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Comment by tolmasky | Hacker News Reader

As I am not "enterprise", these questions are more out of curiosity than anything else:

1. How often do you get updates? One of the things I love about GitHub is the constant stream of new features. Do these make it into github:enterprise fairly soon after?

2. What happens after your "subscription" runs out? That is to say, if I pay for a year, then don't pay next year, do I simply not get any more updates/support? Or is there some kill switch and I lose my content too? I'm sure the answer to this is similar to all enterprise products, but again, I've never experienced anything in the enterprise.

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1. Very frequently. The reason this launch took so long was in large part due to reconfiguring how we merge the differences between .com and the installable (FI/Enterprise). Previously, it was painful and slow and lagged embarrassingly behind. But now it should be no more than a week or a month at most behind .com so long as you upgrade your instance.

2. The instance will lock you out (no web interface, cannot push to repos) but you own all your data so you will never lose your content.

> 2. The instance will lock you out (no web interface, cannot push to repos) but you own all your data so you will never lose your content

Does that mean one can still clone repos?

How are the updates delivered? New OVF?

The OVF will be updated infrequently — there is a software package you upload in a management interface that installs the new software and configures your instance with the updates. It's pretty seamless — download a file, upload it, wait a few minutes for install and you've got an updated version of GitHub Enterprise.

Can't answer the second question, but we haven't gotten very frequent updates. I'm hoping that will change with the transition to Enterprise, but GitHub:FI lagged behind "public" GitHub pretty badly.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3183497 says they merged FI/Enterprise, & .com so Enterprise shouldn't lag behind.

(to question 1...) It's worth considering that if you're an enterprise then you* might not actually want a constant stream of new releases to deal with.

Where you = the CTO/CIO/Security/VP Operations, and the purchase decision maker. Many enterprises are (still) anally retentive about acceptance testing any new version from a vendor.

You = the engineer definitely do, but sadly in the enterprise world the engineer isn't the customer.

Oh, and don't shoot the messenger. I'm not saying I agree with that status quo, simply that if GitHub aspires to make a decent revenue stream from the Enterprise then they'll have to work to those kinds of dynamics.

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