Announcing unlimited free private repos
blog.github.com
blog.github.com
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 automatically assume Github is their code storage tool of choice.
- Microsoft gets the reputation points for running the de facto developer social network (other than Stack Overflow).
GitHub is in the strange position of being both a successful enterprise product AND a social network. What other product exists with that kind of crossover? Microsoft will continue to optimize their enterprise revenue from GH and I think this is a tremendous step forward toward building the network long term.
If you’re not the customer you’re a product... but it doesn’t follow that, if you are the customer, you’re not also a product.
Microsoft's knows they ought not piss off 28 million developers.
edit: 1. I literally forgot about Gitlab as a Github substitute when I wrote the comment, interpret that as you may.
Yes, that is the obvious risk. Gitlab is the #2 in the space, right now they don't have much market share but if an avaricious corporation violated the spirit of Github? It might be the chance they need.
LinkedIn comes to mind, which was also aquired by Microsoft.
Sourceforge did some absolutely egregious things, including bundling adware with windows binaries.
Maybe the people at Microsoft don't know it, but one of the reasons GitHub has such a huge market share is because it hasn't done any of those things.
Sure, MS could have bought it to use its reputation as capital and try and maximise income at all costs. It seems that would be somewhat counterproductive, given the long process Microsoft has gone through to start fixing its image with developers.
Have they ever done that? I wasn’t aware of any such thing.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9966118
https://github.com/nixxquality/WebMConverter/commit/c1ac0baa...
Here more about GitHub suffering from state-censorship: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_GitHub
GitHub also censors any content that they deem stolen (such as the NSA Malware / EquationGroup releases) and content that they deem containing PII-data (such as the public LinkedIn crawl of people stating they work for ICE).
GitHub makes judgment calls on what to censor: They deem a project name offensive, they deem some piece of code stolen (unless the NSA admitted to them it was legit, they had no confirmation), they deem publicly available data crawled from the web PII or harassment instigation.
Unless you do not classify these examples as censorship, it is what it is.
The objection stems from the fact that censorship is always a dominant issue raised in discussions about platforms for sharing and, while it's important to keep it in mind if you're the type of person who might share controversial or objectionable content, that is type of sharing is the minority.
If we were in an oppressive regime like China where state mandated censorship is the norm, then it would be a much more pressing concern. But for most of us, we're not under an oppressive regime and decrying the platform for censorship is on par with complaining that reddit won't let you dox people or flicker banned you for posting kiddieporn.
Microsoft would only stand to gain (short or long term) if it's been engaging in its traditional EEE strategy this whole time and is ready to pull the trigger on that final E. Even if that's the case, I can't see any real benefit; it'd just be a middle finger to developers.
Github on the other hand has actual useful software that is separate from their user base.
I don't think they are comparable.
[1] https://medium.com/@moritzplassnig/github-is-doing-much-bett... (disclaimer: I wrote the article but the data is by Bloomberg)
With this change, Github foregoes a little revenue in exchange for securing the vast majority of their revenue.
It turned out to be damned easy (and very cheap) and that's a serious threat to github's future growth because once people start to default elsewhere for one type of their work, it tends to drag along other types of their work.
But, for one very obvious reason, people have grown more and more interested in finding alternatives to Github, and they're forced to compete.
Gitlab and Bitbucket both heavily positioned themselves against Github with their unlimited private repos feature. With this competing with Github is going to become much harder. I think it's a smart move for MS.
Unless .. all github revenue is irrelevant for Microsoft - which might be true, for all I know.
Source: I am the CEO of Sourcegraph and consider similar things.
But in reality, the source of your customers' income has little to do with value. B2B is favored because the margins are generally higher.
Meh, just fire 12.5% of the staff. /s
As a particular former Microsoft CEO put it: "[…] DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS […]". That strategy/desire hasn't exactly stopped, though it's certainly transformed quite a bit over the last couple decades (and Microsoft is finally actually getting somewhat effective there).
Your assertion can only make sense if you also believe that a 12% paycut is irrelevant to your income.
All of Github's competitors (i.e. gitlab and bitbucket) already offer unlimited private repos. This is Github catching up.
However, I don't think it will be an issue. As hosting costs drop to zero, if someone starts charging, they lose customers to a free competitor. (as is happening here).
There’s surely a goodwill factor and wider strategic benefits here beyond the relatively small amount of revenue - these individuals enjoying the free private repos will in many cases likely be future candidates for customers for the enterprise offerings etc, or one day find themselves involved in discussions regarding managed VCS for a larger org. Given Microsoft’s current strategy to win over developers, this seems like a pretty sensible move, and the price (for Microsoft) very low. Strategically this seems not entirely different to the free accounts AWS throw at university students. Once you have someone hooked on your free offerings, you can start locking them into the wider platform (Azure) much more easily. Again, pretty much the AWS playbook.
Also, let’s not forget the 12.5 percent figure comes from 2016, a year which saw some pretty significant changes to GitHub’s offerings, such as unlimited personal repositories for paying users among other things. Prior to this you had to pay more to get more private repos. The number today may be somewhat different - I know my github spend went down following that change.
Also, 12.5 percent of revenues - comparisons to a 12 percent pay cut are pretty misleading.
Unless there is some reason to believe that making individual accounts free will somehow also reduce costs in a material way. Seems to me it will likely increase costs significantly as many more users will flock to create free private repos.
In fact, it's more like giving you a 12% percent pay cut and then asking you to commute further to work.
A decision like this has to be viewed in the wider context of Microsoft’s market strategy and the rest of their developer tool portfolio, of which Github is just one piece.
If Microsoft just cared about short term gains, there were much better ways to blow 8 billion dollars.
It's misleading because it ignores user acquisition & conversion. Freemium often means you "take a paycut" on option A in order to make even more money on option B.
It's misleading in the sense that a 12.5% pay cut is not something I can recover in other ways.
Meanwhile, there is a possibility that this 12.5% cut on individual account might be recovered automatically in other ways if it results in increased enterprise account.
My personal private repos have always been on BitBucket. Not because I like BitBucket more, but simply because of the additional cost.
Having unlimited private account on GitHub will encourage me to move my stuff there, and ultimately reduces the friction and increases the chance that at some time in the future I might be a paying enterprise customers.
Yeah, I take that deal every day of the week.
