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GitHub Raises $250M at $2B Valuation

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311–320 of 416 posts

Re: GitHub Raises $250M at $2B Valuation

#311

Earlier 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...

Speaking as someone who's used bug trackers for 20 years, Jira is the closest I've ever seen to the mythical "bug tracker that doesn't suck too much".

Re: GitHub Raises $250M at $2B Valuation

#313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The value is a premium considering Atlassian was valued last year at $3.3B even though it has significantly more enterprisey features/ecosystem in the wiki/issue tracker/CI space, although it's not yet owned the social VCS enterprise/SaaS space. Atlassian has an interest in dominating the enterprise-side with JIRA (issue tracker) & Confluence (wiki). Atlassian's Github non-Enterprise competitor, Bitbucket, has unlimi…

What is "Active Directory provisioning"? Is this just an alternative way to authenticate users with the wiki similar to LDAP?

Active Directory is a whole bunch of stuff build on top of something that looks like LDAP except less sucky, and it lets you do many things from setting permissions to sharing printers and deploying software. It's not something to be installed during a lazy Friday afternoon following a 'AD 101' tutorial though.

Re: GitHub Raises $250M at $2B Valuation

#314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you sure? The price of the Github's service is ~$20.8 per developer per month. This is about 10-30 minutes of developers time worth per month. Adapting to Bitbucket's workflow and learning its UI would take much more time.

If you've hired a developer for whom using Bitbucket instead of Github takes 10-30 minutes more effort a month, you need to rereview your hiring process.

I am not sure anyone actually hiring would take this advice seriously.

Re: GitHub Raises $250M at $2B Valuation

#315
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing that GitHub has right now is the userbase - the network effect keeps people interested in their service. The technical value they provide is pretty trivially replicable (see: GitLab, BitBucket), but you can't code up a (real) community. It's worth noting that 10 years ago, this same statement was true of Sourceforge.

gitlab and bitbucket aren't as good, I've tried them and more. GitHub isn't a commodity that excels only because of it happening to be popular. People choose GitHub because it's both popular and good. It has competition, some of which are better for specific circumstances, but as a whole they don't execute as well. Let me contrast with Facebook – it was only good, in my opinion, for a brief period starting in 2005 wh…

What didn't you like about GitLab and when did you last try it?

Re: GitHub Raises $250M at $2B Valuation

#316

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How two factor auth will prevent loss of your source code? (assuming your password is unique)

Keyloggers? Social engineering around the password reset function? I use 2FA on all my personal accounts that support it (Twitter, Github, Gmail, Namecheap, banks).

If a software can log your keypresses, it can probably steal your cookies and log in as you from your machine. Cookies stored by browsers are easily readable by processes running as the same user.

Re: GitHub Raises $250M at $2B Valuation

#317
post #41

Both 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…

The social identity and open source hosting have strong network effects that would warrant a high valuation. The enterprise functionally has much less network effects and using the power of open source we're able to offer a compelling product for less than $5/month per user. I wonder what other people think, is the value in the GitHub.com offering that has a moat due to the network effects but doesn't generate much revenues or is the value in the enterprise product that generates revenues but has much smaller network effects.

Re: GitHub Raises $250M at $2B Valuation

#318
post #41

Both 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.

Imo it's because bitbucket UI is just bad. Especially issues and navigation among repositories. I have a really hard time to get used to it.

Re: GitHub Raises $250M at $2B Valuation

#319
post #301

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We're working on something to split the middle at http://Clubhouse.io As easy to use as Trello for small teams, but scales up as you grow (although we probably cap out at 100-ish devs right now, not quite to Jira's level yet.) (Full disclosure: CEO/Founder)

Looks awesome - but please tell me you will have download-and-install option? Hosting solution is not acceptable to us and this could differentiate you from hundreds of others in this area.

This is rad.

Re: GitHub Raises $250M at $2B Valuation

#320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How two factor auth will prevent loss of your source code? (assuming your password is unique)

It will help when my unique password get exposed through any of the many likely routes that don't give the attacker complete code execution on the servers - SQLi or using XSS to steal admin tokens for example.

Interesting, sqli that works only for reading encrypted_hash from DB? But since password is unique it cannot be bruteforced even locally.
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