Tell HN: GitHub Organizations not as free as it seems

#1

Post by modzu » Thu, Apr 23, 2020, 7:54 PM UTC

GitHub informed us of something supposedly new: we could upgrade our pro personal account to a free organization account. Yay! Quoting the github page: "Everything the personal account has"... plus more fine grained permissions control.

Note the upgrade is a one-way process. Thinking it was free so why not upgrade we did.

Except we had a wiki. With a lot of valuable information. Which is now gone:

While its not documented anywhere in the happy sounding announcement, wikis aren't included in the free organization plan. Bye data! Or if you need it, thanks for upgrading your $4 plan into a more expensive one. All the best, Microsoft.

Re: Tell HN: GitHub Organizations not as free as it seems

#2

Post by ocdtrekkie » Thu, Apr 23, 2020, 8:05 PM UTC

Have you contacted their customer support? I wonder if the data is still there, or can be recovered out somehow.

Re: Tell HN: GitHub Organizations not as free as it seems

#3

Post by rvz » Thu, Apr 23, 2020, 8:06 PM UTC

Well a loss of control of your own data on someone else's service isn't a feature and should be something you should be expecting (create backups of your own data more often), yet as soon as everyone takes the 'free' upgrade bait on a third-party service, then 'all bets are off' including Github.

Seriously for organizations, you're better of in self-hosting your own projects on-premise with open-source alternatives like GitLab (recommended), cgit or even Gerrit to avoid nonsense like 'centralising everything to GitHub' in the long term. [0]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22868406

Re: Tell HN: GitHub Organizations not as free as it seems

#4

Post by neamtua » Thu, Apr 23, 2020, 8:13 PM UTC

But it is documented and from the very beginning. If you look at this page https://github.com/pricing in the comparison table under Pages and Wiki it clearly says "Public repositories". I'm guessing you had a private one. I've also moved from Pro to Free Teams and I've seen this from the start.

Re: Tell HN: GitHub Organizations not as free as it seems

#5

Post by modzu » Thu, Apr 23, 2020, 8:13 PM UTC

Here is another bait-and-switch type announcement, for GitHub Actions:

Original announcement: 10,000 per month

Starting next month: 3,000 per month

:/

Re: Tell HN: GitHub Organizations not as free as it seems

#6

Post by TimTheTinker » Thu, Apr 23, 2020, 8:15 PM UTC

rvz wrote: post #3

Well a loss of control of your own data on someone else's service isn't a feature and should be something you should be expecting (create backups of your own data more often), yet as soon as everyone takes the 'free' upgrade bait on a third-party service, then 'all bets are off' including Github. Seriously for organizations, you're better of in self-hosting your own projects on-premise with open-source alternatives l…

Seriously, you should store wiki pages as .md files in a /wiki folder in your repo, regardless of your git repo hosting provider. I'm positive wiki pages are stored in a separate git repo alongside your code, anyway.

The more that lives in the codebase itself, the better -- ideally this would not only include wiki pages, but also issues, comments, PR threads, etc.

Re: Tell HN: GitHub Organizations not as free as it seems

#7

Post by chrisgoman » Thu, Apr 23, 2020, 8:17 PM UTC

Yup, nobody in all the announcements or any other articles mentioning this new "github" has mentioned the WIKI (which is part of Gitlab) is not included in the free part of Github ... this is kind of critical IMHO

Re: Tell HN: GitHub Organizations not as free as it seems

#8

Post by tedivm » Thu, Apr 23, 2020, 8:18 PM UTC

TimTheTinker wrote: post #6

rvz wrote: post #3

Well a loss of control of your own data on someone else's service isn't a feature and should be something you should be expecting (create backups of your own data more often), yet as soon as everyone takes the 'free' upgrade bait on a third-party service, then 'all bets are off' including Github. Seriously for organizations, you're better of in self-hosting your own projects on-premise with open-source alternatives l…

Seriously, you should store wiki pages as .md files in a /wiki folder in your repo, regardless of your git repo hosting provider. I'm positive wiki pages are stored in a separate git repo alongside your code, anyway. The more that lives in the codebase itself, the better -- ideally this would not only include wiki pages, but also issues, comments, PR threads, etc.

Github treats wikis as another git repository. I regularly use this to backup the wikis I have on github.

If your project is named `username/repository` then your wiki can be cloned at `git clone git@github.com:username/repository.wiki.git`.

Re: Tell HN: GitHub Organizations not as free as it seems

#9

Post by modzu » Thu, Apr 23, 2020, 8:22 PM UTC

neamtua wrote: post #4

But it is documented and from the very beginning. If you look at this page https://github.com/pricing in the comparison table under Pages and Wiki it clearly says "Public repositories". I'm guessing you had a private one. I've also moved from Pro to Free Teams and I've seen this from the start.

if you mean "clearly" by it shows a checkmark beside "wikis" and if you click a chevron to expand the paragraph and find it says "for public repos" then sure.

Re: Tell HN: GitHub Organizations not as free as it seems

#10

Post by modzu » Thu, Apr 23, 2020, 8:23 PM UTC

TimTheTinker wrote: post #6

rvz wrote: post #3

Well a loss of control of your own data on someone else's service isn't a feature and should be something you should be expecting (create backups of your own data more often), yet as soon as everyone takes the 'free' upgrade bait on a third-party service, then 'all bets are off' including Github. Seriously for organizations, you're better of in self-hosting your own projects on-premise with open-source alternatives l…

Seriously, you should store wiki pages as .md files in a /wiki folder in your repo, regardless of your git repo hosting provider. I'm positive wiki pages are stored in a separate git repo alongside your code, anyway. The more that lives in the codebase itself, the better -- ideally this would not only include wiki pages, but also issues, comments, PR threads, etc.

i like this advice