Beyond a certain hand-to-mouth income it is (e.g. 150K vs 132K).
And many people chose pay cuts over personally overworking or stretching their business too thin.
The overly trivial point being behind the parent argument is that 100% of your revenue if better than less than 100%. Which is not always the case in business.
Businesses and freelancer drop gigs all the time to concentrate on where their main income is coming from. If you have a difficult customer or few demanding customers that generate just 20% of your income, it's often wise to drop them to focus on your easier 80%.
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 personal stuff. Now that I did move everything, I actually enjoy Gitlab quite a bit.
What do you think I'm going to use if I start a commercial project? In the past I would have chosen Github, but now that I'm comfortable with Gitlab and see all its benefits, it's probably the one I would choose.
Cutting that 12% may lose 12% in the short term, but in a few years, it's going to gain you much more than 12%.
If you think about mid-sized software companies (~10-100 devs), if 80% of your developers have a strong preference for Github over Gitlab or Bitbucket, then that company is likely going to stick with Github or decide to move to Github eventually. I think this is where Github captures much more than that 12% revenue that they are giving up right now.
I moved all my personal repos to Bitbucket a while ago, as it was free, and have referred them several paying customers from my clients.
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.
If that WERE the reason, they'd be charging for visual studio code, not giving it away.
Github student pack was already a thing. https://education.github.com/pack
I'm one of them that moved to Gitlab afterward and right now I currently hesitate to go back to Github, even if its free.
But in a social network I am the product
I'm sure the screws will tighten on it. Unless Microsoft's entire plan is to run it forever, giving blank checks to GitHub, as a way to endear developers to Microsoft.
Maybe.
Github users are interested more in code than in people. Sure, you can use it to follow your favorite coders and technology people that you respect and look up to, but I have a feeling most people aren't doing that too much.
Like most developers, I use Github extensively to obtain open-source code that I use in projects. Sometimes, I explore Github to look for new things, or see what kind of projects are popular since I've last checked (maybe once or twice a year). Usually, it is the canonical source of information for large open-source projects; the code lives there and issues / bug reports live there. While using it in this manner, I don't look so much at who is posting comments / commits, as I do at the content of the commit or comments on issues, and whether the information is relevant to me.
That's interesting to think about. Who knows, maybe GitHub will become the next LinkedIn for developers? Or for everyone? LinkedIn is nearly unusable these days, in my opinion.
For some background, check this HN classic: "Commoditize your complements" (https://www.gwern.net/Complement#2)
Any literature/thoughts on when to commoditize complements rather than trying to vertically integrate? Private repos might be a complement to github's other business, but it doesn't naturally follow that they should commoditize it in all situations
“Commoditize your complements” is a phrase popularized by Joel Spolsky but the book uses the broader of term: “maximize your value”. Commoditization is one of a few ways to maximize your value.
It's amazing that Microsoft came back to life from being a zombie company. In hindsight, it was such a large zombie that it had sufficient time to change business models. Somehow Sears wasn't. There's a business school case study and tenure buried in there.
https://prospect.org/article/how-sears-was-gutted-its-own-ce...
Once, I was doing an embedded system for a consumer product in the Xbox group. We started out trying to using Windows CE, and after three months of pushing that horrible mess up a hill [holy Toledo, what a steaming pile...] we ditched it in favor of something really simple that could actually do the job, instead of the politically correct thing that we'd been "encouraged" to do. (Honestly, words fail me at how badly designed and buggy the the whole WinCE code base was).
At the time, Ballmer was all about everything having to be Windows. "Windows Foundation" for TV, "Windows Auto", Windows This-and-That. I joked that we wouldn't be allowed to ship our firmware until we named it something like "Windows Just An Event Loop And Some Interrupt Handlers".
The Sears folks are pirates, they don't give a shit about Sears and just want to extract as much money as they can.
Big difference.
Seems strange to me that they are neglecting the client platform (and developer tools to! used to be very important under Balmer), the lock in effect used to be driving demand towards NT server.
to put it frankly: I don't quite understand the grand strategy of MS.
MSFT has changed in some positive ways, but since Satya took over, growth has been actually flat-ish to negative overall until 2018 (a good year). Paradoxically, MSFT stock was flat during the Ballmer years when there was rock solid consistent growth.
The 'new MSFT' things is quite overrated in terms of what it really means for the company overall. We HN readers tend to considerably overvalue actions that might seem positive, such as things like open source contributions. MS VS Code is great, but it's not hugely material next to core business. Most of the world really does not care, and they are buying gadzooks worth of MSFT products and services. For better or worse.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/267805/microsofts-global...
Contrast that with Ballmer, who consistently and reliably grew the company with solid numbers for over a decade, and was rewarded with a stock lift of 0.
The stock lift of MSFT over the last few years is the result of Ballmer. A) his tenure and B) the fact the stock was obviously suppressed a little bit during that time, only recently have the multiples been allowed to shift, and when they did ... the valuation jumped up.
Satya seems to be doing well, but for now it's mostly politics and perception. We'll have to wait and see if his material contributions lead to material change in terms of product and revenue at MSFT.
I grew up in the nineties; things were different then. Visual Studio was the go to product for many developers and developing on windows was a given. Macs didn't become useful as developer machines until a decade later and Linux was a something you ran in your closet or on a old hand me down PC (been there done that). That changed under Ballmer's rule and he failed to adapt. He alienated developers and failed to move windows forward; all while bashing Linux and the Open source community in futile attempts to stem the bleeding of mindshare, revenue, and share holder value.
Fast forward five years or so since Nadella took over and the stock has responded positively to post Ballmer changes by Nadella to bring MS into this century after what was a lost decade.
MS now does open source and established itself as a credible player in the OSS community, it killed off windows phone, opened up the lucrative office ecosystem to non windows platforms by e.g. treating Android and IOS as first class citizens and supporting things like Chrome OS. By embracing linux and open source, and by turning Azure into a very competitive product that mostly runs Linux. He just took Edge out the back and shot it as well.
The net result of all this is that he re-established MS as a company that appeals to developers because despite his famous Mantra, developers were running away under Ballmer. VS Code, having SQL Server supported on linux, supporting Linux and contributing to it, embracing the wider C# ecosystem outside of the Windows silo, buying Github, etc. are all clever moves that rebuilt lost trust. All these things were unthinkable under Ballmer. Even Windows 10 is starting to look pretty nice to people like me with it's linux subsystem, Docker support, and nice hardware options.
