5 ms·

Github has won

95 points by db42 16y ago

makeramen 16y ago
I've actually found bitbucket slowly becoming a good competitor to github. From a sales point of view, bitbucket's offering of 5 free private repos might actually help them attract more developers who are making proprietary apps and making money, and then more willing to pay for more repos in the future. I personally have quite a few repos there partly because I don't want the publicity of github (and partly because hg was quicker to learn than git :P). I also know a friend who switched to bitbucket simply due to the private repo offerings. For open source though, github is probably the way to go. This is all just anecdotal though, I'd love to hear some solid evidence if anyone has some.
- jckarter 16y ago
  In my experience, bitbucket has been extremely unreliable and creaky compared to github. I see frequent random unscheduled outages where the ssh connection won't connect, ssh won't authenticate, or hg won't respond from the other side. The web interface also caches a lot of stuff too long; I've seen it take a few minutes for its idea of "tip" to refresh after pushing new patches, and stripped revisions linger in the log view for similar amounts of time. Hopefully now that Atlassian's bought them the service quality will improve over time.
  - tonfa 16y ago
    > Hopefully now that Atlassian's bought them the service quality will improve over time. Given the growth of the the bitbucket team thanks to atlassian, I do think it will improve quickly. (I'm not even sure there was more than one full time person working on BB before)
- wkornewald 16y ago
  Note that it's not 5 free private repos, but 5 private users. You can have unlimited private repos. So, in a small team you'd probably never have to pay. I wonder what has led them to this decision business-wise. Was the competition from github so overwhelming that they decided to counter it with with relatively drastic measures (giving up lots of $$$)?
  - simonsarris 16y ago
    Well bitbucket won me over and made me start an account with them when it happened. And now that I'm with them, if I go over 5 users I'll gladly pay. It certainly can't hurt to be the first site to do it. (first considering github, bitbucket, google code, codeplex, sourceforge(?))
  - follower 16y ago
    Note that BitBucket was recently acquired by Atlassian: http://www.atlassian.com/hosted/bitbucket/faq.jsp http://www.atlassian.com/hosted/bitbucket/faq.jsp I think this had an effect on the offers.
    - ItarPeyo 16y ago
      Yes it did. The changes in pricing took effect at the moment they got acquired.
  - makeramen 16y ago
    ah yeah, I may be wrong, but I swear it started as 5 repos, then they changed it to users. Anyway, for some reason one of my free accounts has unlimited users right now. Not sure how that happened but I think it might be because I had more than 5 users on a repo before they made the upgrade? Pretty awesome regardless.
- Sapient 16y ago
  This is precisely what happened to me, and the reason I ditched git for Hg in my most recent project. I am not doing anything large enough to warrant paying for a GitHub account at the moment, and its not because I am cheap - its because I am a poor South African, and $7 a month is infinitely more expensive than $0 a month.
- RK 16y ago
  With bitbucket's new offer, I just signed up to work on academic papers (LaTeX) with a couple collaborators using private repos.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
edanm 16y ago
"[..]but just as distributed vcs' had won over svn a few years ago," This is an odd statement, which deserves more explanation. DVCSs have won in the arena of early-adopter programmers who actually care about these things enough to read them, but I'd guess that the number of SVN users still trumps the number of git/hg users by several orders of magnitude. Moreover, I'd guess that the number of programmer who have heard about git/hg is incredibly small as well (compared to SVN or other systems.) By the way, hg has definitely won me. I use it with an online project management and hosting service called Codebasehq.com, which I recommend any time this comes up - I really love their interface, and their pricing options (you pay per project, which can have several repositories tied to it; you can even have several hg repos and several SVN repos tied to the same project, which is what I do.)
- hartror 16y ago
  I know several people who still have to struggle with CVS on a daily basis. Git/Hg are going to take a long time to get entrenched into enterprise.
  - hvs 16y ago
    My company still uses SVN, but I'm in the process of migrating my teams projects to Mercurial. We aren't IBM, but we aren't small, either. I think that DVCSs are starting to make headway into "cutting edge, but not bleeding edge" companies. As to Mercurial vs. Git, whatever. That argument bored me two years ago. Mercurial is, in my experience, easier for SVN users to pick up, but just use whatever works for your situation.
