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GitHub lost $66M in nine months of 2016

bloomberg.com

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Re: GitHub lost $66M in nine months of 2016

#361

Post by cyphar »

bswinnerton wrote: post #293
cyphar wrote: post #176

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.

The oval office isn't around anymore.

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.

Re: GitHub lost $66M in nine months of 2016

#362

Post by cyphar »

bootload wrote: post #149

"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?

$0. I would consider paying ~$30/mo for GitLab though, because it's free (as in freedom) software.

Re: GitHub lost $66M in nine months of 2016

#363

Post by Trundle »

hyperbovine wrote: post #294
asenna wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you really put something in "maintenance" mode without killing it? Maintaining the app and not moving forward with new features and adding value (because of lack of resources), I would assume it would just die eventually.

I don't understand this obsession with the first derivative of value. GitHub already provides loads of value. I understand they need resources to keep the lights on, but they could do that by recouping a tiny fee from their users and most everyone would be happy.

They're not without alternatives already though. In a changing environment to stay still is to fall behind.

Re: GitHub lost $66M in nine months of 2016

#364

Post by indexerror »

camus2 wrote: post #307
pm wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

~4000 for Twitter (although I vaguely recall a culling recently, not sure how many they let go).

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.

This is fitting here: http://danluu.com/sounds-easy/

Re: GitHub lost $66M in nine months of 2016

#365

Post by josho »

martindale wrote: post #275
josho wrote: post #102

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…

> a 5x return with no risk to them There's something strange going on here. What software do you produce?

It's for primary care physicians outside of the US. So, we are dealing with the following:

- An industry that has a slight disdain for maximizing profit (healthcare here is a public good) - The physician in question is already running at 100%, so the extra workload to make an extra $5k/yr isn't worth it for him. - Other docs in the clinic are all over our solution and are seeing the increase in their billings

So, this doc, and another in the clinic looked at the fee and said they'd rather not realize the extra revenue because they thought someone else should be paying the software fee (the someone else being the government that runs healthcare).

Re: GitHub lost $66M in nine months of 2016

#367

Post by bato »

mjrbrennan wrote: post #228
nitrogen wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ignoring the fact that the VCs want to get paid and GitHub's employees want to keep working, how big of a skeleton crew would it take to keep a site like GitHub running in "maintenance" mode?

They could probably get a lot of their diversity, inclusion, and community staff with no real issue.

They could probably their staff what?

Looks like your sentence is incomplete.

Re: GitHub lost $66M in nine months of 2016

#368

Post by hkmurakami »

moritzplassnig wrote: post #265
mmastrac wrote: post #3

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.

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 ove…

Studies have unfortunately shown that negative news gets more eyeballs. When's the last time you saw positive uplifting news on say, CNN?

Re: GitHub lost $66M in nine months of 2016

#369

Post by thebspatrol »

knownothing wrote: post #238
thebspatrol wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The laws of physics aren't interchangeable with our understanding of them

That's a philosophically naive view of how science works.

Claiming that our understanding of science 500 years ago is at all equitable to the way science works in 2016 is even more naive.

Re: GitHub lost $66M in nine months of 2016

#370

Post by BuuQu9hu »

untog wrote: post #39
Asparagirl wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

These folks are archiving all non-fork github repos:

https://www.softwareheritage.org/

There are other github mirrors too.

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