As a consequence they have a lot of healthy growth in their cloud business because developers take them serious again. Shareholders are liking this and their prospects for more growth through a portfolio that is no longer just wintel laptop based revenue.
I see no evidence for your statement.
Ballmer 4x-ed MSFT revenue during his tenure.
He made far more money for MSFT than Gates ever did, and his growth track record is better than Satya so far.
Ballmer pushed XBox, Azure, Office/Cloud, re-orged the sales teams. Increased revenues for all the other major product lines.
Bing and Mobile were a fail, but they did other things well, moreover, they're up against the top 2 companies in the world in Search and Mobile - no easy feat.
All of your points are descriptive, but they don't really represent huge materiality in terms of business outcomes.
MS was never losing developers.
It's 'OSS contributions' really don't make that much of a difference.
Revenue under Satya has been up and down, with no real progress for his first several years until 2018 (2015 being the watermark).
MSFT today was made by Ballmer, most of the things you indicated are good, but not hugely fundamental.
You seem to equate revenue with success, which is not how this stuff works. Shareholder value is actually tied to the prospects for long term success (accumulated profits over time). MS shares were considered overvalued, not undervalued when Ballmer left (or depending on your interpretation, fired by an unhappy board).
Its OSS contributions are critical to both MS and how well it is able to convince developers to build on top of MS platforms. It's critical for it's credibility with Azure. I know people that now consider this a serious alternative to AWS or Google cloud that for sure don't have any interest on running C# on Windows Server while using SQL server. But it sure is a nice way to run some Linux stuff these days.
Satya Nadella also had to absorb a lot of the Ballmer era mistakes. Like paying five billion for the right to shut down an organization (Nokia's Phone business) for probably billions more. As I recall, that was one quarter where MS indeed made a historically unique loss and Ballmer pushed that deal through. Bing indeed is another dud. Windows Phone itself of course was the latest in a series of failures for MS to capture the mobile market that date back to last century.
The fact that it took a few years to recover after Ballmer left strongly suggests that 1) there were indeed problems in MS (i.e. shareholders were right) 2) Nadella addressed those problems. MS is of course valued around a 1 Trillion or so now. This may have a thing or two to do with the fact that he's not doing that bad of a job and that their future looks a lot brighter than a few years ago.
Satya nadella made a surprising change for Microsoft. If a company is going to last long term they have to do more than look at their own navels. You can't just focus on squeezing more money out of your existing lemons.
Happening now at Apple?
Ballmer did not 'squeeze lemons' - he multiplied the company by like 4x. The 'cloud' FYI was a big new thing. All MS products have evolved quite a lot and are not the 'same products'.
What new products / initiatives has Satya introduced that are lining up to be the future of MS? That will replace the core products sometime?
A ceo of a tech company has to both grow revenue and cultivate new technologies. A major company working in almost every area like microsoft has to do even more, so they don't get usurped like endless other former leading companies. Microsoft was challenged in a lot of ways. Ballmer did very well on the bringing in more money area.
1. mobile phones (basically completely blew it here - they had all the pieces but couldn't put them together because of both poor execution and more nimble competitors). Ballmer did terrible here. Even buying nokia was a disaster.
2. web - they managed to keep it microsoft centric for a long time where it only rendered correctly on ie3, but it eventually escaped them. they do sell some web server software, but the days where it had to render correctly on windows, both preventing other platforms from being used and being used for hosting web apps are gone. He held the world at bay for a long time, so I'll give him 25% success here.
3. cloud - azure started under him, so I'd give him 50% success. Who would have thought amazon would kick Microsoft's butt so thoroughly. I saw so many good people go to work there, I never thought amazon would succeed with such a different philosophy, people leaving there so frequently after 2 years.
4. Money, growth - 4/4. So much money. Yet at the same time, people started looking for other companies, and the company felt more and more like it was missing out by forcing everything to reinforce windows and office.
Satya has at least changed the tenor of the company, attracting developers back. I do think Windows seems to have turned into a terrible mess, with unless beta releases with lots of bugs. They fired all the testers because they weren't doing anything? Satya was also leading the azure division, so I think he does get some credit for that.
https://www.theverge.com/2016/1/21/10810834/android-generate...
There was speculation that Microsoft made more from Android for years from patents than Google made.
Besides, Microsoft is still making pretty good money on mobile by targeting developers with Azure and tools like Xamarin
I also doubt that too many people who are spending less than $300 on phones (the average selling price of Android phones) are the target market for Microsoft.
Statistically, Google has captured market share of people with less disposable income than Apple has. It’s at most Pyrrhic victory.
Growth and/or stock market performance are often only indirectly coupled or lag by years better strategy, innovation, management, etc.
Unfortunately sometimes good decisions never cause growth, there’s no simple formula.
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'.
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.
Free is pretty cheap though. Is there going to be a size limit? If not I can see people uploading all sorts of "interesting" data to github.
I mean, it costs them peanuts to run them, but a lot of people will cancel their premium accounts (including me).
Integrations/hooks/CI add some stickyness which is probably why places like Gitlab focus on offering CI to be more than simply “git in the cloud.”
Small but important correction, Github is letting up to 3 contributors use these free private repos.
"For the first time, developers can use GitHub for their private projects with up to three collaborators per repository for free."
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.
My feeling is that this is more a move to fight competitors.
I was looking into LambCI but it only supports github.
I was using bitbucket for private repos.
Checkout: https://github.com/lambci/lambci/blob/master/README.md
It only supports github.
For my hobby projects i can't afford to host gitlab CI/Jenkins or pay for premium CI services.
Now, i can run my tests on Lambda,yay!
...Facebook? WeChat?
Those aren't exactly little-known products.
Gitlab CI however offers 2,000 build minutes a month with their integrated CI service.
Even if your whole set up takes 10 minutes to build on CI, that's 200 builds a month which is plenty for an individual project that's on a private repo.
In other words, I think Gitlab's free private repos + CI is still a better choice for a solo developer who wants private repos since CI is such a useful tool and other external CI services have much more limited free plans (to use with Github instead). Having everything in the same UI is also really useful, which is another win for Gitlab.
