machines, so it'd be easy enough to move to a different Git hosting provider.
- zitterbewegung 10y ago
  The features that github has would be pretty hard to migrate even to something that has almost 1:1 feature parity like GitLab. I don't know of an export tool they have for all the data associated with github.
  - palunon 10y ago
    They have an import tool : https://docs.gitlab.com/ce/workflow/importing/import_projects_from_github.html https://docs.gitlab.com/ce/workflow/importing/import_project...
- dom0 10y ago
  Yeah, but you lose a lot. Issues, Wikis, Github Pages, CI, Reviews, Projects etc.
- carbocation 10y ago
  I moved a bunch of repos to bitbucket, since they support free private repositories (which I need for a small organization that I'm part of). It was, as your comment alludes, extremely quick and easy thanks to the "D" in DVCS. That said, we don't use issues, the wiki, etc.
- AceJohnny2 10y ago
  People keep bringing that up, but that's missing the bigger picture: GitHub is more than just a git host, it's also a "social hub" where people can fork repos and offer changes back (pull requests), a passable bugtracker (issues), even wiki, and even web host (github.io). Many people have warned that using these added-value features makes you dependent on GitHub (Linus Torvalds has a kernel mirror on GitHub, but for this reason refuses to use its other features). Migrating all that metadata is hard (is it even possible?).
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
Netcob 10y ago
...aaand no more OSS! Only half-kidding. So many big and small projects are using GitHub as their primary repository and sometimes their only homepage. And there's all those benefits of it being something of a social network as well, and an issue tracker and so on. I'm sure something else would take its place, but it would take a while before it gets as much momentum.
- moritzplassnig 10y ago
  I wonder how much of a social network it really is. What's the value you get out of other people having their OSS projects on GitHub? Yes, it's all on one site/domain but if Google Search is your entry point, does it matter if the OSS code lives on Bitbucket, GitHub or GitLab? 4 years ago I thought that my GitHub account will get more important, the identity will matter but is that really the case? I don't see the typical network effects and behavior of a social network. I think all there's is the perception of GitHub being the default choice. That's powerful but far less powerful than truly increased value for me as an user because of the size of the network, you being an user too (eg. Twitter or Uber).
minimaxir 10y ago
Fortunately, GitHub Archive exists in the event things go south. https://www.githubarchive.org https://www.githubarchive.org
- searchfaster 10y ago
  I was just trying to collect all issues raised on github, unfortunately anything before 2015 (the now deprecated timeline API) is not very useful.
Analemma_ 10y ago
If they can't stand on their own feet, I imagine somebody would/will buy GitHub at a firesale rather than see it disappear completely. For all their missteps, they have developer mindshare that is the envy of everyone. If we're lucky it would be someone like Google or Microsoft, if we're unlucky it might be Oracle or SalesForce. Whoever it would end up being though, GitHub won't just vanish.
- ocschwar 10y ago
  I appreciate how GitHub's software platform makes migration elsewhere much easier, making me less leveraged by GitHub the company. That, ironically, makes me REALLY not want them to go under: they don't deserve to.
  - rajathagasthya 10y ago
    Isn't the migration easier because it's just a git repo? I'm curious how GitHub's software platform specifically facilitates easy migration.
    - connorshea 10y ago
      The comprehensive API helps, though that can theoretically be limited if a ton of people try to migrate.
    - palunon 10y ago
      The git repo itself is trivial to migrate (you already have a full copy, just push it somewhere else). The problems are issues, code comments, pull request discussions, etc, which may be harder, and their API helps here.
      - mixedCase 10y ago
        Truth be told, an API is an easy way to get app developers to include support for your platform; you aren't going to save yourself from the reality of web scrapers in any case.
Fiahil 10y ago
We'll just move the code to gitlab. Git allow us to do it almost painlessly (well, with a missing issue backlog). It's not a big deal.
- cperciva 10y ago
  99% of the value of github is the user interface, not the mere fact that it's a hosted git repository.
  - Fiahil 10y ago
    I believe gitlab's UI has gotten better lastly. Nevertheless, if 99% of the value provided by github comes from their interface, should we remember how much time they needed to implement the "+1" counters on messages?
    - munchor 10y ago
      Their UI/UX is still nowhere comparable to GitHub's. GitHub is so much simpler to use that GitLab and everyone I talk to seems to have the same opinion. GitLab is still lagging far behind when it comes to user experience, it's just not easy to find stuff.
      - 0x0 10y ago
        Well, I find both Bitbucket and Gitlab to be superior to GitHub in the UI department. I haven't even been able to find a graphical tree log of branches and commits on GitHub. ("network" on Gitlab, "commits" on Bitbucket). They also both offer unlimited private repositories (albeit bitbucket has a limit on the number of users granted access, but very cheap pricing if you need to bump the user limit.). GitHub only recently introduced unlimited private repositories on their pricing plans. For years GitHub priced themselves out of our reach (with 300+ private repositories, they didn't even offer this as an option beyond "call us")
        tcpekin 10y ago
duskwuff 10y ago
> It was bad enough [...] when SourceForge had their "great purge" of inactive projects. What purge? I'm personally aware of some projects which are still on SourceForge which haven't been touched in >10 years. If there was a purge, it must have been limited to projects with no activity whatsoever.
