5 ms·

Agree. GitHub is ultimately doomed because not enough people will pay up.

by askimto 13y ago

chii 13y ago
how do you know that? I m sure they are profitable.
- U2EF1 13y ago
  Not quite, but on track!
coreyja 13y ago
I disagree. I think enough people are willing to pay for a service that makes their lives easier, and developers especially so. GitHub does exactly that, and their pricing is at a good point where it isn't prohibitive for people just starting out.
- noir_lord 13y ago
  GitHubs biggest problem is BitBucket. Unlimited repo's for teams of less than 5 compared to GitHubs pricing model for private repositories is a strong challenge. Throw in that BitBucket is Atlassian backed and they can afford to subsidise BitBucket to sell their other tools (though I would observe that BitBucket does not do heavy sales tactics at all). I actually prefer bitbucket to github day to day (I have about a dozen repo's with them) and they have excellent support for mercurial as well.
  - xsace 13y ago
    it's not about your individual preferences, it's about where the open source community is
    - noir_lord 13y ago
      Since I'm talking about where I prefer to host my projects I think in this case it is about my personal preferences. Obviously GitHub is the major git hosting solution for open source projects and yes I have a github account and yes I visit the site as much as I do bitbucket but mostly to pull repo's, check issues and read documentation.
  - jurre 13y ago
    If you have an active open source presence then you're already using github a lot of the time, personally I don't like switching tools a lot and I guess a lot of people feel similar. Personal preference aside.
  - EnderMB 13y ago
    If they'd offer a couple of private repos I'd jump over to GitHub in a heartbeat. I use BitBucket for private stuff, and then port over to GitHub when I want to make the code public. At work we use BitBucket because of the unlimited private repos, and we've got a fairly good setup built on it. Every office I know either keeps their repo hosted, or uses BitBucket. I've only known one office that uses GitHub, and due to the nature of their work they keep their stuff public. It's not even up for debate anywhere I work. BitBucket, or a private hosted repo is the only choice to make.
  - zimbatm 13y ago
    It's all speculations at that point but if the only reason to go to BitBucket is price then Atlassian is creating a community of poor/cheap people. The scenario for up-sell seems quite compromised in that regard. Another thing is that if you're using open source products then they're likely on github. I agree that both platforms have a general feature parity but if you're going to interact with these projects often enough then it's better to stay on a single platform and avoid the context switch. Personally this only is already worth the $50-100 that our company is paying. You can see that I am biased but something I would also like to point out: on more than one occasion github has prompted me to open-source things. When you reach your repo limit you're faced with a choice that you don't have with unlimited repos. There's a case where you don't want to think about it and just want to keep working as usual but for me space constraint is what keeps my home tidy.
    - noir_lord 13y ago
      I see your points but I'd note that "it's better to stay on a single platform" is actually perhaps not as good as it appears (all your eggs in one basket - for example when github went down the other weekend a lot of PHP developers where stuck without composer update for example). The context switch is fairly minimal, underneath it is just git with a pretty web-ui. The scenario for up-sell is absolutely fine, if you have less than 5 developers it's free, if you have more than that you start to pay based on number of developers, this is both more rational (you are paying for users not number/size of repo's) and easier to quantify. In my opinion GitHub's cleverest move was making it free for open source repo's thereby building a good community of influential developers around their product from day one, this does give them a significant lead but it's not insurmountable (I'm old enough to remember when the first thing you did when you wanted the source code for an open project was head straight over to sourceforge) particularly as moving most (small) projects from github to bitbucket (or another competitor) is one git push.
    - gundy 13y ago
      poor is not the same thing as cheap
      - 13y ago
  - kawsper 13y ago
    All the companies that I have worked with is using Github, and I both have a paid private account and a private organization. Maybe I am atypical, but I really like Github :)
  - sleepyhead 13y ago
    I have never used an open-source project that is on BitBucket.
    - Egregore 13y ago
      There are no incentives to switch open source projects to BitBucket, but there are incentives to switch to BitBucket small team/personal private projects. Edit: Also open source projects will not start to pay github, but private projects might grow and will start paying for BitBucket
  - snowwrestler 13y ago
    When you're talking about private repos for commercial customers, paying is a feature, not a bug. A paid relationship is fundamentally different in that it creates obligations on both parties. When something is free, the person receiving the free service has few rights or remedies.
- gundy 13y ago
  BitBucket killed any inclination in me to pay github a penny. And I will stick with them when my team grows because everything is there anyway and the pricing is better. Github tools are really not there to justify the huge sticker price.
__--__ 13y ago
You're forgetting about corporate accounts. They pay through the nose for something no other tool does right now (at least not as well). Nothing else I've used in the corporate space works as well as Github, especially for code reviews. It's also more expensive than anything else, too. The only problem we saw was it didn't handle large repos very well. And by large, I mean 20+gb. Don't look at me like that, storing every asset in a large 3d game in github made sense at the time! No, it didn't, we were just lazy.