I prefer Github's UI for overall repo exploration and issues, etc.. but I'm not sure if I'll move my private repos over to Github now that's it free, because the repo itself is only 1 piece of the puzzle.
Microsoft also has a deep connection with Docker. It's kind of no surprise that Docker only has automated build support for GitHub and Bitbucket. Kind of a bummer, but with Gitlab CI you can get the same effect in the end.
It's on their pricing page at https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/.
But if you did need > 2k minutes, it sounds like a good idea to spin up a $5 / month DO server to be a dedicated runner. That sure beats paying $50+ / month for most other CI services for their most basic paid plans, especially if you're just a solo developer or small team who wants a nice coding experience.
I actually just use Appveyor if I can for my personal stuff.
If you want free CI, CircleCI is the place to be.
It seemed like if you wanted to self-host your own CI builder with their agent, it was still limited to 1 parallel build on their free plan?
Is that true?
With Gitlab, if you bring your own runner, there's no limitation like that AFAIK (I've never done this yet because I never surpassed 2k build minutes a month) but I glanced their docs.
I am a happy user of Gitlab for 3 years now, I have been using it for all of my private stuff and using it actively for around 10 projects at the moment, and I have seen the product change over time both visually and functionally. There are multiple things that I don't like about it, such as the way it handles registry images, but overall my experience for these 3 years has been terrific.
First and foremost, Gitlab CI is the best experience I have ever had, and I can compare it with Travis and Codeship; Gitlab is way ahead of every platform in terms of convenience and its free-tier limits. They have their own shared runners, which means you can run as many parallel jobs as there are runners available at the moment, so no concurrency limit there. They also allow you to run the free stuff for 2000 minutes per month, which is more then enough for most of the side projects. Also, you can use your own runners with the free tier as well, which means just pick a 5$ VM from DO, install the gitlab-runner using the package manager of the OS, such as apt or yum, and register its address on Gitlab UI. The whole runner stuff takes around 10-15 minutes to setup, and you are good to go. You can have as many runners as you like and you can run as many jobs as you like on them as well. There are also options to setup gitlab-runner in such way that it spans new VMs for jobs, which means you don't even need to have full-time runners, they can be created on demand. Also, CI is completely configured via a `.gitlab-ci.yml` file, which is version controlled and has a clear syntax, I have found it the easiest to use among the other options. It syncs with issues, merge requests and the project tree, which means you can reach to the corresponding pipeline from the MR; it also allows you to generate artifacts and store them for a certain amount of time available for download. Overall, I am a huge fan of Gitlab CI, I couldn't have imagined it would be this convenient to use the same product for Git-hosting and continuous integration, it is a real pleasure.
They also have their own Docker registry, which is pretty convenient to use with CI builds. I use it to push my images with commit hashes as tags to this registry from CI. Unfortunately, there is a lot of room for improvement for registry interface, currently it is pretty basic, meaning it only lists the image tags. If you are pushing the images per commit basis, you are gonna have a lot of images and cleaning up the repository is impossible from the interface, which is sad. I really hope they improve the registry integration. They also have some Kubernetes and monitoring integration which allows you to monitor your cluster and deployments from Gitlab interface directly, but I haven't used it yet, so no comments there.
Apart from the feature set, the most important reason I choose Gitlab over Github is clear communication they maintain. Downtimes happen, engineering teams can have bad times, but they are always open about these problems. They inform everyone from a Twitter account, they are responsive to everyone, and you can see them being very clear and direct about the problems they are having. I expect downtimes to happen, Git-hosting is not a crucial system for me that I cannot live with an hour of downtime, maybe it is because of the scale of the projects I am working with, but having an open conversation about issues like this is the actual value for me. As long as they keep this level of communication, I am fine with occasional downtimes. Not that they have downtimes all the time, but it is true that I have seen more downtimes on Gitlab than on Github.
Overall, the reason I'd not migrate my private projects to Github is not Gitlab having free private repositories, but their huge feature set and level of communication. I see Github as a giant corporation, and Gitlab as some guys like myself, I feel closer to them and I'll be their user & customer as longs as I feel that way. I have no association with Gitlab at all, I am just a happy user and I wanted to explain why I like Gitlab, I think a lot of people would choose Gitlab over Github if publicity is not a concern.
Also wanted to share this feature we are currently working on, it allows you to remove unused tags from Container Registry, and we hope it will land with release 11.7 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/55978
Primarily, each pipeline stage can directly reference other public Github repos, with no additional code on your part. This taps in to that community that only exists on Github; for example, to build a project in Language-of-Choice, you just need to find a public implementation of the build pipeline stage for that language, then reference the URL in the action you build.
Its also very docker native, actually to the point of being totally unobvious that everything starts with a docker container. The documentation and hints about how to use it are still pretty sparse since its in beta.
Pricing still hasn't been announced. We'll see. But it feels very promising, especially if a community developers around it focused on providing pipeline stages.
Until then, I'm sticking with Gitlab for private repos because I don't want to wake up one day with Github actions to find out that I need to start paying to regain access to CI.
I don't mind if it's premium only when it's released, but they should be clear about this up front. It kind of worries me that they didn't mention it'll be a free feature in the docs. That seems like something you would want to say up front if it were true. It would be really lame if they open it to everyone to beta test it and then switch it to paid for the general release without mentioning that.
When searching for this kind of code, you have to wade through an awful lot of repos containing half-baked personal projects, experiments, unmodified clones of upstream frameworks, and barely-modified boilerplate examples. It would be nice if there was less of this detritus clogging up the search results.
However, sometimes the code you actually want is embedded in some otherwise useless, half-baked personal project, or barely-modified boilerplate example. So if all these projects disappear behind a veil of privacy, maybe it won't be a net win.
Finding a library with no documentation then Searching GitHub to see personal projects where the owner has already reverse engineered and integrated.
I always admired Github for incentivizing public repositories to promote collaboration and open source. Would hate to see that fade away.
Gives developers who have small indy projects a reason to use Github rather than a competitor (I know I use gitlab precisely because it's free for my private one-off repos).
edit -- to everyone asking, I have no problems with Gitlab and I also have no strong preference Gitlab vs Github, they both perform the same role for me in exactly the same manner. I just wish I had those couple of days back that I spent migrating and editing my deploy scripts.
