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GitHub lost $66M in nine months of 2016

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

#461

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With their latest revamp? No way. UX-wise it's very similar to GitHub. You're probably talking of experiences in an older iteration or it's just users that were used to GitHub and didn't feel like learning something that looks slightly different.

We're using the latest build at work. I have really like Gitlab's merge request system. Their experience is pretty straight forward and they fixed a lot of the scalability issues with the built-in wiki. The opening/home page of Github is still better though. What really got people into Gitlab was the self hosting. Github has depended on selling their enterprise version. I was at a talk where Wanstrath said something…

We're working hard on making the UI and UX of GitLab better. A good start is this meta-issue [0], but there are many others. We realise we have some ways to go, but this is a major priority for us and 2017 will bring improvements every single month.

[0]: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/24304

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

#462
post #287

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> when someone else then creates the next image hosting site. If I am not mistaken Imgur is doing quite well for many years now.

slowly being replaced with sli.mg, the way that reddit is slowly being replaced with voat.co.

I have been hearing that about voat.co for couple of years.

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

#463
post #421

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I agree. I couldn't stand the slowness of Gitlab's UI. I originally came to Gitlab because Bitbucket was lagging on several features that I wanted, and had a poor UI. Gitlab's UI seemed more inviting as it was similar to Github. Mostly though, I chose Gitlab for the free private repositories. The Gitlab UI is /fine/, but the speed is what gets me. On github, even if I have thousands of commits, the UI is instantaneou…

yeah, gitlab _is_ slow. Given that they are (unlike github) actually making money I don't understand why they wont just throw more servers at the problem (or put some devs on fixing their backend).

> I don't understand why they wont just throw more servers at the problem

There's only so much you can solve by throwing more hardware/money at the problem. We have reached a point where we are wasting too much of this, so adding more won't help much.

> (or put some devs on fixing their backend)

We have plenty of people working on the problem, and for quite a while now. We're also hiring more developers to help us out with this:

https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/merge_requests?scope...

https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/merge_requests/...

https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/25421/

There's also this old (and closed) issue which contains a lot of information: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/operations/issues/42

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

#464
post #384
post #375

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I didn't follow when github started getting political. What happened?

Opalgate: https://github.com/opal/opal/issues/941 TLDR: Some possibly transphobic person said something on the internet that got traced back to his github account. Some person not connected to the project complains and get's transphobic person removed from github. Github hires complainer to "improve diversity". That and a couple of other things like their code of conduct have indicated that github wants to be the PC…

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

#465
post #399

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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 serv…

The very suggestion that GitHub getting "political" supported by a single issue thread caused them to lose $66 million dollars is so laughable as to barely warrant confrontation.

but on the other hand they got rid of their meritocracy rug and removed it from their companies list of values over politics.

so there might be something to it honestly.

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

#466
post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Opalgate: https://github.com/opal/opal/issues/941 TLDR: Some possibly transphobic person said something on the internet that got traced back to his github account. Some person not connected to the project complains and get's transphobic person removed from github. Github hires complainer to "improve diversity". That and a couple of other things like their code of conduct have indicated that github wants to be the PC…

Whoa. I didn't know about that either. I'm not going to comment on the content or arguments because, pretty much whatever one says, is going to result in a flamewar. What I do find unsettling is the fallout, including GitHub's behaviour. I like GitHub as a product, and I use it all the time, but it seems at least moderately prudent to migrate repositories to Gitlab (or somewhere else) and keep them up to date, if onl…

> Old chestnut about all eggs in one basket, etc.

The other old chestnut is "first they came for the..."

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

#467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 serv…

> Most people never noticed either way. Noticed, didn't give a shit. Frankly it was a complete over reaction based on virtue signalling, band wagoning and the general mesd that is any kind of nuanced debate online. When I run into that stuff now I just close the tab, life is literally too short for it.

This is always the way though. Things like being fired for political opinions or detained without trial are always stuff that probably won't affect you as long as you keep your head down and act as a good citizen, and the people who got in trouble were probably pretty bad people. There's some line about how anyone who cares about freedom has to spend their life defending scoundrels.

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

#468
post #362

"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.

Agree, I would not mind paying for Gitlab private repos some sum of money (probably not 30/mo tho).

Gitlab is superior in every possible way than Github except for it's speed.

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

#469

Earlier 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…

I love Gitlab but your main priorities right now should be:

- Performance

- Performance

- Performance

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

#470
post #86

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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 know nothing about investing but I feel somewhat skeptical about these arguments. How many startups actually failed because they were using a poor package manager or source control host?

A startup that can't iterate quickly enough will die by a thousand cuts, and it will be hard to say exactly what killed it. I'd certainly think using github can extend your runway by 5-10% (just in terms of how much time it saves we as a developer), and in a certain proportion of cases that will be the difference between success and failure.
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