- gamache 10y ago
  http://www.infoworld.com/article/2929732/open-source-software/sourceforge-commits-reputational-suicide.html http://www.infoworld.com/article/2929732/open-source-softwar...
  - duskwuff 10y ago
    I'm even more confused now. While the project monetization situation was certainly bad, it didn't result in the removal of any content that I'm aware of.
unethical_ban 10y ago
Maybe, just maybe, someday we'll have a decentralized web with a web-of-trust identity framework, and people can host their own email, code repository, and even website! P.S. to put a bit more effort into my post: I really do wonder if the discoverability problem of a decentralized web can be better solved for things like social networks, code sharing, etc.
- dispose13432 10y ago
  You can host your own "GitHub". It's called "GitLab". For my use, it's just as good. The only downside is that for a toy project, you have to spend money and resources on it.
- rogual 10y ago
  Startup idea for someone: A search engine that only indexes decentralized, self-hosted stuff. No Github, FB, etc. Hell, go ahead and delist all sites using Google Analytics.
inthewoods 10y ago
Or is it - to me Github is just another example of the developer tools market cycle. Reminds me a bit of the image hosting market - image hosting company is created and gains momentum, then has to monetize, so they add advertising and people start to drift away when someone else then creates the next image hosting site. In the developer space, it seems pretty much the same. SourceForge was good/cool until it wasn't, so people moved to Github. Now, as Github perhaps gradually loses steam or coolness (might not happen either), another company will emerge (maybe it's Gitlab) who will take share while Github perhaps spins into irrelevance. Wash, rinse, repeat - but each time the software tends to get cheaper and cheaper, creating a massive deflationary environment as the particular developer tool set becomes commodity. Or maybe AWS or Google step in with an actual good product (hasn't happened yet as far as I can tell in CI/CD but hey you never know), and they charge nothing for it because it's part of a basket of services. Margin for the standalone company goes to zero. Developers have, as far as I can tell, almost zero brand loyalty - and that probably makes sense - but it's very tough in my opinion to create great products for developers and make money as a company at the same time.
- sumedh 10y ago
  > when someone else then creates the next image hosting site. If I am not mistaken Imgur is doing quite well for many years now.
  - camus2 10y ago
    How is Imgur making money ?
    - sumedh 10y ago
      Ads, they are making good money from the ads that they removed paid plans and gave all the features to everyone.
      - nerdponx 10y ago
        Keep in mind that also have a superior product to just about every image host that came before them (other than Flickr), they are the de-facto favored image host for Reddit, and to top it off have their own social networking features with non-trivial market adoption. With that many eyeballs on your site it's no surprise that even their subtle advertising style [1] is profitable. I'd personally much rather see sponsored posts everywhere than pandering direct marketing and spying/tracking. [1]: http://www.imgurads.com/ http://www.imgurads.com/
moritzplassnig 10y ago
GitHub is a $100M ARR revenue company that is probably (2 VC rounds where they had a lot of leverage) still controlled by the founders. They are in a healthy state right now, regardless of the high burn compared to most VC-backed companies. They certainly made a lot of mistakes, had changes in the leadership team and are successful despite that not because of it, but I don't see them dying anytime soon. $60M burn over 9 months after raising $250M isn't horrible either. If they continue to grow which seems to be the case, they will be break-even long before they run out of money. The numbers aren't surprising to me; I'm more surprised why Bloomberg makes such a big deal out of it. GitHub's bigger problem is certainly that they stopped improving, had internal team issues, etc. but that's only a small part of the article (vs. a big focus on those numbers).
- justinclift 10y ago
  > I'm more surprised why Bloomberg makes such a big deal out of it. They're probably sounding alarmist to try maximising attention. :/
  - moritzplassnig 10y ago
    Could be or they probably don't know the details of GitHub's business, product, etc. If you aren't an engineer, writing for Bloomberg and getting the financials of a hyped startup like GitHub, that article is the outcome in most of the cases. Imagine them writing about Docker - I doubt it would be different. Which is a bummer. I wish there would be somebody more closely analyzing the industry. There's so much going on and I believe that surfacing more of that to the broader community would be beneficial for all of us and result in stronger companies. I think nobody wants to see GitHub going out of Business. We need health competition (as consumers of their products). That GitLab forced pressure on them to improve the product is awesome. I wish Bloomberg would have put more focus on the cultural/leadership issues because a more diverse/inclusive GitHub, again, is better for all of us.
    - monkmartinez 10y ago
      > If you aren't an engineer, writing for Bloomberg and getting the financials of a hyped startup like GitHub, that article is the outcome in most of the cases. Imagine them writing about Docker - I doubt it would be different. And it shouldn't be different. If the financials are not well, then the financials are not well. Docker, like github, DOES NOT have their future "locked up" 100%. There are a lot of reasons why both could ultimately fail and burning piles of cash seems pretty darn relevant despite the echo chamber that is Silicon Valley.