Assuming you're not using Issues or anything non-portable.
Not a huge amount of time, but since I only have about 2-3 hours per day to work on the technology side of the business, it was a couple of days worth of hours from the time I decided I needed to cut spending to the time I had Gitlab integrated into my stack. It was a couple of days I didn't have to spend improving the product, even though it was a win from a financial standpoint.
And now with this announcement, it was hardly even a financial win. Oh well. I don't have the time or desire to migrate back.
I mirrored everything to Gitlab sometime ago, for public repositories and also use them for private repositories. The only real advantage I could specifically name for Github is the organic contribution factor due to their volume of traffic. However, this doesn't really apply to private repositories.
Edit: I see this has been answered below now - time spent migrating.
I'm wondering what the future holds for both GitHub and Azure DevOps. I actually use both, and have done for several years, and they're both great products - I'd hate for either of them to go away.
They'd be better off killing one product or the other, rolling it into the remaining one, and at least having a single-brand offering that can compete on features with GitLab.
I'm afraid you're mistaken there - Azure DevOps combines Git (or TFVC, if you really must!) repos with CI, CD and scrum/kanban boards.
https://github.com/marketplace/azure-pipelines
* in marketplace, limitations apply
Why on earth are there so many domains in their login flow? My password manager can't make heads nor tails of it 90% of the time
I was working on Outlook stuff at my previous job and it was a nightmare. They have three different offerings of emails. You can login in Outlook and O365 with the same account iirc, but not the others. Or something like that.
I just remember wanting to cry as I tried to figure out how to login.
Then the API docs are even worse. They had different APIs for each email offering and one pointed to the other then that one pointed to the previous one.
Microsoft's problem is that it has too many services. Google may change things constantly but at least they don't have three different email offerings with three different APIs at varying levels of brokeness.
Other than that, their CI system is quite amazing!
GitHub's default path for organizations is that you are creating a business that will be very separate from your personal account.
GitLab's default path is that it's just a group. Maybe just a named group for related projects. Once you dig in though, GitLab's group admin is much better than GitHub in my opinion.
Edit: typo
I'm not sure how relevant it is to you, but I hope you take some inspiration from https://platform.sh/ – it's the PaaS I've had the most luck with. While it isn't perfect, it's the closest thing I've found so far. Their "almost everything is in git" and instant environment cloning are fantastic features.
GitLab is GitHub but with more features and a smaller community. GitLab focuses more on code than community, at least from my experience with it.
Changing the terminology makes me not want to use gitlab.
Take a new dev who has never used gitlab or git. Merge request instantly makes sense but pull request does not.
But... But... Yes, I have no good arguments, but after 10 years of saying pull-requests anything else feels wrong.
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 Levie, co-founder and chief executive of Box once said in 2014, “These guys will drive prices to zero, [...] you do not want to wait for Google or Amazon to keep cutting prices on you. ‘Free’ is not a business model.”[1]
[0]: https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/07/github-free-users-now-get-...
[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/25/technology/box-dropbox-an...
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 competitors.
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 goes over the next few years.
Seems like we've been here before.
All the breathless hyperbole AGAINST "EEE," and yet, we're watching Microsoft destroy another market.
But they "love" Linux, and open source.
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 .com and I've set up/maintain several sefl-hosted solutions). I originally tried out GitLab due to lack of private repos on GitHub, and I don't see a reason I should switch back at this point. The open development and attitude towards the product and community has been part of that.
I'm also just much more comfortable with GitHub since I use it daily in my day job.
Repositories which I make public I put on GitHub since that seems to be where people will find them and are more likely to contribute.
Had this policy been in place when I started using git I never would have found and used Bitbucket, but I don't feel anything is gained by moving my private BitBuckets to GitHub.
Update: I see another reply talking about the web interfaces. If I used them that might be a factor, but for my private stuff the only web functions I use are for creating the repositories, and both platforms get that done easily enough.
Complete opposite. I'm going to stop using it as much as I can.
This is quite annoying. I'd much rather they take my pittance than monetize me any other way.
https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/
The free tier is the functionality you get for private repos. Public (not internal) repos get Gold capabilities.
Runner limits can be eliminated if you host your own runner to hook in to.
The above is specifically for GitLab.com hosting. Self-hosted is a different story with features.
Absolutely, though I don't think it's really "switching back". I always preferred to use GitHub but had to use BitBucket for private repos. Now I don't need to bother with BitBucket.
No. I'm old enough to remember the way Microsoft operated for most of their history, and do not trust them.
Github was always the go-to option and there was no reason to really even consider alternatives at first. People said "Bitbucket has free private repos!" for years and that was interesting but not compelling. Few users left Github because their competitors had free private repos.
Github got acquired, and that acquisition basically erased any and all user trust in Github as a company because they no longer control their own destiny. Instead we have to trust Microsoft. And that was a big enough shock for people to actually consider all of the competitors instead of just defaulting to Github like they did before.
To some extent, I suspect people paid for private repos from Github because they believed in supporting Github as a company and $7/mo isn't that much. Nobody believes in supporting Microsoft as a company. Microsoft charging for private repos is like Disney having a Patreon account.
I believe Microsoft has been doing amazing things for developers the past few years.
Sure, that motivation started to erode the longer that Github stayed around and the more money they made on their enterprise products, but there was never a sudden shift that forced anyone to reconsider the question until Microsoft came in.
[1] Editing with footnote: This is also one reason Bitbucket struggled despite having free private repos. Atlassian is big and corporate and widely resented already, so they couldn't even offer that value proposition anymore than Microsoft can.
Since moving to Gitlab, I couldn't go back to having to run Jenkins for private projects after using Gitlab CI (with a self-hosted runner). Also even on the free tier, even for one-man projects, the issue tracker features are better than github.
I would definitely choose it over GitHub Enterprise.
But I don't want the BB version to become outdated so I end up maintaining 2 repos. Having private repos directly on GitHub will optimise my worflow. Definitely a good move.
Open source is just as much a culture. I don't mind fewer repositories without a LICENSE.
I suspect people who wanted free private hosting used gitlab or bitbucket.
Personally speaking, I’ll still default to public for my side projects. But a free private repo sounds like exactly the thing for online classes or web challenges where you’re explicitely asked not to share your code. I’ve just started on the cryptopals challenges, now I know where to put my code :D
I think the projects that could go either way -- that are public just because it's cheaper than private -- probably aren't that common or that important.
