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GitHub Raises $250M at $2B Valuation

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

#341

Post by rmc »

hueving wrote: post #282
rmc wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I just don't want to have to worry about what will become this politically incorrect in the future when I'm writing code and documentation. Then don't say/write bigotted things. Honestly, it's like asking people not to write spelling or grammar mistakes in documentation. It's not that hard.

tell that to airbus engineers. Perhaps you can boycott flying on every airbus because it says "retard" to the pilots on landing.

Do you not know that words can have more than one meaning? From the context you can tell the meaning. When airbus use "retard" they're using it to mean "to slow down".

It's not "these 6 letters in this combination is banned", it's "stop insulting people based on mental illnesses".

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

#342

Post by ghuntley »

andruby wrote: post #284
ghuntley wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, you are right on point. Developers use the commodity version at home and want to use the same (awesome) tools in the workplace. Enterprise companies who wish to differentiate their hiring/talent pipeline recognise this and consider it a commercial advantage. Additionally these same enterprises have strict IP policies which prevent the IP from being hosted in the cloud. Win Win. The enterprise product VMware/Xen/…

Nope, the enterprise version is _not_ the exact same ruby/chef codebase. See for example this blogpost [1] where they announce LDAP sync. New features are often released on the public Github before they are included into a new github enterprise release. That being said, the enterprise version is very close to the public version. They are probably branches of the same repositories. [1] https://github.com/blog/category…

There are four distinct products in production (public, firewall, ghe v1 and ghe v2). I've explored the internals between all of the minor and major enterprise releases over a beer or two on a lazy afternoon. The initial product was a separate spin-off and there was definitely product convergence at the ghe v2 stage which appears to be based off public. My best uninformed, informed guess as of v2 they are now on the same branch, potentially using feature flags to enable/disable behavior to reduce maintenance/support overhead. Extremely interesting stuff can be found at the pre-install and immediate post-install stage (use standard forensics tools + granular vmware snapshots to produce diffs) that's all I will say on the topic however.

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

#343

Post by bernardlunn »

timr wrote: post #63
calcsam wrote: 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…

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…

I think it makes sense. Enterprise saas is great (direct moentization) but cost of sale sucks. Viral growth plus direct monetization is holy grail.

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

#344

Post by otis_inf »

calcsam wrote: 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…

You too miss a vital point: every user of github who doesn't pay for using the service adds to the costs of running the service. The popular it gets among free users, the more costs github has. What you're referring to is precisely the reasons why users use the service for free, and of all these users github doesn't make a dime (well, in practice they might make indirect money of these users by selling profile information and perhaps because some users might purchase services because they know github, but that's not a given)

> Companies that need enterprise functionality around security and flow configurability move to Github Enterprise and spend, not $7/month/organization, but $20/month per programmer.

This is not a given at all. Github is used by many because it's a great free service. When you have to pay for the service however (or better: you're going to use a service offered by github which costs money), there are other alternatives which might be cheaper or even free. E.g. private repositories are free on bitbucket. Private repositories don't need the social aspects of github at all, as they're private and the group of people using the repo is limited and known up front.

I find the article missing this point as well: sure they got funding and that's great, but their popularity among the users of the free service is not a reason to think they'll be a very profitable company: only the paying users can make that happen.

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

#345

Post by otis_inf »

mszyndel wrote: post #119
blazespin wrote: post #112

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...

Hello, nice to meet you :) I use jira and I like it. I don't like github issues that much in comparison because it lacks features I love in Jira, like subtasks on an issue. But YMMV of course ;)

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

#346

Post by Grue3 »

mszyndel wrote: post #119
blazespin wrote: post #112

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...

I prefer JIRA. I used Github issues and my current place of work uses Redmine, and neither of them are as nice to use. I like the ability to customize your dashboard to show the exact issues you're interested in, and that you can filter them by basically everything.

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

#347

Post by chmaynard »

hrayr wrote: post #16

"The company’s co-founders were inspired by a tech talk given at Google Inc. in 2007 by Linus Torvalds" funny how many successful companies are founded after getting inspiration from a single talk.

A video of this wonderful Google tech talk is available on YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XpnKHJAok8

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

#348

Post by [deleted] »

MarkPNeyer wrote: post #99
arikrak wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Github currently may use the "social coding" part for marketing now, but it can build off it in the future. For example, StackOverflow built a whole careers site off Q&A, Github can choose to go further based on real code.

"github labs used machine learning to generate a simple english -> python translation algorithm. it crawled the millions of commits, looking at comments and commit logs to understand software"

[deleted]

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

#349

Post by nathanvanfleet »

mpdehaan2 wrote: post #180
mszyndel wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet to meet a developer who's as excited about using Jira as about using Github issues...

Despite having a gazillion issue trackers, something halfway between the two would be welcome. GitHub issue tracking is not good enough to manage any kind of large project, JIRA is a bit of a beast. I'd prefer having an integrated JIRA any day, though I do still strongly DISLIKE JIRA. There's still opportunity for something better IMHO. (For very small teams, I find that's Trello, but Trello isn't really for large gr…

I feel like everyone talking about JIRA aren't talking about the same thing. I stated strongly in a job interview that I currently used JIRA and knew it well. But was surprised that the new job didn't set theirs up in the same was as the job before.

It all depends on how you set it up, because it can be setup in myriad of ways. My first job the PM set up all sorts of convenience links to see different issues in different ways (sprint, status, owner, priority).

Now at my new job they just tell us over skype what query they typed in. Nothing wrong with that, but it's a lot more work than if it was setup differently.

Furthermore, the number of states a issue can be in can be different too. And it can be confounding to have too many states which mean nothing, or too few that don't mean enough.

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