  - NickPollard 16y ago
    Anecdote is not the singular of data and all that, but at the major game development studio I work at, no-one at my team has even /heard/ of git, and when I try to explain what a distributed version control system is I get blank stares.
    - andybak 16y ago
      If these are developers then I'm shocked that they could be that ignorant of trends inside their own profession. Although I met a student studying Java for a CS degree who hadn't heard of Python. So anything is possible I suppose...
andrewgodwin 16y ago
I'm not sure I'd say it has "won" - such a phrase implies a long-term positioning at the front of the pack, and those that came before it for code hosting (SourceForge, Google Code) enjoyed their time in the spotlight before having something new come along. BitBucket in particular have made a good attempt after the Atlassian takeover, with the infinite free private repos being the most interesting part - I use it a lot, but mostly because I do a lot of small personal projects, and so the "social" features of GitHub - those which benefit most from its prominence - are mostly meaningless to me.
Estragon 16y ago
As others here and in the blog comments have pointed out, this post is semantically incoherent. But it was worth reading for the reference to hg-git alone. Cool stuff!
Tycho 16y ago
For some reason this page immediately crashes Safari on my iPad. Can see it for an instant then window closes and back to iike screen.
swah 16y ago
Has Linus ever mentioned Github?
- pjscott 16y ago
  The Linux kernel has its own fairly elaborate and entrenched system for handling their source; Github, as lovely as it is, just wouldn't be a good fit for them.
lusis 16y ago
I've said it multiple times but github won because of what they focused on - code: http://goo.gl/XfvG http://goo.gl/XfvG (http://lusislog.blogspot.com/2010/10/designed-for-developers-why-people-keep.html http://lusislog.blogspot.com/2010/10/designed-for-developers... for the paranoid)
- bonzoesc 16y ago
  Why shorten a link if you're putting the real one there anyways?
  - kemayo 16y ago
    He wants to track how many clicks it gets. Take a look at http://goo.gl/ http://goo.gl/ and note the stats on urls you've previously shortened.
    - lusis 16y ago
      Yep. It's just to track interest. Blogger does crap for stats and logging.
mjs 16y ago
It occurs to me just now that it's kinda weird that subversion repositories are pretty much distributed everywhere; git repositories generally end up on github.
- joshuacc 16y ago
  That's probably because with a distributed system, there isn't too much downside to everyone relying on a central service. If Github goes down, you can be up and running at a new host in 5 minutes.
  - mjs 16y ago
    My comment was more of an observation rather than a telling point for or against git, but I don't think it's a huge advantage of git that everyone has a backup copy of the repo that can be used for failover. github is essentially a central point of failure for many teams. You're going to change the location your CI checks out from if github goes down? Are you using github for issue tracking? Code reviews? What's more likely, I think, is that you just wait for a few minutes or hours until it comes up again, which is what you'd do with svn.
- rue 16y ago
  SVN repositories are not distributed anywhere. Dispersed, perhaps?
- pjscott 16y ago
  I think that Github is a big factor in git's success. If you use git and stick a project on Github, you just send people the Github URL, and BAM! they see your code and README file, neatly presented on one page. And since Github is so popular, this lowers the barrier to entry for other people to contribute patches, which is always nice. If Github is bringing people to git, then it stands to reason that a seemingly disproportionate number of git users would use Github.
tzs 16y ago
Disclaimer: I've only used Github for projects where either I'm the only coder, or where someone else was the only coder and I was just handling some release management stuff. So I've not experienced the full glory of collaboration via Github. Am I the only one who is not particular impressed with Github? It seems OK, but not in a different league from other code hosting places the way many make it out to be.
- docgnome 16y ago
  I think it's main neat feature is to be able to click a button to fork. Many others have this now but, iirc (and my memory my be faulty), github was the first. At least the first I saw. That alone makes it easy to fork, fix, pull request. I'm a bit of a github fanboi.
KirinDave 16y ago
