What's so "awesome" about Github? It doesn't even have proper codesearch like Google used to have before they shut their code hosting down. I seriously don't get it. For my own needs I just host my own Mercurial and hgweb. It takes all of 5 minutes to set up, and provides all I need.
GitHub Raises $250M at $2B Valuation
251–260 of 416 posts
Re: GitHub Raises $250M at $2B Valuation
#252Both this piece, and most commenters, seem to miss the point about where Github's value comes from. It's not for being a social identity for programmers, or hosting open-source libraries. Those are worthy pursuits, but from a business perspective mostly serve as marketing. Github is basically Microsoft Word for programmers, and is an essential part of their workflow. Companies that need enterprise functionality aroun…
Microsoft Word became a valuable monopoly because it was a proprietary standard. But git hosting is a commodity service. There are already a number of players doing exactly what GitHub does, for less money, and it's trivially easy to migrate a repository away from GitHub to those other providers. Something tells me that the "facebook for programmers" angle is essential to selling the dream here. The so-called "networ…
GitHub still has the best UI for code hosting I've ever seen, and continues to improve their user experience in little bits throughout the year. The fact that open-source projects by and large have moved to GitHub now that SourceForge and Google Code are no longer reliable hosting options was probably the final nail in the coffin, although GitHub has been the major player in open-source code hosting for years in my opinion. But, you're probably correct in some way in saying that it's a "facebook for programmers"...it's relied on by companies to make hiring decisions, developers to find out what each other is up to, and projects to host their resources. GitHub is a great mixture between social media, infrastructure, and general workflow or development tools, and I think that's what has made it so valuable.
I can't think of a better place to host my code.
Re: GitHub Raises $250M at $2B Valuation
#253Github seems to be a pretty good or "safe" investment. Developers have already entrusted them with something as precious as their code itself. They also have pretty clear pathways for being profitable with private repos and so on, I'm not that surprised they are getting a lot of funding.
Sorry to say, but any time I need a private repo I just head to BitBucket. GitHub provides tremendous value, I hope they find a good way to capture some of it.
So, when you're looking to not pay for something to head to a BitBucket, but if someone else is footing the bill (like a company with a real budget for more than $7/month) you'd prefer GitHub? Sounds like a win-win for GitHub.
Re: GitHub Raises $250M at $2B Valuation
#254Both this piece, and most commenters, seem to miss the point about where Github's value comes from. It's not for being a social identity for programmers, or hosting open-source libraries. Those are worthy pursuits, but from a business perspective mostly serve as marketing. Github is basically Microsoft Word for programmers, and is an essential part of their workflow. Companies that need enterprise functionality aroun…
I agree, but they are a bit of a phenomenon given the amount of marketshare they actually have. They have something else going for them, and I think it's that they are the default option for most new developers as their centralized repository.
It's interesting because bitbucket still offers free private repos yet doesn't seem to have nearly as much following as github.
Re: GitHub Raises $250M at $2B Valuation
#255JIRA/Stash/et. al isn't so bad, but I definitely prefer using GitHub Issues or Trello for my own projects. ZenHub looks pretty cool too. Definitely think the way that we use JIRA at my office is the only way to use it "right", in the sense that we basically track everything with JIRA tickets, from IT maintenance requests to operations bugs and project management tasks. The automation between JIRA and Stash is also 10% awesome, with that other 10% lost because you can't specify a code reviewer in a Stash pull request and have that person be automatically assigned to the JIRA ticket you're working on in the branch. Little failures like this are commonplace among the Atlassian toolset, which is why I don't like using it quite as much.
Re: GitHub Raises $250M at $2B Valuation
#256What's so "awesome" about Github? It doesn't even have proper codesearch like Google used to have before they shut their code hosting down. I seriously don't get it. For my own needs I just host my own Mercurial and hgweb. It takes all of 5 minutes to set up, and provides all I need.
I can only speak for myself, but I love GitHub because it's easy accessible for me. When I was learning how to use git and code in general (well, I'm still in that process to be fair), it's great to have a visualitation of what you're actually doing. It's even better when that interface is well-designed (at least I consider GitHub to be great UX), so you don't have to learn using another UI on top of all the new stuff you already learn as well. I think that's a factor you underestimate when you've been working with revision control and code for a long time.
Additionally, the collaboration aspect of GitHub is great as well - As it's a big plattform, a lot of developers already have a GitHub account and it's very easy to contribute with forks and pull requests. Submitting patches via mailing lists isn't everyone's cup of tea.
Re: GitHub Raises $250M at $2B Valuation
#257Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed, the valuation makes no sense to me. There's really no switching costs that I see. Bitbucket is actually superior in many ways because of its tight integration with Atlassian - the real Microsoft Word of the Developer community. Sourceforge had this kind of play at one point and look at it now. Maybe they're going to start displaying ads for jobs for developers. Not sure that's worth 2B though...
Of dozens of projects I've contributed to in the past 18 months or so, including open source, freelancing, and at work, all of one has been on anything other than github (Bitbucket) and the other dev and I ended up migrating it to github because we preferred it. Slack ate HipChat's lunch, too. From the trenches it's hard for me to consider Atlassian the "standard" of modern development focussed organizations.
If they're serious about development, they should have tried Stash. It's for hosting Git inside your company and it is vastly superior to BitBucket when performing pull requests.
Re: GitHub Raises $250M at $2B Valuation
#258Earlier quoted context omitted.
BitBucket is free for private repos, GitHub is not (unless you have a student promotion active).
BitBucket is free for private repos with less than five people. Doesn't work for a lot of businesses, which is where most of the money is.
..but if they didn't charge what does it matter that it's where the money is?
Re: GitHub Raises $250M at $2B Valuation
#259Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed, the valuation makes no sense to me. There's really no switching costs that I see. Bitbucket is actually superior in many ways because of its tight integration with Atlassian - the real Microsoft Word of the Developer community. Sourceforge had this kind of play at one point and look at it now. Maybe they're going to start displaying ads for jobs for developers. Not sure that's worth 2B though...
Yet to meet a developer who's as excited about using Jira as about using Github issues...
Different use cases. Github issues can only take you so far.
I doubt anyone is actually excited about using JIRA. It's usually the solution that just sucks the least and offers features for developers, project managers and higher management alike.
Re: GitHub Raises $250M at $2B Valuation
#260Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yet to meet a developer who's as excited about using Jira as about using Github issues...
I very strongly prefer, as an engineer, not to use Atlassian products (Jira, Hipchat, Bitbucket, etc).
What's wrong with Bitbucket and Hipchat?
I love Hipchat for having a native client.