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.
GitHub lost $66M in nine months of 2016
71–80 of 594 posts
Re: GitHub lost $66M in nine months of 2016
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
The problem is social hubs add very little real value and are easily replaceable, especially among technically astute people.
Oh, but they do add a lot of real value. In fact, they're extremely efficient at making this value - so efficient that they don't get to monetize anything but a small fraction of it.
Re: GitHub lost $66M in nine months of 2016
#73I 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.
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.
As a natural monopoly seems closer to the GP's argument.
Re: GitHub lost $66M in nine months of 2016
#74I always freak about some other country attacking github. The world would crumble/ it's probably some sort of weird national security scenario.
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.
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).
Re: GitHub lost $66M in nine months of 2016
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
The laws of physics are.
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)
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.
Re: GitHub lost $66M in nine months of 2016
#76Part 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?
"... who could replace them?" Im hoping it's a company run by women and minorities, just for your sake.
Lets be clear, I never implied that women and minorities can't do tech or are in any way inferior.
But I'm not a fan of actively bringing bias into hiring. You're just being racist if you hire someone on the basis of them being a skin colour.
I don't support racist organisations of any kind.
If there is a company that happens to be funded and started by minorities and women is successful then that's fine, of course that's fine, I support them fully, but when they're being vitriolic about people regarding race and gender I'm not pleased.
Re: GitHub lost $66M in nine months of 2016
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
99% of the value of github is the user interface, not the mere fact that it's a hosted git repository.
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?
Re: GitHub lost $66M in nine months of 2016
#78I 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.
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.
This could be the article the parent was referencing: http://words.steveklabnik.com/is-npm-worth-26mm
Re: GitHub lost $66M in nine months of 2016
#79I 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.
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.
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.
Re: GitHub lost $66M in nine months of 2016
#80The 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.
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.
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.