Uh oh. So much is dependent on Github. Is there a full mirror?
Not a complete one, but:
GitHub lost $66M in nine months of 2016
371–380 of 594 posts
Re: GitHub lost $66M in nine months of 2016
#372Earlier 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.
Are there any native UIs that are as good or better than the github UI?
Re: GitHub lost $66M in nine months of 2016
#373Earlier quoted context omitted.
It gives you a future market share via so many people using your software for free. They won't pay if it weren't free anyway, but would use a competing piece of software. That is, without the free (as in freedom) version, few would even consider paying for a commercial license. Did you ever think why Microsoft is so lazy about enforcing the end-user Windows licenses on non-business customers? Maybe they want kids get…
Which is all fine and good when you have VC funding and can run at a loss for years, or are growing at a rate where you don't care about a few cheats using your product. But, for all those bootstrapped business' your argument falls flat.
Like it did e.g. for MySQL?
~20 years ago Oracle handed out a stripped-down "personal edition" of Oracle Server, their then crown jewel, with basically no strings attached, just to get people on the bandwagon.
Re: GitHub lost $66M in nine months of 2016
#374Earlier 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?
Post VC investment, GitHub would never be allowed to exist in maintenance mode. It would be liquidated in one form or another if things were that dire. Once they took the venture capital, the possible outcomes narrowed considerably.
They could go non-profit like the Mozilla foundation.
Re: GitHub lost $66M in nine months of 2016
#375Earlier quoted context omitted.
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,…
But github has a monetization strategy, they're a paid service. This is more about their headcount expanding and possibly losing paying customers because they decided to get political.
I didn't follow when github started getting political. What happened?
Re: GitHub lost $66M in nine months of 2016
#376Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
They built a replica of the Oval Office as their lobby. I don't think it lasted more than a year. It's all gone now, and not a spec of the original Oval Office is there anymore. It's an open seating area for coffee... Nice big fat waste of money, right there.
You weren't kidding...
https://findery.com/Du/notes/githubs-oval-office-lobby
Hard to have much sympathy for that.
Re: GitHub lost $66M in nine months of 2016
#377Re: GitHub lost $66M in nine months of 2016
#378Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The point is more or less, if VC invests (or plans to) in 20 software companies, investing additionally in something like GitHub or npm makes it more likely that the other 20 companies will succeed. They don't invest just in GitHub from the goodness of their hearts.
I am hugely skeptical that this ever happens. Do you have any evidence?
I believe no VC is going to invest $50 million dollars purely in hope of vaguely helping the rest of their portfolio. While at the same time vaguely helping every other startup in existence, thus negating any advantage that might accrue to their own companies.
Re: GitHub lost $66M in nine months of 2016
#379Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> If they continue to grow which seems to be the case, they will be break-even long before they run out of money What are you basing that on? The article says that in 2015 they had revenue of $95 million and lost $27 million. For the first 3 quarters of 2016 the article says they “surpassed last year’s revenue […] with $98 million”, but also that they lost $66 million in that same period. So while revenue doubled, th…
As an anecdote, I was called into a meeting with the CTO of a fairly large European bank, and a sales guy from GitHub a couple of month ago.
I got the feeling that they are selling rather aggressively right now.
Re: GitHub lost $66M in nine months of 2016
#380Earlier quoted context omitted.
But github has a monetization strategy, they're a paid service. This is more about their headcount expanding and possibly losing paying customers because they decided to get political.
I didn't follow when github started getting political. What happened?
They made a code-of-conduct. It pandered too strongly to the list-every-under-privileged-class attitude including explicitly rejecting the concept of "reverse discrimination" and so the reactionary folks who want to insist they aren't sexist and hate any moralizing or politics that challenge them etc. got up in arms. It was all a stupid side-show and had nothing to do with anything that matters to GitHub's basic services or business model. Most people never noticed either way.