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Announcing unlimited free private repos

blog.github.com

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Re: Announcing unlimited free private repos

#541

Post by adrianmonk »

mehrdadn wrote: post #527

I wanted to take a moment to point something out. I think most people here would agree that "unlimited free private repos" is not considered lying when in fact the free private repos are limited to 3 collaborators... correct? So why is it that when the subject turns to cell phone data, suddenly "unlimited data" is considered lying when the speed is then limited past a certain point? (Yes, I get that one service is pa…

Another difference is that, with GitHub's announcement, there are multiple ways to interpret it because there are different things that the modifier "unlimited" could apply to. It could mean:

1. Unlimited number of repos, each of which is limited (by user, as it turns out).

2. Limited number of repos, each of which is unlimited.

3. Unlimited number of unlimited repos.

When there are multiple ways to interpret and you find out someone has picked one of them, it doesn't feel like they are being disingenuous.

Whereas with cell data plans, there's only one thing they could reasonably mean is unlimited: the data. So they've changed what "unlimited" means. It is limited, but there aren't overage charges.

Re: Announcing unlimited free private repos

#542

Post by clhodapp »

mehrdadn wrote: post #527

I wanted to take a moment to point something out. I think most people here would agree that "unlimited free private repos" is not considered lying when in fact the free private repos are limited to 3 collaborators... correct? So why is it that when the subject turns to cell phone data, suddenly "unlimited data" is considered lying when the speed is then limited past a certain point? (Yes, I get that one service is pa…

I think that with GitHub the "unlimited" is understood to mean "in repo count". You can create as many repos as you want and still get the same quality of service. You are not punished for creating more repos, you just have some limitations on (all) the repos you can create.

With cell phone data, "unlimited" is understood to mean "in quantity". However, once you reach a not-all-that-hard-to-hit threshold in that same metric, your quality of service degrades severely. I don't think anyone would have any issue if a carrier sold an "unlimited data" plan that provided that degraded quality of service from the start and didn't throttle based on actual usage. They would just factor the tradeoff into their purchasing decision and choose a plan appropriately. The problem is that the carriers advertise both the higher speed and the unlimited-ness when you can't actually have both at the same time.

Re: Announcing unlimited free private repos

#543

Post by closetCS »

markmark wrote: post #515
boramalper wrote: post #259

Competition in a free market is good, but in the presence of monopolies, it's a self-destructing concept. TechCrunch wrote[0] "This feels like a sign of goodwill on behalf of Microsoft, which closed its acquisition of GitHub last October, with former Xamarin CEO Nat Friedman taking over as GitHub’s CEO." I believe it's more of a sign of an attempt to kill GitHub's rivals by hurting their revenue streams. As Aaron Lev…

It's tough when your competition can give away their product and fund it through their bottomless pockets and money they make on other products. I used to work for a great company in the developer tooling area, one of the big players came directly after us, ramped up a team, started copying our features and gave the product away for free. We were still doing well when I left, but it'll be interesting to see how it go…

This might be a naive comment, but isn't that predatory pricing. By dropping prices to zero and trying to purposely hurt your competitors, you effectively gain a monopoly on that industry.

Re: Announcing unlimited free private repos

#544

Post by karmakaze »

smartmic wrote: post #374
iambateman wrote: post #190

A lot of people are concerned about the “what if they make me the product since I’m no longer paying.” A few reasons I don’t think that will happen: - private, single contributor repos tend to be pretty small. it costs Github very little to service a single account. - Github is a growing social network for developers. Getting young engineers on the platform for free will pay off handsomely when they join a team and a…

It is no surprise but sound business reason that private repos will be available for free. For some background, check this HN classic: "Commoditize your complements" ( https://www.gwern.net/Complement#2 )

All else being equal, demand for a product increases when the prices of its complements decrease.

For the first time, developers can use GitHub for their private projects with up to three collaborators per repository for free.

The free repos are kind of a loss leader to bring in users onto the platform to keep Github as the de facto provider.

This is great news. I still prefer then issue management abilities of Gitlab nested projects, but choice and competition are good for the end user.