Hopefully others will be like me and simply opt to not use it.
Besides, I wouldn't want to live in a world where people want to do X (private repos) but are forced to do Y (public repos) because X is not feasible. Now X is feasible and the landscape will more accurately reflect developer intentions.
Not even an apology in there, would have expected more from TNW.
This will significantly increase my use of GitHub.
> You will no longer have access to unlimited collaborators or advanced code review tools in private repositories. > You will still have access to unlimited private repositories.
So it seems some functionality beyond just unlimited collaborators that is tied to the Pro account - but the blog post makes no mention of what these "advanced code review tools" could be. Anyone know?
All the details are listed on the official pricing page in the feature comparison section: https://github.com/pricing and in the docs: https://help.github.com/articles/github-s-billing-plans/#bil...
What does that mean? What are these code review tools?
The help document does talk about Protected Branches and Code Owners but those seem different than code review tools and "code review" is listed in the free plan.
> If you downgrade, you’ll lose access to advanced code review tools in your private repositories.
This sort of explains things better now:
https://github.com/pricing#compare
Essentially you lose:
Protected branches, CODEOWNERS, insights, wikis and pages.
I've been happily paying Github $7/mo for years now for Pro, but there's now literally no reason to keep doing so, so back to Free it is. Thank you Microsoft! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
And look for the "Public repositories" note in the table.
B2B revenue is huge compared to anything you'll get from the few hobbyists who are both able and willing to pay for this kind of service.
I know several people I worked for or did business with that paid for Organization accounts, from Team to Enterprise.
I didn't opt to pay for GitHub until I needed to host some private config files in Git, and at the time (maybe a year, year and a half ago?) GitLab wasn't in as great of shape as it tends to be now: for me, it was slow, unreliable, and sometimes just felt "off" in ways I can't really quantify. I already used Github for open-source work and at my day job (and had been using it at work for years), so I paid up (given the alternative, with GitLab not being what I was looking for, was to pay up and host a Gitea instance, or use BitBucket, which was a complete non-option for me).
These days GitLab seems to be a lot more stable and able to handle day-to-day workflows, but GitHub still has the community factor, so all my public repos and forks live there. It made sense to continue to keep my private repos next to my public ones, so when my annual subscription renewed, I was cool with it.
Migrating fully over to GitLab/Gitea/flavour-du-jour is something that's perpetually on my "TODO: investigate" list, and never actually gets done, because despite any minor gripes I may have with it, GitHub tended to "just work", and it "just worked" ~$80/yr worth.
I guess it only counts open source projects, but still that's a lot of data.
Afaik I saw the data set was updated weekly.. afaik it's maintained by GitHub.
This move doesn't worry me, as I'm sure Microsoft would look to do something easy to calm the nerves of people who worried about Microsoft's acquisition. The cynic in me sees this as sweetener for Microsoft's later moves to integrate GitHub with Microsoft's developer tools, which will infuriate me along with millions of other developers.
This was always one of the core worries about GitHub and Microsoft. Microsoft will not leave GitHub alone. It's too important to developers, and no matter how much they say "we won't touch GitHub", nobody (rightfully) will believe them.
I wish I had waited a few more days now.
So let's be clear here. If I have 10 private repos, I can have 30 collaborators? Or they must be the same three.
Private repositories on free accounts are limited to three collaborators per repository, not including the owner.
So, in your example, if you have 10 private repos, you can have 30 collaborators, without counting you - the owner. (3 collaborators * 10 repos)
If the 3 collaborator limit isn't a problem, is there any reason to keep a subscription?
https://github.com/features/actions https://developer.github.com/actions/creating-github-actions...
Source: used to work at atlassian ;P
`Upgrade to GitHub Pro or make this repository public to enable Pages.`
So others won't leave for gitlab.
It can take minutes to page through and find the most recent image buried among hundreds.
We are also setting up a team to focus on just packaging related features within GitLab, like the Registry, which should improve our velocity in this area.
> focus on just packaging related features within GitLab
I'm curious what you mean by that?
Package encompasses both the Container Registry, as well as other repository types like Maven, NPM, etc.
Also, it is ridiculously expensive to have epics, compared to every other issue tracker I have seen, in GitLab issues.
Could you please tell us what could make your experience more convenient? Do you have an open issue regarding your suggestions? If not, it would be great if you could open an issue about it at https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues. We'd like to follow up on it.
It’s really valuable for us when users take the time to submit issues for bugs, changes, or feature proposals. This helps us steer the product in the right direction.
I'd love to hear more about your painpoints with issue boards (and issues in general).
Like many others here I'm also pretty happy about it. $7/month is not a lot of money but I also moved some personal private repos to BitBucket to avoid the fees. I will probably go back now.
My workflow is GitHub+CircleCI, so GitLab was never a big win for me; I just used it for the private repos.
Jun 4 2018: (microsoft acquisition) Github sucks!
Jan 7 2019: (free repos) Github rocks!
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 paid and the other is free, and that you don't look a gift horse in the mouth, but those are beside my point.)
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.
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.
I just took Microsoft/github up on their kind new deal and cancelled my pro plan at the end of the current yearly billing period.
Thanks Microsoft/github!
Also, will be curious to see the pricing structure - if this changes anything. The sad thing about Github is I always liked it more than competition, and I wanted to pay, but the price felt a bit steep for my usage. Since private will now be free, I hope they have some type of $4/m price range for solo devs, slightly better than free.
- cancelling my paid subscription: but in truth I was planning to do this anyway and moving to self-hosted in some way...I just wasnt getting relative value paying to just have private repositories for my own projects (I don't want contributors, but that doesn't mean I want my work to be public).
- but I will now as a result keep my repositories and activities on github. So this is a win for me: less work for now.
I'd be interested to see if you do a post-mortem on this - what the consequences were, and what steps you end up taking to ensure that it doesn't happen again.
One way to help ensure that it doesn't happen is to take steps to prevent it and post a post-mortem explaining both what caused it to happen and why it won't in the future.
edit: just kidding, it's shipped
I used to start my repos on Gitlab in private mode before publishing them publicly on Github. A huge time saver here!
