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Comment by madrox | Hacker News Reader

I applaud GitHub. However, I think no matter how valiant they are they will not climb out from under this. The scale problem will keep getting worse, and it's getting worse in a way I don't think is translating to more money for them. Sooner or later, they're going to have to charge for things currently free.

I've been saying this for a while: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47534499

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That's a business decision for Github of course. They are getting some value out of being the goto place for source code hosting for what is essentially a shockingly high percentage of OSS projects and a really large amount of enterprise projects. It's essentially the largest and most complete network of developers and code in the world. That kind of influence and reach is valuable in itself to Microsoft. And of course it's a gold mine for AI training data as well. Which is presumably why they sponsor it.

But it does raise the question for especially commercial users of Github whether it's time to reconsider the relationship with Github and maybe not put all our eggs in one basket. Basically, this wiped out a whole workday for many companies.

I'm not that eager to start self hosting my stuff. But I am considering it. Besides availability, CI build performance is also becoming a blocker for us. My AI coding jobs creating lots of PRs are making that a bottleneck. Fixing that in Github would require switching to a paid plan. And at that point, self hosting might be the more cost effective option. There are a few tradeoffs here of course. But I like the idea of throwing more memory/cpu at this to get blazingly fast builds.

If pushes are the main problem, they could rate limit too.

Maybe GitHub sees value in hosting the code that is produced, for model training purposes. This would justify to maintain a free offering, even when it gets flooded like it has been recently

And even when this code is AI produced, yes. It has some informational value.

Yes, but there are sharks in the water. Can GitHub afford to lose less money than them, at a slower rate?

Yes, they can, because I don't think other forges are actually making money.

GitHub is the de facto standard.

They are effectively getting spammed / ddosed by vibe coders pushing slop nobody uses.

A majority of this increased traffic is the codex/claude in auto mode used by people who don’t even know what git is.

Not sure why you got downvoted. You're mostly right.

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