Github has "won" in that it's the current darling child of the code-hosting industry. It's done this for two reasons: 1. Git is superior to its competitors as a technology for use by developers. It isn't very much superior these days, but it is enough to be noticeable and preferred. This is a superiority in use and performance, which are enough of an edge to offset its architectural failings. 2. Github has better UX than the competition: I've been referring to code hosted in bitbucket frequently, and I often sigh at what they're doing. Getting to any given piece of code takes longer and requires more clicks than on Github. Github also has great features for understanding how code is moving within a project, and I find them more comprehensible and useful than the competition's. It doesn't hurt that Github is a small self-started company with a staff full of brilliant people and a talented support staff. They certainly win the personality part of the competition thoroughly.
jmoiron 16y ago
I normally shy away from writing provocative information-light rants. The important parts (for me): 1. github is a social service, or perhaps best used as a social service 2. it has "the momentum", which is paramount for social services 3. git has "the momentum" wrt adoption of dvcs There are assumptions implicit within these arguments that I've accepted, based largely on the summation of 'soft' and anecdotal evidence that has built up over the last couple years. People are right to challenge them, and right in their criticism that I take them at face value.
MikeW 16y ago
I don't believe there will ever be a clear "winner" because the landscape is constantly changing. Sourceforge was THE place to store your OSS code and provide downloads and there was a really great broad selection of code and a way to discover it. But they didn't build good ways of managing it and the whole experience became cluttered and confusing. I saw many projects move to Google Code who provided a clean interface. And now I see many of those projects move to github and everyone I know is a big fan of the forking and pull requests. But the landscape will change again and github keeps needing to iterate and innovate on their product. Just about every time I use github, I curse their disastrous search. There is just so much innovation they could develop around code management which they don't have, a competitor could jump in and they too could become the darling of the development world. They too will have "won".
- sdesol 16y ago
  When I started developing my product two years ago, I seriously thought about throwing my product into the source code hosting ring. I knew I had a product that could compete but as you pointed out, the landscape is constantly changing and it is also one of the places where you have compete by price. Look at the recent shift by Bitbucket after being purchased by Atlassian. Bitbucket can now afford to be a money pit so that Mercurial can gain further adoption. Atlassian is really trying to build an enterprise solution around Mercurial (they've said this publicly) so they don't care if they lose money with Bitbucket. And this is going to affect Github. Only time will tell how much of an impact this is going to have. So yeah I'm glad I decided I didn't want to get into this market space. I decided I was better off focusing on developing the innovations and be a complimentary asset for sites like Github, Bitbucket, and other hosting sites instead. My product certainly has overlap with some of the things that Github and Bitbucket has, but it's not designed to be a hosting solution. It's more of a competitor for Atlassians Fisheye and Fogcreeks kiln. If you are curious you can see a bit of my tool in action at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MfEDwirFO1s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MfEDwirFO1s Sorry it has no sound so it might not make any sense.
csomar 16y ago
I started using bitbucket a month ago and everything went fine. I'm new to version control and selected mercurial as my VCS, so I was happy by finding a github counterpart. I think it's wrong to compare bitbucket to github. You won't move to github because github is superior, but if you want to move to git, you'll probably do. Bitbucket has all I need. I don't think I need any other fancy features, I already get things done the right way. I'm using the free version, but would upgrade if needed. Also, make sure you read the down times before you argue about it: "Bitbucket will be unavailable for approximately two hours starting Monday, Nov 1st, 01:00 GMT for a kernel upgrade."
kaffiene 16y ago
Come on. Saying "yay Github" does not mean that Git/Github have 'won'. What does it even mean to say that, anyway? "Yay Mercurial!" there we are, hg wins!! Whoo!! Who the hell thought this counted as news? Even as opinion, it's wishy washy.