dijit 10y ago

Part of me is glad the "inclusive" practices of only hiring women and minorities isn't being rewarded. At the same time, GitHub really is at the centre of opensource- how can they be losing money when they are literally the defacto code hosting site? And if they go under, who could replace them?

jjawssd 10y ago
Gitlab is a fully featured and ready full replacement for Github. Additionally, the Gitlab team is far more competent and listens better to user feedback.
- enraged_camel 10y ago
  I have never used GitLab, but I keep hearing lots of positive things. Is there anything they don't do as well or better than Github?
  - asb 10y ago
    Site responsiveness, though they're working hard in that.
    - sanswork 10y ago
      It's pretty ok if you host yourself(which is easy to do(on DO) thanks to the omnibus package).
  - speg 10y ago
    Although it's made a lot of progress the past few version the design/UX of Gitlab is a bit lacking.
    - awhildy 10y ago
      We are working really hard on improving the design and UX of GitLab. We'd love to learn what we can do to make the experience better for you. Please let us know if you have any specific suggestions or problems that we can tackle. Feel free to comment on this issue (https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/25752 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/25752) create an issue if that is easier (https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/new https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/new). Thanks!

wjossey 10y ago

I hope this is a temporary blip on the radar for Github, and that they return to profitability very quickly. Github should be a pillar platform in our community for the next decade, and the only way for them to become that is via profitability.

was_boring 10y ago
Why should it? They weren't responsive to user demands for years, routinely break features (checkbox saving is broken right now), and have terrible discovery and search. If anything we should be cheering for gitlab. Atleast we can modify it locally.
- wjossey 10y ago
  Because we should be cheering for Gitlab, and Github, and any other major competitor in the space to perform well and be stable (and independent, ideally). Competition & long term stability means that they can focus on the features that are most meaningful for their user base. If their revenue stream continues to be poor, they may begin making short-term decisions to prop up revenue, which ultimately will lead to a much poorer product over the long term.
- dom0 10y ago
  Just anecdotal evidence: I contacted support twice, the latest incident just a couple days ago, and they fixed it in both instances in one or two days.

kumarski 10y ago

I always freak about some other country attacking github. The world would crumble/ it's probably some sort of weird national security scenario.

Asparagirl 10y ago
An attack on StackOverflow would be as bad or worse. These sites should probably be protected as areas of national strategic importance, like how the US protected the NYC docks during WWII.
- rm_-rf_slash 10y ago
  I agree completely. Informational infrastructure is not taken as seriously as it should be.
- untog 10y ago
  Not really. StackOverflow is mirrored and archived everywhere, like in the Google Cache. Github is read/write, and can't be mirrored anywhere near as easily.
  - BuuQu9hu 10y ago
    These folks are archiving all non-fork github repos: https://www.softwareheritage.org/ https://www.softwareheritage.org/ There are other github mirrors too.
- abraae 10y ago
  Perhaps the federal government should take over IT security for github and SO? )
- hguant 10y ago
  It will be very interesting to see what entities are labeled as national security assets as the DoD begins to view 'cyber' a core battleground. What's the programming equivalent to a national strategic resource? How do you write the spec on that - "We must be able to immediately have access to 100,000 programmer-hours per 16 day period, at a skill level of no less than x% of industry average"? How do you implement that? My thought is that, apart from core infrastructure, and expanding internal capabilities, there's not going to be governmental protection of businesses/American internet entities (aside from what protection already exists in the form of legal code), if only because it would compete/displace with already existing businesses (CloudFlare, Akami, etc) which is something the US is loathe to do (which is part of the reason why flood insurance is so messed up - there exists a program to help homeowners get flood insurance, but it's by law required to not displace existing insurers).

