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"
GitHub lost $66M in nine months of 2016
131–140 of 594 posts
Re: GitHub lost $66M in nine months of 2016
#132Re: GitHub lost $66M in nine months of 2016
#133I 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.
> basically it provides infrastructure for other startups
The good news for them, is they can become much more. GitLab learned earlier on, the value of selling to Enterprise as opposed to startups. They (GitHub) really should have gone on a hiring blitz a few years ago, to find people who understood Enterprise.
GitHub, way over estimated the value of "social programming", when it comes to Enterprise. I would say 80% of programmers in Enterprise, are not passionate about programming and have no interest, in the "social" value, that is offered by GitHub Enterprise. The vast majority of Enterprise programmers see it as a job, and really don't care about what others are working on, unless it directly affects whether or not they can leave work on time.
What GitHub needs to focus on, is doing the hard things, that GitLab and Bitbucket will not be able to do, without serious R&D. I personally think, they should abandon Atom at this point, and use those resources to work on solving harder problems, that Enterprise would gladly pay for. Like better searches, better analytics/reports, better code reviews, and so forth.
Re: GitHub lost $66M in nine months of 2016
#134I 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.
Except as pointed out in the article, the massive increase in spending was fairly frivolous. They spent crazy money on a new huge office, threw big parties, and sent their employees traveling everywhere. They also doubled their headcount, when I think we can all agree that they haven't had a surge in volume or features that merits that many new employees. There's no reason that GitHub couldn't be run profitably if th…
I have been using GitHub for maybe 4 years and I feel like the number of features rolled out this year blows away the other years.
Review groups and Projets (kanban) have both been great.
GitLab started applying pressure and I think GitHub responded well, staying competitive in the face of a competent challenger.
Re: GitHub lost $66M in nine months of 2016
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
I'm a GitLab Community Advocate, so I'm biased, but off the top of my head: - Performance, we're working on improving this for GitLab.com but right now it's slower than we'd like. If you run your own instance it'll be fine as long as you meet the recommended specs, GitLab.com struggles because we have so many users by comparison. - Following users/social network-y things, we haven't really focused on this and don't h…
> Following users/social network-y things, we haven't really focused on this
Good. Please don't waste resources trying to be Facebook-but-for-devs.
> Also I want to mention that we value diversity, I disagree with the grandparent comment about how inclusivity shouldn't be rewarded.
Strongly agree with this.
Re: GitHub lost $66M in nine months of 2016
#136The 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.
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.
GitLab has a migration feature that "just works". Was painless here
Re: GitHub lost $66M in nine months of 2016
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
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.
Is it really necessary though? I've been using bitbucket at work, and their UI is the worst. I mean, you can't even close a PR after a rebase. Yes, it's seriously this _BAD_. So, we're just using cli tools and gui clients, and it works fine.
I understand that people would be annoyed by a forced switch, github has a working issue tracker, wiki, and not to mention the awesome github pages. But, I just think loosing them is not that dramatic.
Re: GitHub lost $66M in nine months of 2016
#138GitHub 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 toge…
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).
Re: GitHub lost $66M in nine months of 2016
#139Considering 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.
Re: GitHub lost $66M in nine months of 2016
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
This is one of several reasons why the GPL is a great license for FLOSS. You can GPL-license your software and contribute to the community, while offering alternative commercial licenses to companies that want them. If you use a totally-permissive BSD-style license, you're stuck trying to charge for a support contract or custom plugins or something.
Or AGPL if the market direction is going to be providing a hosted service running your product.