Tbh, I like this move. I hope they will merge Atom with VS Code and shutdown VSTS in favor for GitHub.
Right now I use VSTS for private repos, but it'd be nice to be on GitHub were the vast majority of open source projects are hosted.
I currently pay for GitHub, personally. This has the following benefits:
- Easy to collaborate with other people if I want to invite them to my projects.
- Web-based code hosting, meaning I can access my code from anywhere regardless of whether I have access to my own machine or not.
- A web interface! This is quite useful for browsing code or sharing particular snippets with others.
- Integration with third-party tools. Almost literally every code-related service that offers integration will integrate with GitHub – things like CI servers etc. for example. This means basically zero-effort setup for many other tools.
The cost to me is basically a rounding error, and the utility is great.
https://www.visualstudio.com/team-services/pricing/
It's very simple, reasonable, and sane compared to GitHub's.
Why would you lower your price if people are still paying for it and you are the market leader? Also at $7 per month it is among the cheapest tools for a professional developer.
Well, it's Microsoft, so more complex tiering and tie in to MSDN should be on the road map.
> Their current price of $7 a month is absolutely absurd for individual developers.
How so?
> I can get a pretty decent VPS for $2 a month cheaper.
Perhaps, so what? That's an unrelated service.
> Considering that most of their competitors give small teams free private repos, their price should be half of that.
Their competitors do that to build a user base and mind share in the face of GitHub’s huge advantage in network effects.
Lately, based on comments made while promoting .NET Core, it sounds like Microsoft don't want to consolidate tooling, so it wouldn't surprise me to see Atom and VS Code co-exist as entirely separate entities/teams.
Atom is extensible to a fault. A plugin can do just about everything and anything. FFS tabs are actually a plugin! While that means that performance will suffer, many (myself included) use Atom because of that insane freedom that plugins have to do what they need to do.
VSCode on the other hand is much more "if you want to do X, use this API". It's much more controlled, much more opinionated about how things "should" be done using VSCode as a platform.
From 30,000 ft, they are the same. But their goals and details differ, and I always prefer more choice rather than less.
I think most people who use github would NOT want that.