sergiotapia 10y ago

>The new digs gave employees a reason to come into the office. Visitors would enter a lobby modeled after the White House’s Oval Office before making their way to a replica of the Situation Room. The company also erected a statue of its mascot, a cartoon octopus-cat creature known as the Octocat. The 55,000-square-foot space is filled with wooden tables and modern art. The Sillicon Valley episodes write themselves it seems haha. This is hilarious.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
niftich 10y ago
I'm hesitant to call this, and their hotel retreats and jet-setting travel 'opulence' out of a sense of decency, but... I guess I'm just a lot more frugal, and mostly isolated from this culture.
- BurningFrog 10y ago
  I don't begrudge anyone all the opulence they can afford. But when they can't afford it, my eyes start rolling pretty hard.
- crucini 10y ago
  Back in the dotcom boom, I think Philip Greenspun leased a Ferrari and lent it to employees in rotation. That looked insanely wasteful (since most people thought the company owned it) but was probably way cheaper than this stuff - and more awesome too.
dawnerd 10y ago
Their CEO looks like he comes right from the show.
- MaxLeiter 10y ago
  https://i.imgur.com/s5Bonrs.png https://i.imgur.com/s5Bonrs.png

drchiu 10y ago

I can't find the blog post, but some blog wrote a while ago why VCs invest in companies like Github. TL;DR -- basically it provides infrastructure for other startups. The business itself may not be a great business due to the amount of cost it takes to run it -- but it's necessary for the running of other ventures. Sort of like highways and non-toll bridges.

ktamura 10y ago
>The business itself may not be a great business due to the amount of cost it takes to run it -- but it's necessary for the running of other ventures. The latter half of the statement applies to Stripe as well. The big difference between GitHub and Stripe is that Stripe's business model is more directly tied to the growth of entrepreneurship economy: the more money goes through Stripe-powered businesses, the more money Stripe makes. In GitHub's case, the correlation is less direct and less predictable.
cperciva 10y ago
Are you saying that VCs are investing because they see companies like GitHub as being public goods? That's contrary to normal investing principles, unless there's some reason to think that a VC investing will result in their portfolio companies having superior access.
- LiamMcCalloway 10y ago
  As a natural monopoly seems closer to the GP's argument.
- stock_toaster 10y ago
  This could be the article the parent was referencing: http://words.steveklabnik.com/is-npm-worth-26mm http://words.steveklabnik.com/is-npm-worth-26mm
- joering2 10y ago
  Actually... without any proofs whatsover, who knows who is really glancing over private repos parked at GitHub. I bet there are many projects with multi-million dollar source code (aka secret sauce) that many would love to look into.

pep_guardiola 10y ago

please guys get your shit together. I guess I would be able to figure out an alternative but a big chunk of my life as a programmer is centered around Github. It would be a major let down to see them perish.

h1d 10y ago
Maybe someone said that about SourceForge 10 years ago.

pinkrooftop 10y ago

Maybe they'll be the next Verizon aquisition

Longhanks 10y ago

That and their open racism (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11049067 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11049067). Hopefully, they wake up soon enough and stop this bs.

st3v3r 10y ago
I'm not seeing a shred of racism there. I'm seeing a white, straight male not being treated like he's special, and interpreting that as racism.
- OJFord 10y ago
  > I'm not seeing a shred of racism there. How about: > it is very hard to even interview people who are 'white' which makes things challenging, > Some of the biggest barriers to progress are white women > This is not work for white folks to lead I think maybe you read only the comment, and not the article it was commenting on: http://uk.businessinsider.com/github-the-full-inside-story-2016-2 http://uk.businessinsider.com/github-the-full-inside-story-2...
- gpm 10y ago
  Read the article linked, some key quotes > "it is very hard to even interview people who are 'white' which makes things challenging" - anonymous insider, presumably someone in a position to interview people > "Some of the biggest barriers to progress are white women" - Lead of social impact team > "This is not work for white folks to lead." - Slide in talk given by above lead > "We need solidarity with our Asian friends and colleagues" - Same slide (This one is especially odd, Asian's are over-represented in tech as a percentage of the population) > "Some of the biggest barriers to progress are white women" - Same slide > "don't think we'll succeed teaching white, male middle managers empathy and compassion any time soon [new paragraph] so let's limit their scope of damage" - Social impact team technical director via twitter
  - st3v3r 10y ago
    Not seeing racism. Again, just seeing white men not treated as the default standard, and white people here seeing that as racism.

joeax 10y ago

The takeaways from the article: (1) They went on a hiring spree in 2015-16, dramatically increasing their costs before their revenue was able to keep up. Something to keep an eye on in 2017. (2) Half the team is remote! Kudos to them for making this work.

jimmywanger 10y ago
> Half the team is remote! Kudos to them for making this work. FWIW, I believe they're retrenching heavily on this. I remember reading articles about how they're trying to centralize management, and if you look at their jobs page (https://github.com/about/jobs#positions https://github.com/about/jobs#positions) most of their eng positions are SF only, at least the three or so I looked at. Only their support positions seem to be remote.
- johnward 10y ago
  They still had remote positions the last time I looked but they were more client facing roles. Sales and tech consultants.
  - jimmywanger 10y ago
    From looking more closely at the job descriptions, it seems most of them are tied to a geographic location, as opposed to previously, where remote was always an option. Seems like now remote has to be offered explicitly for your position.
noobermin 10y ago
>Half the team is remote! Kudos to them for making this work. Are you being sarcastic (esp, in light of your point 1) )? Out of curiosity from someone not in the know, would remote employees cost more or less than ones made to come in every morning?
- tqkxzugoaupvwqr 10y ago
  joeax means managing / coordinating remote workers is often harder than on-site workers because of different time zones and conference software problems.

