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Comment by tasoeur | Hacker News Reader

The only reason why I switched to BitBucket is "free unlimited private repository". GitHub is great, I used to love it as a student, it also was a great asset when applying for jobs. But now, I'm in a company that unfortunately do not allow me to do OpenSource anymore, and bitbucket was a great solution. If GitHub was to offer a few free private repos (other than if you are a student), I believe that bitbucket would be in a bad position...

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Last year, I switched from Github to BitBucket because of the unlimited free private repositories. Shortly after, I switched back to Github for everything else Github offers.

Would you mind detailing what that everything else actually is?

We (objective-cloud.com) are using Bitbucket for our private repos as well. But once our stuff has matured a bit we open source it as frameworks on github and manage issues/documentation there.

We love open source and want to contribute back. Since most people are on github and not on bitbucket we open source our stuff on github. Just to make it easier for the community.

The missing/invisible bitbucket community is certainly a big thing... :(

Do you mean your company doesn't let you do open-source side-projects? Because if you mean repo hosting for the company, I would hope they could afford the very cheap Github subscription fee for private repos.

The problem is convincing management there is a significant advantage to paying for private GitHub repos when you could use BitBucket for free. Even if we needed to pay for BitBucket (i.e. need more than 5 users on a repo), the cost for a company like ours that might need 20 users total on a repo is pretty minimal, and the pay per private repo on GitHub quickly adds up and passes the BitBucket costs. From a pure cost analysis for private projects, I don't see how BitBucket doesn't come out on top. Maybe if you only have 1 repo and 100s of users, but in the more average company where you have multiple repos and a smallish number of developers, BitBucket is almost always going to win the price war.

I presume you're all developing on NetBooks?

That's not a fair comparison. If all you want is private version control hosting, Github and Bitbucket offer pretty much the same amount of functionality, whereas a NetBook differs greatly from a full-sized laptop or desktop.

How many private repos do you need? I'm also in a very cost-conscious company, but compared to other infrastructure costs, GitHub is very very inexpensive.

According to linus' talk, git's whole point is branching. The point is that cost must not be an argument not to branch.

The public-or-pay on github effectively forces one to pay for starting a project. Starting a project should be free, easy and obvious. Github satisfies none of those.

According to linus' talk, git's whole point is branching. The point is that cost must not be an argument not to branch.

The public-or-pay on github effectively forces one to pay for starting a project. Starting a project should be free, easy and obvious. Github satisfies none of those.

I don't agree that this is the main difference between github and bitbucket though. I would argue bitbucket is support for their other services (basecamp and whatnot), and team-based development is what you pay for.

Github's features seem directly oriented to make github's administrator's jobs easier. Anything that is a bit of a problem, or doesn't fit in the original design doesn't get made at all or gets cut (ie. file attachments, project downloads). And "darling" features, like the network graph, that are unusable due to speed and bad UI get pushed into the spotlight, despite that.

Uh, there is no cost to branch on GitHub. I'll leave my critique of your comment (and it's abortive duplicate cousin) at that.

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