[0] http://docs.gitlab.com/ee/workflow/repository_mirroring.html
This is quite important for game development, where binary assets grow faster than you can think. Azure DevOps includes unlimited, private lfs-storage for small teams. [1]
I also wonder how microsoft prevents abuse in such an environment, but that's another question...
[1] https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/devops/2015/10/01/announcin...
As a service anything I build privately will need more than three collaborators. Especially for things which are traditionally kept secret like academic software.
Maybe this might help freelancers but proliferationf private repos with very few contributors is an anti pattern.
Gitlab is still the clear winner for private use while Github remains the most active for public repos.
Nothing has changed.
It's surprising most people here aren't picking up on that. If you have more private projects on that make money. It's more likely you have more collaborators that you have to pay.
Thanks, Microsoft!
1. Create two private copies of that repository
2. A, B, C contribute to the first repository
3. C, D, E contribute to the second repository.
4. C will maintain the synchronization
5. One could write scripts for performing synchronization.
If anything this move might be beneficial for Bitbucket because if there's a 0% chance we would use their other paid products, we were just taking up resources.
Recall back when Internet Explorer was free and bundled with Windows, and there was a whole antitrust lawsuit over it by the Department of Justice. What was old is new again.
Well played @The Next Web :D
I intend on sharing the code when ready, but wanted issues history to be on GH without needing to migrate anything.
This decision saves me $7 a month
Now all Microsoft has to do is buy up StackOverflow and they will corner the developer social market.
I don't think I ever would have, if github had this. Not coming back though.
I have 100+ repos on Github and about 30 private ones on BitBucket. Brilliant move because now I will use Github exclusively.
I do wonder how they will monetize “me” though...
Has anyone figured out a quick way to determine which are the problem repos? (I have a lot!)
My free academic discount expired a month ago. I was thinking to subscribe $7/month but it seems like I won't need to pay.
I was even sold to 10 private repos with 1 dev shared :)
This is really poor from TNW. They spoiled all the excitement in twitter tomorrow!
Private subscriptions were a direct revenue stream for Github, and explained directly how they can afford the infrastructure that provides the service.
Generally when previously paid stuff becomes free, it's because the paid service is no longer a product - it's now a tool to attract users. How will users be monetised now?
Selling Azure services.
>Private repositories on free accounts are limited to three collaborators apiece. So, while this might work for a small project (like, for example, a team competing in a hackathon), it isn’t particularly well-suited for actual commercial usage.
GitHub enterprise will also continue to provide a revenue stream.
Meanwhile, if people that just don't want to share their solo tinkerings focus on Gitlab or Bitbucket free plans for the private repos, then when they are ready to move up, GitHub is in a worse position to try to monetize them than if they were already in the GH ecosystem.
There's plenty you can criticize Microsoft about for sure, but they aren't trying to gather boatloads of info about you, just keep you buying Microsoft software.
Now that I think about it like that, maybe Google is infact becoming more evil than Microsoft.
Depends on the product you are using and what kind of data you're talking about. For Google, GSuite (the old Google Apps and GCP) are more business focused and don't really capture data about you. Free-tier products will gather more data to better target ads to you or to provide useful features.
For Microsoft, they do try to sell you products... but you have to look at other products where they do gather data on you. I'm not sure what kind of data they get out of Bing and outlook.com/Hotmail. Then you have LinkedIn, which is all kinds of data gathering (though more Facebook style).
It's sort of hard to give blanket statements about many of the large tech companies, as they have multiple divisions and products that operate differently depending on the target markets.
Does anyone remember how Microsoft purchased GitHub in 2018? This is part of Microsoft's strategy now. Microsoft cares about developers using their platforms. Getting people hooked early on their ecosystem is part of that strategy. GitHub is now a part of that ecosystem. My prediction is that Visual Studio is going to get tied closer and closer to GitHub, that a lot of people are going to learn how pull requests work because of Visual Studio integration with GitHub.
Microsoft then turns around and sells GitHub + Visual Studio to software development firms, along with Windows Server and SQL Server licenses, MSDN subscriptions, etc. Managers won't hesitate to buy it because all of their employees already know how to use GitHub and love it.
I favor a distributed model as much as possible, that means for now having personal/projects classic websites, mirrored for instance on ZeroNet&c and source code exchanged as much as possible only P2P. It's not comfortable now but that's the sole possible free evolution path we have and only investing in it now can ease situation tomorrow.
On git only: what is another remote? A GitHub concurrent company? A personal dyndns from a single developer with a fable ADSL?
On GitHub: many use it's proprietary characteristics like PR, wikies, pages etc. That's not "portable" to any other remote if you do not count site-scraping...
No, we need to focus on distributed/decentralized solution now.
In the past at least we use tons of different hosting most of them offered by ISP that actually use hosted projects, universities that actually participate in many FOSS project so while not distributed we are decentralized on "friendly" systems. Not nearly all FOSS project is on a super-big-corp server. Without any viable alternative ready to use.
A remote is a URL location of a repository. A local git repo can point to multiple remotes by using the git remote <opts> functionality. For instance, you can point your local repo to GitHub, GitLab, and BitBucket and choose which to push to using the command git push <branch> <remote>.
In the past we have tons of hosters so we can easily spread our code in many "mirror", now there is GitHub and few others, mostly on the very same "cloud".
I mean you have no damn viable remote. Single devs can share code P2P but nothing that can work instantly out of the box.
When I was a bit younger I read that "internet" was a fantastic decentralized infrastructure explicitly design to being fault-tolerant and unlockable as possible to survive any critical scenario... Now it seems more a deep substrate of a modern mainframe... So deep that only few subject can really access it, all others are in their own hand...
In the context of the original comment, think: "setup a /second/ remote" as the meaning. If the first 'remote' is github, the second remote could be gitlab, and so forth.
Sorry for being rude but for me is unacceptable to depend on tons of proprietary stuff from a handful of vendors. Even personal websites that use Google Fonts, some JS framework directly from the "project" CDN (too hard to keep it on your disk, up to date) etc...
We need to be interdependent or independent not dependent of few subjects that make money on us for witch us are puppets. How can we say "it's FOSS" if so? How can we have FOSS as the tip of a proprietary iceberg?
One can, if one chooses, setup a git repository on a spare PC in ones basement and have a "git repository" into which one or more collaborators can "git push" and "git pull" to/from.
