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Announcing unlimited free private repos

blog.github.com

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Re: Announcing unlimited free private repos

#621

Post by dogweather »

jkchu wrote: post #435
madamelic wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>does this make you consider switching back at all? If so, why? Complete opposite. I'm going to stop using it as much as I can. This is quite annoying. I'd much rather they take my pittance than monetize me any other way.

I am confused by this sentiment. Wouldn't moving to another product (like bitbucket or gitlab) put you in the same boat (since they also offer free private repositories)?

GitLab's free private repos have the same feature set as their public ones. Not so with GitHub's, and this blog post hides that fact.

https://github.com/pricing#feature-comparison

Re: Announcing unlimited free private repos

#622

Post by dogweather »

aarongray wrote: post #582
closetCS wrote: post #543

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This might be a naive comment, but isn't that predatory pricing. By dropping prices to zero and trying to purposely hurt your competitors, you effectively gain a monopoly on that industry.

Github's competitors are already providing the same service for free. Github is dropping their prices from $7 / mo to free to compete.

But they're not. They created a new, feature-reduced repo type to make free/private. The marketing hides this, and you need to dig to the "Comparison" section to see it:

https://github.com/pricing#feature-comparison

Re: Announcing unlimited free private repos

#623

Post by profalseidol »

princeofwands wrote: post #518
TimTheTinker wrote: post #490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> censoring projects Have they ever done that? I wasn’t aware of any such thing.

> GitHub bans repository over use of the word "retard" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9966118 https://github.com/nixxquality/WebMConverter/commit/c1ac0baa...

Well, it is still decentralized. The author still has a copy of the repo and can always upload to other servers.

Re: Announcing unlimited free private repos

#624

Post by saghm »

laurentl wrote: post #255
iambateman wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could be correct, but the “social network” boost to reputation potential is strong enough now that I suspect a lot of people will still choose to post public content where reasonable, while us cheapskates won’t have to look to another platform for private code hosting.

For better or worse, having a Github profile is now a thing that’s expected of developers, so public repos are here to stay. Personally speaking, I’ll still default to public for my side projects. But a free private repo sounds like exactly the thing for online classes or web challenges where you’re explicitely asked not to share your code. I’ve just started on the cryptopals challenges, now I know where to put my co…

Offline classes too! As a former TA, I can attest to sometimes being a struggle to deal with grading when students from past semesters have their code publicly available online. (The solution we used was to change the specifications for projects slightly so that old code wouldn't produce the correct results; generally students who would rather cheat than learn are too lazy to actually modify the code they're plagiarizing, and we usually caught at least one or two each semester)

Re: Announcing unlimited free private repos

#625

Post by mixmastamyk »

kabdib wrote: post #556
pstuart wrote: post #507

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sears seemed to be intentionally run into the ground so that Eddie Lampert could loot the assets: https://prospect.org/article/how-sears-was-gutted-its-own-ce...

Whatever bad things you can say about Ballmer, he wasn't out to gut Microsoft. He simply made decisions that were short-sighted and insular. Well, and the review system (which caused a bunch of good people to leave for Google in Kirkland, and some other places). Once, I was doing an embedded system for a consumer product in the Xbox group. We started out trying to using Windows CE, and after three months of pushing t…

They named it wince, ‘nuff said.

Re: Announcing unlimited free private repos

#626

Post by croo »

dpwm wrote: post #307
benatkin wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's currently in stark contrast with GitHub. I won't be at all surprised if I see in-your-face ads on GitHub in the near future. It's not like there isn't a precedent for it (hello, SourceForge).

I'm not so sure. LinkedIn was always quite spammy. Sourceforge did some absolutely egregious things, including bundling adware with windows binaries. Maybe the people at Microsoft don't know it, but one of the reasons GitHub has such a huge market share is because it hasn't done any of those things. Sure, MS could have bought it to use its reputation as capital and try and maximise income at all costs. It seems that…

Sourceforge got revived from its ashes though. It's a nice site nowdays.

Re: Announcing unlimited free private repos

#627

Post by gsaga »

Isn't that 3 contributor limit just a virtual limit. Assume there are 5 contributors (A, B, C, D, E) for a project. The organization could do this:

1. Create two private copies of that repository

2. A, B, C contribute to the first repository

3. C, D, E contribute to the second repository.

4. C will maintain the synchronization

5. One could write scripts for performing synchronization.

Re: Announcing unlimited free private repos

#628

Post by sah2ed »

dhh2106 wrote: post #455
smartmic wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is no surprise but sound business reason that private repos will be available for free. For some background, check this HN classic: "Commoditize your complements" ( https://www.gwern.net/Complement#2 )

Interesting article. Any literature/thoughts on when to commoditize complements rather than trying to vertically integrate? Private repos might be a complement to github's other business, but it doesn't naturally follow that they should commoditize it in all situations

You’d get a lot of value from reading an old but still relevant book from 1998: Information Rules: A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy by Hal Varian & Carl Shapiro that discusses several of these strategies.

“Commoditize your complements” is a phrase popularized by Joel Spolsky but the book uses the broader of term: “maximize your value”. Commoditization is one of a few ways to maximize your value.

Re: Announcing unlimited free private repos

#629

Post by ptx »

iambateman wrote: post #217
maxander wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All true, but why mot data mine too, while they’re at it? If you’re not the customer you’re a product... but it doesn’t follow that, if you are the customer, you’re not also a product.

Sure. My point is that I expect them to be respectful, not avaricious. Microsoft's knows they ought not piss off 28 million developers.

Microsoft have already started doing this to developers (forced data-mining, a.k.a. telemetry) in .NET Core and VS Code - and to everyone in Windows 10 - so I don't see why they wouldn't do the same with Github.

Re: Announcing unlimited free private repos

#630

Post by thaumasiotes »

iambateman wrote: post #190

A lot of people are concerned about the “what if they make me the product since I’m no longer paying.” A few reasons I don’t think that will happen: - private, single contributor repos tend to be pretty small. it costs Github very little to service a single account. - Github is a growing social network for developers. Getting young engineers on the platform for free will pay off handsomely when they join a team and a…

> GitHub is in the strange position of being both a successful enterprise product AND a social network. What other product exists with that kind of crossover?

...Facebook? WeChat?

Those aren't exactly little-known products.

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