95 points by db42 16y ago

I've actually found bitbucket slowly becoming a good competitor to github. From a sales point of view, bitbucket's offering of 5 free private repos might actually help them attract more developers who are making proprietary apps and making money, and then more willing to pay for more repos in the future. I personally have quite a few repos there partly because I don't want the publicity of github (and partly because hg was quicker to learn than git :P). I also know a friend who switched to bitbucket simply due to the private repo offerings. For open source though, github is probably the way to go. This is all just anecdotal though, I'd love to hear some solid evidence if anyone has some.

jckarter 16y ago
In my experience, bitbucket has been extremely unreliable and creaky compared to github. I see frequent random unscheduled outages where the ssh connection won't connect, ssh won't authenticate, or hg won't respond from the other side. The web interface also caches a lot of stuff too long; I've seen it take a few minutes for its idea of "tip" to refresh after pushing new patches, and stripped revisions linger in the log view for similar amounts of time. Hopefully now that Atlassian's bought them the service quality will improve over time.
- tonfa 16y ago
  > Hopefully now that Atlassian's bought them the service quality will improve over time. Given the growth of the the bitbucket team thanks to atlassian, I do think it will improve quickly. (I'm not even sure there was more than one full time person working on BB before)
wkornewald 16y ago
Note that it's not 5 free private repos, but 5 private users. You can have unlimited private repos. So, in a small team you'd probably never have to pay. I wonder what has led them to this decision business-wise. Was the competition from github so overwhelming that they decided to counter it with with relatively drastic measures (giving up lots of $$$)?
- simonsarris 16y ago
  Well bitbucket won me over and made me start an account with them when it happened. And now that I'm with them, if I go over 5 users I'll gladly pay. It certainly can't hurt to be the first site to do it. (first considering github, bitbucket, google code, codeplex, sourceforge(?))
- follower 16y ago
  Note that BitBucket was recently acquired by Atlassian: http://www.atlassian.com/hosted/bitbucket/faq.jsp http://www.atlassian.com/hosted/bitbucket/faq.jsp I think this had an effect on the offers.
  - ItarPeyo 16y ago
    Yes it did. The changes in pricing took effect at the moment they got acquired.
- makeramen 16y ago
  ah yeah, I may be wrong, but I swear it started as 5 repos, then they changed it to users. Anyway, for some reason one of my free accounts has unlimited users right now. Not sure how that happened but I think it might be because I had more than 5 users on a repo before they made the upgrade? Pretty awesome regardless.
Sapient 16y ago
This is precisely what happened to me, and the reason I ditched git for Hg in my most recent project. I am not doing anything large enough to warrant paying for a GitHub account at the moment, and its not because I am cheap - its because I am a poor South African, and $7 a month is infinitely more expensive than $0 a month.
RK 16y ago
With bitbucket's new offer, I just signed up to work on academic papers (LaTeX) with a couple collaborators using private repos.

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

edanm 16y ago

"[..]but just as distributed vcs' had won over svn a few years ago," This is an odd statement, which deserves more explanation. DVCSs have won in the arena of early-adopter programmers who actually care about these things enough to read them, but I'd guess that the number of SVN users still trumps the number of git/hg users by several orders of magnitude. Moreover, I'd guess that the number of programmer who have heard about git/hg is incredibly small as well (compared to SVN or other systems.) By the way, hg has definitely won me. I use it with an online project management and hosting service called Codebasehq.com, which I recommend any time this comes up - I really love their interface, and their pricing options (you pay per project, which can have several repositories tied to it; you can even have several hg repos and several SVN repos tied to the same project, which is what I do.)

hartror 16y ago
I know several people who still have to struggle with CVS on a daily basis. Git/Hg are going to take a long time to get entrenched into enterprise.
- hvs 16y ago
  My company still uses SVN, but I'm in the process of migrating my teams projects to Mercurial. We aren't IBM, but we aren't small, either. I think that DVCSs are starting to make headway into "cutting edge, but not bleeding edge" companies. As to Mercurial vs. Git, whatever. That argument bored me two years ago. Mercurial is, in my experience, easier for SVN users to pick up, but just use whatever works for your situation.
- NickPollard 16y ago
  Anecdote is not the singular of data and all that, but at the major game development studio I work at, no-one at my team has even /heard/ of git, and when I try to explain what a distributed version control system is I get blank stares.
  - andybak 16y ago
    If these are developers then I'm shocked that they could be that ignorant of trends inside their own profession. Although I met a student studying Java for a CS degree who hadn't heard of Python. So anything is possible I suppose...

andrewgodwin 16y ago

I'm not sure I'd say it has "won" - such a phrase implies a long-term positioning at the front of the pack, and those that came before it for code hosting (SourceForge, Google Code) enjoyed their time in the spotlight before having something new come along. BitBucket in particular have made a good attempt after the Atlassian takeover, with the infinite free private repos being the most interesting part - I use it a lot, but mostly because I do a lot of small personal projects, and so the "social" features of GitHub - those which benefit most from its prominence - are mostly meaningless to me.

