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Comment by vv_ | Hacker News Reader

There is no reason to host 'decentralized' tools besides regulation. It's considerably cheaper to use GitHub (or other alternatives like GitLab) than hosting your own and hiring people to maintain and support the solution. Their issue tracking system is very convenient for small teams too.

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> It's considerably cheaper to us

This is not true. The cheapest option is to not have services that require servers to maintain. Git continues to work if GitHub is down. So do shell scripts when CI is down. So why can’t we have an issue system where the underlying data is text files in a git branch?

I understand at scale you can pay people to optimize a process for the larger team, but there is a ton of unnecessary fragility before getting to that scale.

If you're collaborating with a small group of people (or you're not running a huge amount of CI/CD) then you can make almost anything work. Once you get big it's another story entirely.

Exactly, hire a team of 3 and pay 500K in compensation, or spend 100K on a system that works and you get a support person to call in the event of an issue. The math is so simple.

Except you’re not considering the cost of when you can’t deliver something on time for a customer because infrastructure you don’t control is down.

You don’t outsource things that prevent you from doing your core competency.

And for most companies, building and managing an SCM is absolutely not their core competency. Your point is valid, but not in the way you're trying to convey it.

> building and managing an SCM is absolutely not their core competency.

Building their software is - Github being down is currently preventing that for many companies.

Nope, sorry. Github offers cloud and on premise offerings. If you choose cloud and your company can't handle a 45 minute service outage, that's just a bad purchasing decision. You do realize they make most of their revenue from on premise enterprise customers and that none of those customers were impacted? The solution was there the entire time but they can't force people to use it.

It's surreal to imagine most companies not being able to handle a 45-min service outage of a VCS to begin with. Sounds to me like a GitHub mandated break for all SE 's.

The costs would be trivial for the vast majority of Software Engineering companies. Talking about corner cases is useless as they often need a custom specialized solution anyways and wouldn't be using GitHub in the first place.

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