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Comment by Sapient | Hacker News Reader

You are probably correct.

I don't even know why I like GitHub as much as I do. I have decided not to pay them as I can't really justify the amount (Dollars are not cheap in Africa) - so I host my repos on one of my Linodes and have them backed up to S3 every day. This works perfectly well, and I have no problems doing it, yet I feel like I am missing out on not having them tucked away on GitHub.

I suppose the feeling is similar to my feelings of Linux vs OSX. There is nothing (apart from Photoshop) that I cant do just as well on Linux, but I still feel like I am missing out by not being on OSX.

Its probably just that it seems all the "Cool People" are using GitHub.

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We love Github, we pay for Github, we host a private instance of Github on our network for which I am sure Github is going to charge us any day, we've even done work for Github.

But we won't host our public code on Github, because then Github has a nonzero chance of ranking higher on Google for "Matasano" than "www.matasano.com".

So I know the feeling.

Wow, though: internal Github one of the all-time no-brainer best purchases we've made.

What's that, you say? We could run something called "gitosis" and not pay thousands of dollars for a prettier UI on fundamentally free software? FIND MY PITCHFORK. LIGHT THE TORCHES. BURN THE HERETIC.

And we don't have more money than god. The pricing dynamics work the same way for software startups as for BigCos. There's another thread going on right now where at least one person made a (facetious, I think) case that developers ought to ask for the '11 MBP upgrade if they have the '10 MBP, because the cost is a rounding error compared to their salary. And nothing Github sells costs more than an MBP.

Genuinely curious: why don't you just make all your apps public on github? Note that you can still explicitly state your license terms so why wouldn't that be a reasonable choice?

I am ashamed of the code in some of the older ones, and I don't trust that certain of my clients to keep to our maintenance contracts in others.

Certainly there are some which I would feel okay about sharing the code. But since there is a non-zero chance of there being security holes in the apps, I think the risk could be too great.

I understand that making the code public could result in patches from other people using it, but I just don't think anyone else would be interested in using for that reason.

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