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How GitHub Conquered Google, Microsoft, and Everyone Else

wired.com

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Re: How GitHub Conquered Google, Microsoft, and Everyone Else

#51

Post by proksoup »

DannyBee wrote: post #34
shubhamjain wrote: post #6

I think one of the underappreciated point of github is its excellent business model. The freemium model of providing everything for free if your code is public and charging only for private repositories allowed them to grow exponentially with rising popularity among open source projects. Sourceforge and Google code tried to cater only for open source projects, while never thinking that code hosting is the problem tha…

"Sourceforge and Google code tried to cater only for open source projects, while never thinking that code hosting is the problem that needs to be solved. " Actually, Google didn't care at the time. We weren't catering, Google Code required you be an open source project to use it. It literally was not trying to solve this problem, because it did not want to. We knew commercial code hosting was a problem to be solved,…

Yeah, focus is good.

Glad to see you're happy about not caring.

Re: How GitHub Conquered Google, Microsoft, and Everyone Else

#52

Post by deanotron »

I haven't seen anyone mention this but part of the success is that they had git in their name. All social platform successes aside, they had the right technology at the right time.

Before I had ever heard of GitHub, I had seen presentations at the large company I worked for praising git. Git was thrown into the limelight at the same time as subversion, CVS, perforce etc. were being eschewed.

Re: How GitHub Conquered Google, Microsoft, and Everyone Else

#53

Post by Oompa »

MollyR wrote: post #8

I'm a little paranoid about my code. I want to like github's private repos, but I don't want my code to be stolen by github's internal employees. I've heard that their employees do shady things on occasion (2nd hand knowledge).

> I've heard that their employees do shady things on occasion (2nd hand knowledge).

Care to elaborate?

Re: How GitHub Conquered Google, Microsoft, and Everyone Else

#54

Post by eridius »

chrismorgan wrote: post #48
eridius wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it actually a good business model, though? My understanding is GitHub is not profitable, and relies on VC funding to keep operating. At this point it seems like it will never be profitable unless they find some other significant source of income (as there's no reason to believe that there's hordes of companies out there just waiting to start paying GitHub for private repos). What's going to happen when the VC fund…

In August 2010: https://signalvnoise.com/posts/2486-bootstrapped-profitable-... . That might imply that at that time at least GitHub was profitable? I have no knowledge one way or another.

GitHub took VC funding in 2012. $100M from Andreessen Horowitz and SV Angel.

I have no direct knowledge about their revenue stream, but profitable companies don't usually seek VC funding, and I've heard from other people (who may or may not actually know what they're talking about) that they're not profitable and are relying on the VC funding to operate.

And they're certainly spending money like it's not their own. Check out their ridiculous office: https://customspaces.com/office/DhXb6EKlE9/github-office-san.... And that bar. That's "we're spending VC money" behavior, not "we're spending our own revenue" behavior.

Re: How GitHub Conquered Google, Microsoft, and Everyone Else

#56

Post by RaleyField »

scott_karana wrote: post #10
MollyR wrote: post #8

I'm a little paranoid about my code. I want to like github's private repos, but I don't want my code to be stolen by github's internal employees. I've heard that their employees do shady things on occasion (2nd hand knowledge).

Employees of any company in the world can do shady things. You need to trust your server hosting company, your server OS vendor, your own workstation's software, your OS, all your firmware... If GitHub employees stole proprietary code from you, and commercialized it, proving "prior art" and theft should be extremely easy for you. IANAL, but it's not something I'd worry about with most companies hosting on Github.

> your server OS vendor, your own workstation's software, your OS, all your firmware

They all stake their reputation so in theory they have checks in place to minimize rogue behavior (in practice though they are often clueless, see starfish). Also they put their code/hardware into public so they normally can't target individuals without fearing others to discover their attempts.

Contrast this to rogue employees at Github who can copy repositories for their old colleagues from college to give them an edge and the only difference you will ever see manifested is competitors seemingly always having timely answers to any new features you are about to unveil in your solution, because they were too smart to copy/paste your code directly.

Re: How GitHub Conquered Google, Microsoft, and Everyone Else

#57

Post by walterbell »

jusben1369 wrote: post #39
shubhamjain wrote: post #6

I think one of the underappreciated point of github is its excellent business model. The freemium model of providing everything for free if your code is public and charging only for private repositories allowed them to grow exponentially with rising popularity among open source projects. Sourceforge and Google code tried to cater only for open source projects, while never thinking that code hosting is the problem tha…

My understanding is that GitHub makes the majority of its revenue by selling on premise versions. So there's another layer/level to the genius of their business model.

Do they have a sizable enterprise sales force, or is cloud-hosted github a sufficient demand generator of inbound sales?

Re: How GitHub Conquered Google, Microsoft, and Everyone Else

#58

Post by cpeterso »

The slideshow on this article doesn't work on Firefox. Not "doesn't work" in some subtle way; clicking a photo produces a white page. How did Wired not catch this problem? Is there no one testing or even casually using Firefox at Wired?

btw, the slideshow is broken by a flexbox fix in Firefox 33 (October 2014): https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1142690

Re: How GitHub Conquered Google, Microsoft, and Everyone Else

#59

Post by jusben1369 »

walterbell wrote: post #57
jusben1369 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding is that GitHub makes the majority of its revenue by selling on premise versions. So there's another layer/level to the genius of their business model.

Do they have a sizable enterprise sales force, or is cloud-hosted github a sufficient demand generator of inbound sales?

Great question! I believe it's both. Cloud hosted becomes the lead gen and they've had to build a team to manage that deal flow. I don't think they're doing any cold outbound though.

Re: How GitHub Conquered Google, Microsoft, and Everyone Else

#60

Post by jsprogrammer »

eevilspock wrote: post #49
jbigelow76 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish Sourceforge would have come to that realization. Anytime I search for something that tends to be older enterprisy-ish code and it shows up in Sourceforge (iText for example) I can never figure out what the hell is and isn't an ad. If I didn't know better I would suspect a malware vendor purchased it and turned it into a honeypot for lazy devs.

Dalton Caldwell, who once worked at SourceForge, blames the ad-supported business model as the underlying reason Sourceforge sucked[1]. The users were the product and the real customers were the advertisers no matter how much he and his coworkers wanted to believe otherwise. He credits GitHub's straight up reliance on just user revenue as the key to the quality of their product. We've all been duped into thinking tha…

Is there a reason/ability to pay Github if all your work is open source (ie. no private repos)?
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