partycoder 10y ago

If you are an investor, you want to invest $1 to get $2 back (aka shareholder value). If your dividends are not growing, you divest and invest somewhere else. Now, the thing is very competitive, and many companies offer "exponential growth". If your growth slows down, if the perspective is not good, divestment starts and that is a downwards spiral. To stay competitive and to prevent an investor run, companies are forced to take massive risks. And risks materialize into huge disasters... like this one apparently.

antirez 10y ago

It's a few years now I can not see Github focused, from the external POV at least, to provide good coder tools. All the new things only marginally improve on what we used to have. I would worry more about that than about the losses themselves, since I feel the losses mostly reflect the fact the company has no clear direction so is spending money on workforce in the hope to have larger effects. Perhaps they don't need more people but more focus.

politician 10y ago
Agreed; they need less people and less money. Look at what GitLab's achieved! Maybe it's time to leave the posh accommodations and go back into the wilderness. That said, I feel for the engineering staff that has to deal with the availability requirements and the DDoS events. Those folks are heroes.

camus2 10y ago

Fortunately it is easy to push the same repo to multiple hosts with git. So people, use mirrors instead of putting all your eggs in the same basket. Git is a distributed CVS, relying only on github means you are using it just like SVN.

josho 10y ago

This is an example of how VCs distort the market for other businesses. I had a recent conversation with a prospect and they took issue with the price of our software. Our app is in a specialized industry (ie. a smaller market). We charge a per use fee of $35. This fee enables our customer to immediately earn nearly $200 (a 5x return with no risk to them). Despite the significant benefit and profitability of using the app the prospect took issue with our price and referred to the cost of other apps. It was that conversation that made me realize how we've become accustomed to the quality and price of software that's been heavily subsidized by massive VC investments.

bbcbasic 10y ago
> It was that conversation that made me realize how we've become accustomed to the quality and price of software that's been heavily subsidised by massive VC investments. Not to mention open source, sponsored by big companies, universities and passionate individual contributors. E.g. try and sell a compiler, a JS framework or an IDE.
- danmaz74 10y ago
  > or an IDE I think JetBrains is doing fine...
  - mark242 10y ago
    Didn't they switch to the subscription model because people weren't upgrading enough to sustain the business?
    - stuartaxelowen 10y ago
      And it worked.
  - tajen 10y ago
    and Atlassian is selling fine when there are heaps of open-source bugtrackers, wiki, git hosters, build engines and chat tools.

andrewbinstock 10y ago

GitHub has some significant challenges ahead that are not mentioned in this article. As companies move to the cloud, they will run their own development ecosystems--SCM, CI, defect tracking, etc.--in their own cloud; and hosting services like GitHub and BitBucket will have a hard time competing. Already Oracle (and surely other vendors) are offering developer cloud instances that provide these services all wired together.

hinkley 10y ago
BitBucket is owned by Atlassian now. Stash is rebranded as BitBucket and while it has its issues, its integration with Confluence and Jira is at least as good as any of the other Atlassian integrations. So if you're hosting your own tools, BB still gets paid and you don't have to switch vendors. (my personal feelings about Atlassian rank somewhere between dislike and dread, but the BitBucket integration is one the least offensive bits).

throwaway2222c 10y ago

I once met Chris Wanstrath. He is the most arrogant guy I ever met. I travelled for an hour and he sat there staring at his phone between looking at me like something he had trodden in. At least pointing tens of companies at Gitlab has made me feel better.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

etnos 10y ago

The whole VC structure in Silicon Valley sounds closer to "Planned Economy" than socialism does. Just a handful is deciding what is to be "disrupt"

ThePhysicist 10y ago

Considering the piles of venture money they received it sometimes startles me how few new features they have pushed to production in the last two years. Gitlab, on the other hand, seems to push a new major feature every other month. Of course it helps that they don't have to worry about running a SaaS service for several tens of millions of users, but still it seems that Github is too focused on minor improvements and might just lose the game against the open-source approach of Gitlab.

therealjohn 10y ago

Am I the only one the tone in this article bothers? The author keeps criticizing and belittling the CEO, who is obviously significantly smarter than him. There might be correlation there.

bootload 10y ago

"GitHub quickly became essential to the code-writing process at technology companies of all sizes and gave birth to a new generation of programmers by hosting their open-source code for free." How much would you be willing to pay to store your open-source code at github?