In the context of the original post, to which you asked "what is another remote", the second (or third, or fourth) 'remote' can be "any git repository to which the individual has access".
Having a second remote does not, in an of itself, require that that second remote be one of the proprietary git hosting systems, nor require that it be one of the semi-proprietary or open source hosting systems. It could just as well be plain git running in repository serving mode on an old PC.
See the documentation for the "git http-backend" and "git daemon" commands that are built into the git distribution.
now with GitHub&c excluding Savannah the sole friendly option is buy a domain, a VPS and host there the project...
That's the problem, not technical but "political" to a certain extent.
In the past someone try GitTorrent to solve this problem a bit (opening the door for "personal hosting at home" but it's a dead project now ad it was never completed. Mostly because newcomers think GitHub&c as a free space by nature, something guarantee to work always and been always free without any other "occult" cost.
Does this mean I no longer have to pay for these services?
"GitHub has the right to suspend or terminate your access to all or any part of the Website at any time, with or without cause, with or without notice, effective immediately. GitHub reserves the right to refuse service to anyone for any reason at any time."
What bothers me is that this move didn't seem as well planned and prepared for than previous changes, not a good sign. github has a certain flow, hope MS doesn't destroy that.
Thank you Github / Microsoft!
> Due to a scheduling error, we published this story one day before the embargo lifted. This feature isn’t live yet, but Github will formally unveil it tomorrow. When that happens, we’ll update this post with a link to the official announcement.
Also... kinda unfair to others.
It's not enough to pull me from GitLab just yet, but if I keep having 10MB+ issues there, I'll switch.
Happens with bash in windows or GitHub Desktop. No one has ever been able to fix it. I have just tried to not use large files.
Would GitHub be peeved if another source published this before their official PR statement?
1.) Author submits an article often as a word file.
2.) Editor starts working on the word file.
3.) Author and editor do 1-5 rounds of edits using track changes.
4.) Editor says "Great, post it to run at xx:xx on mm-dd."
5.) The author actually logs in and makes the post.
If you're thinking that technology we use every day could solve this problem, you're right! Alas, it's harder to fix years of habits than the technical issues behind the habits.
Wouldn’t it be great though if you could kill content from the internet by simply removing the source. Privacy concerns would probably become less of an issue.
This will also make me a little more cautious as a consumer, since they're voluntarily removing the incentive for me to pay for their services upfront.
> there's no reason for me to keep my subscription...
Could be totally wrong, but I expect there may be some incentive to induce folks to keep their paid plan.
What a weird way to thank a company. I get it, but still.
GitHub also doesn’t live in a vacuum and this is likely not puuuurely done out of the goodness of MS’s heart. There may have been some strategy wrt gitlab and bitbucket taken into consideration. Dare I say... competition?
I don’t doubt their goodwill, but let’s not pretend the market is about that for MS.
Edit—ah I now see the “thank you” in parent’s post. Ok disregard this, then. Totally fair. I’m dumb. :)
Thankless business is killing us culturally.
Microsoft will be more than happy to use GitHub for analytics, AI/ML research and to drive developers to their other offerings, especially their cloud ones.
Edit: Updated error from "lost" to "loss"
Now that they're part of Microsoft, Github's corporate goal isn't to be financially solvent anymore, it is to be a loss-leader for Microsoft's other products. Hook people with github, and then get money from them by offering integrations with Azure, Office, Windows, Sharepoint, etc.
I believe individual paid accounts were a tiny fraction of total revenue.
With AWS’s quality of service going downhill, and Google’s apparent inability to execute, this gives MS a huge advantage. Remember, AWS is pretty much how Amazon stays profitable.
That’s the one I have too
But now that I'm on gitlab, I'm finding I like it better mainly because of the docker-based continuous integration feature. Managing contributors and 2FA without all that "organization" cruft is handy too.
Got it.
So, what's their social graph play?
This is more about getting people to use (or keep using) GitHub for their personal projects so that it seems like a natural/obvious/default choice for a bigger-budget project, and that's where the revenue is.
And guess what they want... "Private code to know what people are working on."
> (I say this -- because last time I said something negative they banned me).
I have the impression that they banned your GitHub account because of your username [1].
I like to think that increased competition from us (GitLab) contributed to this change, we recently passed 10m repositories on GitLab.com
At GitLab we think that repositories will become a commodity and we're focussing on making a single application for the entire DevOps lifecycle.
I think Microsoft will try to generate revenue with people using Azure more instead of paying for repos.
Also see our blog post https://about.gitlab.com/2019/01/07/github-offering-free-pri...
I think a more encouraging move would be to have people with all experiences share as much of their progress as possible so that people who are getting started can find inspiration and learn to overcome their "imposter" feelings.
> Oh fuck me.
> I just accidentally published a major piece of news one day early because I've got butterfingers and typed the wrong number in the scheduler.
> Is it too early to start drinking?
> Wordpress is fucking stupid. If you schedule something for \in the past\* it should say "er, are you sure?" instead of just immediately publishing the post.*
What I find most interesting about the fiasco is that TheNextWeb.com's editorial process consists of the stock Wordpress "Schedule a post" function [1] which includes this lovely tidbit:
> Tip: Always double check the date at the top of this calendar before clicking publish, and verify that it correctly says AM or PM
Trying it out in a test instance of Wordpress, he's correct: The initial status of a new post is "publish immediately." [2] Clicking "Edit" brings up a date editor. [3] And "OK" doesn't warn you if your date is in the past. [4] Finally, clicking the "Publish" (which could read "Schedule") generates a post with the URL /01/05/ that's visible immediately with no warning. [5]
Note the visibility and status options above the date: Wordpress does support some options for "draft" or "pending review" options with private/password-only visibility, but apparently TNW - a business that draws $15 million in revenue, is among the top 20,000 websites, and has dozens of employees - didn't use them before this oops.
I somehow assumed that there would be a red-tape process involving legal, editorial, and managerial oversight before you could get any content to the front page of a site like this. Not sure after seeing this if TNW is just playing fast and loose, or if everyone is...
[1] https://en.support.wordpress.com/schedule-a-post/
[2] https://i.imgur.com/0CxPYhS.png
[3] https://i.imgur.com/qa7emUd.png