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GitHub is now free for teams

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Re: GitHub is now free for teams

#81
post #8

Well, this is amazing! I never would have thought the Microsoft acquisition would have these kinds of results! Congrats to Nat and the GitHub team (and by extension Microsoft) for making this possible! I wonder whether this is a result of market conditions, or whether GitHub sees this is a first-to-market play of some sort, or whether it's something else. I hate to be a cynic given how much good Microsoft + GitHub ha…

I feel like anyone who lived through the 90s could have expected "these kinds of results".

Git is open source and widely supported, which doesn't benefit Microsoft. By causing GitHub-specific features to be an essential part of a "modern" or "industry standard" git workflow, they can capture more marketshare/attention, and cause alternatives to be sidelined. This requires removing all friction to entering the proprietary ecosystem, including purchasing. This, along with the acquisition of NPM, is the "embrace" part.

The next will be an expansion of GitHub and NPM's featuresets in ways that are only accessible via branded, first party tools (i.e. not git/ssh/yarn). GitHub has already made some inroads there prior to the Microsoft acquisition with of course the ubiquitous PRs as well as GitHub Issues and Actions. I imagine the ability to check out GitHub wikis as git repos will probably eventually go away to further this.

The last part ("extinguish") is turning off support for non-firstparty tools like git-via-ssh, .patch URL support, issue collaboration via email, yarn, et c. By the time they do this, few people will notice, having acclimated to the entirely-proprietary ecosystem they've been incrementally subjected to.

The goal, as always: a Microsoft editor (VS Code or Atom), editing code in a Microsoft language (TypeScript/.NET/whatever), signed off via Microsoft review software (GitHub mobile), publishing to a Microsoft website (GitHub/npm), running CI on a Microsoft VM (GitHub Actions), pushing code to a Microsoft datacenter (Azure).

It's simply a moat to prevent open, unfettered competition in any intersection of the vertical. Any weak spots (such as GitHub signup friction) are to be subsidized as they will yield benefits when later used as a cohesive whole in an anticompetitive fashion.

Re: GitHub is now free for teams

#82
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a great change! One request: I wish that SAML was not an enterprise feature. SAML ought be a basic security feature like 2FA—it's especially valuable for open source teams who might use a mixture of services, and an easily accessible and cheap SSO solution would go a long way in raising the security bar for all teams, not just open source teams.

Agreed. SAML even makes sense for solo dev.

So you care a lot about this, but not $4/month care?

Re: GitHub is now free for teams

#83

This is pretty cool. Anyone have thoughts as to _why_ they’re making this move?

The fact that they're mirroring Gitlab's offering probably suggests that Gitlab is capturing market share from them. It's probably happening more now, as companies are taking very serious looks at their expenses.

Re: GitHub is now free for teams

#85
post #35

Hi HN, I'm the CEO of GitHub. Everyone at GitHub is really excited about this announcement, and I'm happy to answer any questions. We've wanted to make this change for the last 18 months, but needed our Enterprise business to be big enough to enable the free use of GitHub by the rest of the world. I'm happy to say that it's grown dramatically in the last year, and so we're able to make GitHub free for teams that don'…

This is a great change! One request: I wish that SAML was not an enterprise feature. SAML ought be a basic security feature like 2FA—it's especially valuable for open source teams who might use a mixture of services, and an easily accessible and cheap SSO solution would go a long way in raising the security bar for all teams, not just open source teams.

+1

Even the ability to just “login with gmail” for non-enterprise accounts would be huge

Re: GitHub is now free for teams

#86
post #66
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a great change! One request: I wish that SAML was not an enterprise feature. SAML ought be a basic security feature like 2FA—it's especially valuable for open source teams who might use a mixture of services, and an easily accessible and cheap SSO solution would go a long way in raising the security bar for all teams, not just open source teams.

Agree. I sell simple sass product myself and offer SAML to everyone. I view security as a basic right, not something to be used to extract more money for. Charging for additional features is ok, charging for keeping your account more secure is just plain wrong.

But saml is for integration (SSO). Github provides 2fa for free.

What enterprise is paying is the convenience, not security itself.

Re: GitHub is now free for teams

#87

Hi HN, I'm the CEO of GitHub. Everyone at GitHub is really excited about this announcement, and I'm happy to answer any questions. We've wanted to make this change for the last 18 months, but needed our Enterprise business to be big enough to enable the free use of GitHub by the rest of the world. I'm happy to say that it's grown dramatically in the last year, and so we're able to make GitHub free for teams that don'…

While we have your here, any plans for more fine-grained IAM for GitHub Apps? It's already a lot better than legacy apps, but it's still pretty broad. Ideally every API call/resource could be specified individually in an IAM policy, so we can only request the minimum permissions possible in our GitHub Apps.

Re: GitHub is now free for teams

#88
post #35

Hi HN, I'm the CEO of GitHub. Everyone at GitHub is really excited about this announcement, and I'm happy to answer any questions. We've wanted to make this change for the last 18 months, but needed our Enterprise business to be big enough to enable the free use of GitHub by the rest of the world. I'm happy to say that it's grown dramatically in the last year, and so we're able to make GitHub free for teams that don'…

This is a great change! One request: I wish that SAML was not an enterprise feature. SAML ought be a basic security feature like 2FA—it's especially valuable for open source teams who might use a mixture of services, and an easily accessible and cheap SSO solution would go a long way in raising the security bar for all teams, not just open source teams.

SAML (and 2FA to a lesser extent) comes with some serious support burdens on the companies offering it. There's a long tail of more or less broken SAML implementations on both the service and identity provider sides, provisioning issues, configuration issues, "Sally can't login on Tuesdays" issues, duplicated slightly-inconsistent data in IdP and Service side records issues...

If you as a SaaS provider outsource your SAML integration to a third party provider like Okta or Auth0, the auth provider pricing is immediately on a "call us" tier, with a per-federation pricing in the low four figures for each company connecting via SAML. Let me just state that again, to have company X connect to my SaaS via SAML, I as the SaaS provider have to pay my auth provider $X,000 per year for the privilege, not counting the base enterprise tier pricing for the auth.

Re: GitHub is now free for teams

#89
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GitHub has significant vendor lock-in, so it makes sense to make it free to capture the market before a competitor gets traction. [Speculation:] Perhaps they've run the numbers and can figure out that they make enough money from enterprise clients and will make enough more money from the 'marketplace' being a channel for selling github integrations and addons to cover this cost of not trying to monetize through suppo…

> GitHub has significant vendor lock-in Do they? Unless you're on GitHub Enterprise, migrating is just moving your repos over the weekend, setting up new webhooks, emailing everyone a command to switch their upstream URL, and hoping the new workflow works for you. For teams of <100, this it one of the easier transitions to make.

There are external services that integrate with Github but not Gitlab. (though more and more are also adding Gitlab integration)
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