wcummings 10y ago
$0
cyphar 10y ago
$0. I would consider paying ~$30/mo for GitLab though, because it's free (as in freedom) software.
- romanovcode 10y ago
  Agree, I would not mind paying for Gitlab private repos some sum of money (probably not 30/mo tho). Gitlab is superior in every possible way than Github except for it's speed.
  - cyphar 10y ago
    I'd pay for public repos (I don't need private repos, all of my code is free software). In fact, I would _donate_ $30/mo to GitLab if I used their services enough (unfortunately the projects I maintain live on GitHub and I don't have the authority to change that). I have no problem donating to free software (I donate $10/mo to Neovim, $10 to SirCmpwn (sway), and other bits and bobs here and there -- as well as donating my time to openSUSE, runC and the OCI). The only condition is that I have to use it enough that I feel that they are owed some money to make the software even better.
  - sytse 10y ago
    I hear you. GitLab self hosted is fast but GitLab.com is too slow. From Monday we're having a daily 50 minute call to coordinate our efforts around https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitaly https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitaly We'll try to reduce IOPS and make GitLab.com fast.

kristopolous 10y ago

Staying in an annual budget of $98 million sounds feasible for a place like github. That's an $8.1m/month burn. Just be a little less elaborate, I'm sure this is doable.

cyphar 10y ago

I'm surprised that they actually have a recreation of the oval office in their office. How arrogant and self-important do you have to be to honestly believe that such a parody is in any way justified? No, GitHub, you're not in charge of the free software world. You were just the first decent choice for code hosting. GitLab is eating your lunch and you're pretending that it's not happening.

bswinnerton 10y ago
The oval office isn't around anymore.
- cyphar 10y ago
  I mean, that's an even more frugal waste of money. Still, the fact they even had something like that is the problem. It's like something from an episode of Silicon Valley.

Animats 10y ago

Uh oh. So much is dependent on Github. Is there a full mirror?

markdog12 10y ago
You can easily mirror with Gitlab: https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/workflow/repository_mirroring.html https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/workflow/repository_mirroring.htm...
- Animats 10y ago
  That's not the question. I'm not concerned about mirroring my stuff. I'm concerned about the disappearance of other people's stuff, perhaps forgotten by them but still used by others, if Github tanks.
BuuQu9hu 10y ago
Not a complete one, but: https://www.softwareheritage.org/ https://www.softwareheritage.org/

bsder 10y ago

Apparently "git cash" isn't working very well ...

flukus 10y ago
git rm -r --cached . This is apparently working very well.
tomschlick 10y ago
More like "git spend" is running in an infinite loop on frivolous bullshit. 600 employees is pretty crazy for what GH is.

234dd57d2c8db 10y ago

You know, I can't say I'm surprised. When github first started, it was just about code. Nothing else. Then they started with all the identity politics crap. As soon as a company starts parroting political messages like "white middle managers have no empathy" instead of, you know, building good tools, I know it's time to find another solution. I was a paying customer, and when github got into the political game, I dropped them like a bad habit. I'm not screwing around here, I'm trying to build a business and your political aspirations do _nothing_ for me as a customer, so why don't you take them and shove em. Happy customer at bitbucket ever since.

Girlang 10y ago
Bingo. Let "DailyKos" deal with "Social Justice". Let GitHub deal with source code management.

dkarapetyan 10y ago

This is why the mania around unicorns is not sustainable. The best part is that github isn't even burning money that fast compared to some of the other ones.

nunez 10y ago

SIX HUNDRED EMPLOYEES?! I don't care how advanced GitHub is; that is an INSANE number of employees for this kind of business!

pm 10y ago
~4000 for Twitter (although I vaguely recall a culling recently, not sure how many they let go).
- camus2 10y ago
  I'm curious what does these 4000 employees do at Twitter ? let's say half of them are engineers, what are these 2000 engineers working on ? Twitter is mostly CRUD and messaging.
  - LeonidBugaev 10y ago
    Analytics, Reporting, Ad management and Biding platform, Fraud detection, and way more. This basic CRUD app is just user-facing thing, and now remember that they are making money not because of you, but because of publishers. This is where main functionality is.
  - pm 10y ago
    There'd be more than the consumer-facing systems. Whether they require 4000 people to run it all is another question, but without a deeper look into what's running, it would be hard to surmise.
  - indexerror 10y ago
    This is fitting here: http://danluu.com/sounds-easy/ http://danluu.com/sounds-easy/
camel_Snake 10y ago
Why?
- deleted 10y ago

Girlang 10y ago

Maybe if they cared about source code management instead of "social justice" they'd have a product.