Re: Announcing unlimited free private repos

#545

Post by mehrdadn »

adrianmonk wrote: post #541
mehrdadn wrote: post #527

I wanted to take a moment to point something out. I think most people here would agree that "unlimited free private repos" is not considered lying when in fact the free private repos are limited to 3 collaborators... correct? So why is it that when the subject turns to cell phone data, suddenly "unlimited data" is considered lying when the speed is then limited past a certain point? (Yes, I get that one service is pa…

Another difference is that, with GitHub's announcement, there are multiple ways to interpret it because there are different things that the modifier "unlimited" could apply to. It could mean: 1. Unlimited number of repos, each of which is limited (by user, as it turns out). 2. Limited number of repos, each of which is unlimited. 3. Unlimited number of unlimited repos. When there are multiple ways to interpret and you…

In cell plans it's exactly the same thing though. The amount of data vs. the speed can each be artificially limited separately. They obviously mean the amount is unlimited whereas people somehow take it to mean both the amount and the speed are unlimited.

Re: Announcing unlimited free private repos

#546

Post by beatgammit »

dwild wrote: post #420
geezerjay wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's fair to say that the personal accounts are irrelevant from a revenue perspective. Your assertion can only make sense if you also believe that a 12% paycut is irrelevant to your income.

> Your assertion can only make sense if you also believe that a 12% paycut is irrelevant to your income. You only see the short term. I was on Github during my university, all my projects were there, my team mate were on there too, it was pretty great. When my student account expired, I decided to move everything to Gitlab. I didn't want to move but I won't pay 7$ a month to host my old school projects and some perso…

Sure, but that 12% isn't irrelevant, it's an investment. They're investing 12% of lost revenue in future growth.

Now, if personal accounts were far less (e.g. 1% of revenue), I could see the argument that they're irrelevant.

Maybe I'm just complaining about vocabulary, and perhaps your clarification was what the OP intended.

Re: Announcing unlimited free private repos

#547

Post by sbarre »

sonnyblarney wrote: post #538
smartmic wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is no surprise but sound business reason that private repos will be available for free. For some background, check this HN classic: "Commoditize your complements" ( https://www.gwern.net/Complement#2 )

The problem is - hosting repos, especially private ones, is not a 'complementary service' for Github. It's the core of their offer. Edit: example - Google paying for Chrome, Android - this is 'complementary'. Google giving away free personal ads on search ... 'core'. MSFT giving away free dev tools, Bing search - complementary. Giving away 'Windows Home' for free ... 'core'.

Github's core offering is not small private repos with max 3 contributors.

Re: Announcing unlimited free private repos

#548

Post by baroffoos »

boramalper wrote: post #384
aarongray wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Code storage is a free market and GitHub is not a monopoly.

It’s currently the de facto solution, and it’s on the way of becoming a monopoly. 9 out of 10 companies I’ve applied to asked for my GitHub profile explicitly; I presume they would be equally happy with a link to Bitbucket or GitLab but it just shows that GitHub has already won the mindshare by far -which comes as no surprise-. Now that they are acquired by Microsoft, they have more resources than any of its competit…

Its the most popular option but its far from a monopoly. Last job I applied for asked for my github account and I sent them a gitlab link. They hired me and internally they use bitbucket.

Re: Announcing unlimited free private repos

#549

Post by SquishyPanda23 »

iambateman wrote: post #190

A lot of people are concerned about the “what if they make me the product since I’m no longer paying.” A few reasons I don’t think that will happen: - private, single contributor repos tend to be pretty small. it costs Github very little to service a single account. - Github is a growing social network for developers. Getting young engineers on the platform for free will pay off handsomely when they join a team and a…

I'm generally pretty skeptical of these sorts of arguments. People gave similar arguments about why Facebook wouldn't turn against its users or Amazon would always have some of the lowest prices you could find.

Among other things, a private repo is a file system with full history. Anything that can be used as a file system will likely get abused.

More generally, this kind of argument basically says "this company will likely ignore this revenue stream forever", which doesn't sound very likely in the long run.

This might also be an attack on GitLab, which I believe has had unlimited free private repos for a while.

Re: Announcing unlimited free private repos

#550

Post by baroffoos »

mroche wrote: post #273

For those of you using GitLab, BitBucket, or , does this make you consider switching back at all? If so, why? It may be myopic, but the only major reason I can think of is visibility if you plan on publicizing the repo at some point. But you can achieve this by using GitHub as a mirror for your main repo on another platform (at least for GitLab, I’m not familiar with BitBucket). Edit: Personally, I use GitLab (both .…

Gitlab is vastly better in so many different ways that this doesn't even come close to making me want to switch back.
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