Agree. GitHub is ultimately doomed because not enough people will pay up.

by askimto 13y ago

Agree. GitHub is ultimately doomed because not enough people will pay up.

chii 13y ago

how do you know that? I m sure they are profitable.

U2EF1 13y ago
Not quite, but on track!

coreyja 13y ago

I disagree. I think enough people are willing to pay for a service that makes their lives easier, and developers especially so. GitHub does exactly that, and their pricing is at a good point where it isn't prohibitive for people just starting out.

noir_lord 13y ago
GitHubs biggest problem is BitBucket. Unlimited repo's for teams of less than 5 compared to GitHubs pricing model for private repositories is a strong challenge. Throw in that BitBucket is Atlassian backed and they can afford to subsidise BitBucket to sell their other tools (though I would observe that BitBucket does not do heavy sales tactics at all). I actually prefer bitbucket to github day to day (I have about a dozen repo's with them) and they have excellent support for mercurial as well.
- xsace 13y ago
  it's not about your individual preferences, it's about where the open source community is
  - noir_lord 13y ago
    Since I'm talking about where I prefer to host my projects I think in this case it is about my personal preferences. Obviously GitHub is the major git hosting solution for open source projects and yes I have a github account and yes I visit the site as much as I do bitbucket but mostly to pull repo's, check issues and read documentation.
- jurre 13y ago
  If you have an active open source presence then you're already using github a lot of the time, personally I don't like switching tools a lot and I guess a lot of people feel similar. Personal preference aside.
- EnderMB 13y ago
  If they'd offer a couple of private repos I'd jump over to GitHub in a heartbeat. I use BitBucket for private stuff, and then port over to GitHub when I want to make the code public. At work we use BitBucket because of the unlimited private repos, and we've got a fairly good setup built on it. Every office I know either keeps their repo hosted, or uses BitBucket. I've only known one office that uses GitHub, and due to the nature of their work they keep their stuff public. It's not even up for debate anywhere I work. BitBucket, or a private hosted repo is the only choice to make.
- zimbatm 13y ago
  It's all speculations at that point but if the only reason to go to BitBucket is price then Atlassian is creating a community of poor/cheap people. The scenario for up-sell seems quite compromised in that regard. Another thing is that if you're using open source products then they're likely on github. I agree that both platforms have a general feature parity but if you're going to interact with these projects often enough then it's better to stay on a single platform and avoid the context switch. Personally this only is already worth the $50-100 that our company is paying. You can see that I am biased but something I would also like to point out: on more than one occasion github has prompted me to open-source things. When you reach your repo limit you're faced with a choice that you don't have with unlimited repos. There's a case where you don't want to think about it and just want to keep working as usual but for me space constraint is what keeps my home tidy.
  - noir_lord 13y ago
    I see your points but I'd note that "it's better to stay on a single platform" is actually perhaps not as good as it appears (all your eggs in one basket - for example when github went down the other weekend a lot of PHP developers where stuck without composer update for example). The context switch is fairly minimal, underneath it is just git with a pretty web-ui. The scenario for up-sell is absolutely fine, if you have less than 5 developers it's free, if you have more than that you start to pay based on number of developers, this is both more rational (you are paying for users not number/size of repo's) and easier to quantify. In my opinion GitHub's cleverest move was making it free for open source repo's thereby building a good community of influential developers around their product from day one, this does give them a significant lead but it's not insurmountable (I'm old enough to remember when the first thing you did when you wanted the source code for an open project was head straight over to sourceforge) particularly as moving most (small) projects from github to bitbucket (or another competitor) is one git push.
  - gundy 13y ago
    poor is not the same thing as cheap
    - 13y ago
- kawsper 13y ago
  All the companies that I have worked with is using Github, and I both have a paid private account and a private organization. Maybe I am atypical, but I really like Github :)
- sleepyhead 13y ago
  I have never used an open-source project that is on BitBucket.
  - Egregore 13y ago
    There are no incentives to switch open source projects to BitBucket, but there are incentives to switch to BitBucket small team/personal private projects. Edit: Also open source projects will not start to pay github, but private projects might grow and will start paying for BitBucket
- snowwrestler 13y ago
  When you're talking about private repos for commercial customers, paying is a feature, not a bug. A paid relationship is fundamentally different in that it creates obligations on both parties. When something is free, the person receiving the free service has few rights or remedies.
gundy 13y ago
BitBucket killed any inclination in me to pay github a penny. And I will stick with them when my team grows because everything is there anyway and the pricing is better. Github tools are really not there to justify the huge sticker price.

__--__ 13y ago

You're forgetting about corporate accounts. They pay through the nose for something no other tool does right now (at least not as well). Nothing else I've used in the corporate space works as well as Github, especially for code reviews. It's also more expensive than anything else, too. The only problem we saw was it didn't handle large repos very well. And by large, I mean 20+gb. Don't look at me like that, storing every asset in a large 3d game in github made sense at the time! No, it didn't, we were just lazy.