tim333 10y ago

It's funny reading Tom Preston-Werner's write up on GitHub in Dec 08: >You Don’t Need Venture Capital >A lot has been written recently about how the venture capital world is changing. I don’t pretend to be an expert on the subject, but I’ve learned enough to say that a web startup like ours doesn’t need any outside money to succeed. I know this because we haven’t taken a single dime from investors. We bootstrapped the company on a few thousand dollars and became profitable the day we opened to the public and started charging for subscriptions. I guess VCing up and losing money is a choice. They probably figure the odd $100m cash loss will end up as $1bn+ on the market cap. He looks quite cheerful in his rich list write up http://www.forbes.com/profile/tom-preston-werner/ http://www.forbes.com/profile/tom-preston-werner/

sleepyhead 10y ago
He was right though. They didn't need it. But it was just too much money for the founders to say no to. I'm also in the bootstrapping camp but I don't blame them for filling up their bank account.

huntermonk 10y ago

> "The income statement shows a loss of $66 million in the first three quarters of this year. That’s more than twice as much lost in any nine-month time frame by Twilio Inc., another maker of software tools founded the same year as GitHub." These sort of statements are a little annoying. I understand that Bloomberg has to write for a less technical audience, but the writer must know this isn't an accurate comparison.

DeBraid 10y ago

Short-selling companies that make very popular and effective developer tools is low expected value play.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

christop 10y ago

Interesting to read there (and nowhere else that I could find) that GitHub co-founder Scott Chacon left the company this year.

nikcub 10y ago

Interesting that 600 employees sounds like a lot, but it works out that revenue/employee p.a is $230k+ - which is above average for enterprise SaaS[0] - and you have the 25%+ annual growth on that That said, they should be doing better margin-wise since they would have relatively lower customer acquisition costs compared to the market since they have so much developer recognition. [0] http://tomtunguz.com/revenue-per-employee-trends/ http://tomtunguz.com/revenue-per-employee-trends/

moritzplassnig 10y ago

I'm surprised that the author doesn't focus more on the other numbers (the burn numbers aren't surprising to me - see here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13190371 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13190371). According to the author's data, GitHub had $25M in ARR in Sep'14. That's 2 years and 2 months after they announced their $100M round, so probably 28 months after they signed a term sheet. If you calculate back from there, let's say $12M in ARR in Sep'13, $6M in Sep'12 and $4-5M in May'12 - that's insane (them raising $100M). Not sure if Bloomberg's data is correct but if we look at the other data points (probably same source data), $90M in ARR in Sep'16, it seems to be accurate. Sep'12: $6M (assumed) -- raised $100M a couple of months earlier Sep'13: $12M (assumed) Sep'14: $25M (according to Bloomberg) Sep'15: $50M (assumed) Sep'16: $90M (according to Bloomberg)

stefek99 10y ago

How come such a fantastic product is not massively profitable?

Shorel 10y ago

Everyone is comparing GitHub with GitLab in the comments, but they are ignoring the other competitor. I think Atlassian is the company that makes the most out of the git marketplace, even if they have fewer customers. They are simply more efficient, and are ready to take over with Bitbucket if GitHub fails. Also, many companies pay for Jira+Confluence even if they use GitHub.

taspeotis 10y ago
If you're looking for a dark horse, look at Microsoft's offering [1]. Those are some deep pockets that aren't going to run out. [1] https://www.visualstudio.com/team-services/ https://www.visualstudio.com/team-services/
- duiker101 10y ago
  I wasn't actually aware of this, looks very nice! I should probably take it for a spin! Has anyone tried it?
  - Sacho 10y ago
    We use visual studio team services(previously visual studio online) for all our projects. The main pro is integration with all other MS stuff(something you expect as a MS-based dev). MS has also been working hard into making it usable with a Git repository instead of TFVC, in fact, there's a lot of features and workflows that only work with Git - e.g. branch for work item, pull requests, etc(I'm debating switching from TFVC to Git because of this). It has a lot of the features you'd expect from an issue tracker - projects, teams, kanban boards, iterations, a dashboard, the "work item" with all its configurable fields.. since it uses TFS as a backend, there's also the awesome query builder which gives you tons of ways to create queries and filters to dig into your work items - this is probably great for management. There's also a very complex permissions system(I assume, again using the TFS backend). The main con for me however is the abysmal UI around discussions on work items. The discussion by default is stuck in a tiny part of the already cluttered work item screen(this has changed recently as they introduced the ability to fully customize the layout). There's a single textbox with a "smart editor"(ugh) where you can type your comment, and some limited hyperlinking(you can address team members and link work items), and you need to press "save"(which is actually under the default option "save and close") for the work item to add your comment. It's pretty clunky to monitor conversations(email notifications) vs github's notification hub. Oh, and they're a bit light on various smaller features, but they've been churning out new updates constantly, so I think they'll catch up. As a top-down, management-heavy approach, TSVS is probably a fine system. As a collaborative workspace for a small dev team with very little management, I find it lacking the killer feature of rich discussions that Github has.

