61–70 of 90 posts
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My thinking was that it's effectively a private repository (albeit publicly visible), so it would subvert their business model.
they were talking about it being a private repo anyway that they were worried about.
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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)?
Of course it only works because the product is brilliant, and the product is only brilliant because it was created by open source developers scratching their own itch. I don't think the lessons really apply to the wider web.
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,…
At the same time though, competition is great -- plenty of me wishes you guys had tried to compete via a paid offering, one which may have lasted longer or even have been profitable. And, as a paid offering, potentially brought in some revenue and therefore maybe also had more funding/staff/effort/polish/etc. Provide choice at the very least...
And, even still, maybe Github or similar would have been better -- but I can't help but think that more competition would have resulted in a better outcome [for everyone] than a product shutdown...
For a matter of completeness, this[1] is an article worth the six minutes it takes to read it. [...]Bruce Sterling calls them “the Stacks”: Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, [GitHub]. [...] They don’t want much, those Stacks. Just your identity, your allegiance, and all of your data. Just to be your sole provider of messaging, media, merchandise, and metadata. Just to take part in as much of your online exi…
Thanks for pointing this out and for the link. I'm sort of surprised to see that sort of opinion published in the tech media. I agree with everything the author says... including how nice Github is to use, and I too use it all the time. At the same time the secret to Github's success in my opinion is all of you hackers who use it to collaborate, not their genius business model or anything like that. When git was gain…
Now git has its own weaknesses with large objects, steep learning curve and complex UI, and difficulty of central control. But the difference is that those things are all the result of tradeoffs which make git very very good for the most talented programmers, and open source in particular. You're not going to magically make something that solves all those problems but still is as good as git for versioning the average small to medium open source software project.
But even if you do, will it be good enough to convince the greybeards to switch? Did Sublime kill vim? I actually think that whatever kills GitHub will not be the same thing that kills git. It will probably be a convergence of trends that remains unforeseeable for the time being, much in the same way that GitHub rode a series of trends which would have been utterly unpredictable 10 years ago.
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Thanks for pointing this out and for the link. I'm sort of surprised to see that sort of opinion published in the tech media. I agree with everything the author says... including how nice Github is to use, and I too use it all the time. At the same time the secret to Github's success in my opinion is all of you hackers who use it to collaborate, not their genius business model or anything like that. When git was gain…
Never say never, but I don't see the git killer anywhere on the horizon. Look at how hard it was for git to beat out svn, and that was with the advantage of svn being built on an irredeemably broken repository design that no objective engineer could ever put on the same playing field with git, hg, etc. Nevertheless there was a definite period of flame wars where large groups clung to svn religiously until they were d…
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Thanks for pointing this out and for the link. I'm sort of surprised to see that sort of opinion published in the tech media. I agree with everything the author says... including how nice Github is to use, and I too use it all the time. At the same time the secret to Github's success in my opinion is all of you hackers who use it to collaborate, not their genius business model or anything like that. When git was gain…
Never say never, but I don't see the git killer anywhere on the horizon. Look at how hard it was for git to beat out svn, and that was with the advantage of svn being built on an irredeemably broken repository design that no objective engineer could ever put on the same playing field with git, hg, etc. Nevertheless there was a definite period of flame wars where large groups clung to svn religiously until they were d…
While GitHub has obviously spent enormous resources around hosting git repos there is nothing tying them to git as an SCM. If for some reason Mecurial or something brand new becomes the new hotness GitHub would be able to accommodate. Their business strength is around the community and users, who they seem to keep happy.
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…
> " The freemium model of providing everything for free if your code is public " I actually prefer Bitbucket model of free private repos for tiny groups. I found myself with a lot of repos that I don't want to share until they are in a minimum quality state.
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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. C…
Taking VC's money is usually a sign of a company that wants to grow faster or want something else the VC may bring to the table (connections, expertise, ...)
I have no idea if they are profitable or not, but your comment seems to be based entirely on heresay.
Github hasn't centralized all open source code Because git itself is decentralized. If only other social networks let you extract your data so easily.
The source code itself is stored in a decentralized way, sure, but the git repository doesn't include pull request comments, wiki pages and issues. Of course, you can fetch these using the (rate-limited) GitHub API, but it's not quite the same (and other social networks typically let you extract your data in the same way).