rexreed 10y ago

It seemed that Github was doing just fine accomplishing their mission and goals when they were bootstrapping, but things got ridiculous with a massive (and possibly unneeded) VC investment. Or at least an investment of that humongous sum of money. Can someone explain the rationale behind pumping all this money into firms that clearly don't need such vast amounts of it, which only spurs exorbitant and unnecessary spending? Is it some sort of non-obvious game of unicorn musical chairs hoping for a hyper inflated exit before the music stops?

fredsters_s 10y ago
It's opportunistic investment from investors who predict continued growth. The hook for the founders? Who knows. My guesses: - assumption that eventually the enterprise play will win the majority of the $ in the market - that there is possibly a winner-takes-all dynamic in the market, given the strong ecosystem benefits Also, it's very expensive to sell top-down to enterprises. In SaaS your cost of sale is up-front (sales salaries, commissions, acquiring the customer etc) whereas the payout is typically over time. Even if the contracts are mostly paid up front, you still have to build the enterprise sales team and ramp the reps, which can take around 6 months. So it's possible that the logical premise "pumping all this money into firms that clearly don't need such vast amounts of it" may be incorrect if enterprise sales success is required for long term success and they don't have the cash to 'go enterprise'. Will be fascinating to see how this market plays out. My money is on Sid.
nslindtner 10y ago
From the outside it looks like a land grab game. Competetion is heating up (bitbucket, gitlab, tfs online, etc).
- rexreed 10y ago
  but is throwing all this money at a company who clearly doesn't know how to effectively deploy it to grab that land (those expenditures are ridiculous) the best way to do it?
  - 10y ago

alistproducer2 10y ago

The subtext to this (at least why this made it to the front page) is "github is lighting money on fire, can't last forever, but github is infrastructure-status now what if it disappears?" I think this anxiety is why there's a lot of work being done in the decentralized space right now. The UX-side of "web 3.0" is sorely lacking but I think it's only a matter of time before people begin to crack it. I'd love to see some research into what it would take (in terms of network size) to provide robust, decentralized replacements for service-as-infrastructure products like Github.

daveguy 10y ago
Wait. We're on web 3.0 now? What does this version add?
- pvdebbe 10y ago
  Hard dependencies to JS
- cr3ative 10y ago
  About two meg per page
- alistproducer2 10y ago
  Decentralized applications and infrastructure.

vacri 10y ago

> The company paid to send employees jetting across the globe to Amsterdam, London, New York and elsewhere. If a company as vitally important to an industry as Github is to software can't do this... it's time to really worry.

tscs37 10y ago

I personally moved away from Github, mostly due to political issues, secondarily because of this funding issue. Can't keep burning money forever. I put my private stuff on my own Gogs instance or on Bitbucket, tho I like Gogs UI much better, it's closer to github. The community fork of it, Gitea, is also making progress to enable pull request federation. Would be awesome if I could work together with people using Gitlab, Github or Gitea without them having to sign up to my site. They just fork to their own site, make their patches and submit the pull request to my upstream. GitHub has little value to me, the social network they built can move elsewhere like it is for many programmers and coders.

new299 10y ago
Which political issues? I'm honestly curious.
- tomp 10y ago
  I'm guessing parent is referring to stuff like the "meritocracy rug" and "code of conduct".
- tscs37 10y ago
  I'm not particularly comfortable with how Github has handled their community and executes takedowns of repositories. I don't feel like my code would be safe on github.

pavlik_enemy 10y ago

It feels that GitHub failed to create an ecosystem and did little innovating it just turned a single-tenant application to multi-tenant (which sometimes is no small feat). They could've created other developer-oriented products - issue management, CI, code review etc and they could've innovated more in their primary area that is storing code like providing better tools for code exploration than simple search (see GitQL project).

galfarragem 10y ago

Github is too good to fail IMHO: if they raise a bit their prices, all their paying costumers will still stay and their money problems will mitigate. By the other hand, Atom is clearly a long term loser and they should let it go. Their contribution to the text editing world was terrific but now they should focus where they are the best.

h1d 10y ago
Atom lose against which ones?

rampage101 10y ago

I remember reading a few years ago how GitHub and StackOverflow were the new resumes. You needed a good profile on both to have any chance of getting hired. It just goes to show that having a profile on a website does not define who you are as a developer. Websites go under, and better ones will rise up. I hope GitHub does stay around... I do not care for their "politics" but I like their service.

iso-8859-1 10y ago
What do you consider politics? If they insert relevant ad links in the comments of your code, would you mind?

throwaway1892 10y ago

A blog that could be relevant http://hintjens.com/blog:111 http://hintjens.com/blog:111

compsciphd 10y ago

The thing not mentioned is that Bloomberg is a Github Enterprise customer. They ran their own git server for a bit and then transitioned the whole company to github and the pull-request model (relatively quickly too)