Estragon 16y ago

As others here and in the blog comments have pointed out, this post is semantically incoherent. But it was worth reading for the reference to hg-git alone. Cool stuff!

Tycho 16y ago

For some reason this page immediately crashes Safari on my iPad. Can see it for an instant then window closes and back to iike screen.

swah 16y ago

Has Linus ever mentioned Github?

pjscott 16y ago
The Linux kernel has its own fairly elaborate and entrenched system for handling their source; Github, as lovely as it is, just wouldn't be a good fit for them.

lusis 16y ago

I've said it multiple times but github won because of what they focused on - code: http://goo.gl/XfvG http://goo.gl/XfvG (http://lusislog.blogspot.com/2010/10/designed-for-developers-why-people-keep.html http://lusislog.blogspot.com/2010/10/designed-for-developers... for the paranoid)

bonzoesc 16y ago
Why shorten a link if you're putting the real one there anyways?
- kemayo 16y ago
  He wants to track how many clicks it gets. Take a look at http://goo.gl/ http://goo.gl/ and note the stats on urls you've previously shortened.
  - lusis 16y ago
    Yep. It's just to track interest. Blogger does crap for stats and logging.

mjs 16y ago

It occurs to me just now that it's kinda weird that subversion repositories are pretty much distributed everywhere; git repositories generally end up on github.

joshuacc 16y ago
That's probably because with a distributed system, there isn't too much downside to everyone relying on a central service. If Github goes down, you can be up and running at a new host in 5 minutes.
- mjs 16y ago
  My comment was more of an observation rather than a telling point for or against git, but I don't think it's a huge advantage of git that everyone has a backup copy of the repo that can be used for failover. github is essentially a central point of failure for many teams. You're going to change the location your CI checks out from if github goes down? Are you using github for issue tracking? Code reviews? What's more likely, I think, is that you just wait for a few minutes or hours until it comes up again, which is what you'd do with svn.
rue 16y ago
SVN repositories are not distributed anywhere. Dispersed, perhaps?
pjscott 16y ago
I think that Github is a big factor in git's success. If you use git and stick a project on Github, you just send people the Github URL, and BAM! they see your code and README file, neatly presented on one page. And since Github is so popular, this lowers the barrier to entry for other people to contribute patches, which is always nice. If Github is bringing people to git, then it stands to reason that a seemingly disproportionate number of git users would use Github.

tzs 16y ago

Disclaimer: I've only used Github for projects where either I'm the only coder, or where someone else was the only coder and I was just handling some release management stuff. So I've not experienced the full glory of collaboration via Github. Am I the only one who is not particular impressed with Github? It seems OK, but not in a different league from other code hosting places the way many make it out to be.

docgnome 16y ago
I think it's main neat feature is to be able to click a button to fork. Many others have this now but, iirc (and my memory my be faulty), github was the first. At least the first I saw. That alone makes it easy to fork, fix, pull request. I'm a bit of a github fanboi.

KirinDave 16y ago

Github has "won" in that it's the current darling child of the code-hosting industry. It's done this for two reasons: 1. Git is superior to its competitors as a technology for use by developers. It isn't very much superior these days, but it is enough to be noticeable and preferred. This is a superiority in use and performance, which are enough of an edge to offset its architectural failings. 2. Github has better UX than the competition: I've been referring to code hosted in bitbucket frequently, and I often sigh at what they're doing. Getting to any given piece of code takes longer and requires more clicks than on Github. Github also has great features for understanding how code is moving within a project, and I find them more comprehensible and useful than the competition's. It doesn't hurt that Github is a small self-started company with a staff full of brilliant people and a talented support staff. They certainly win the personality part of the competition thoroughly.

jmoiron 16y ago

I normally shy away from writing provocative information-light rants. The important parts (for me): 1. github is a social service, or perhaps best used as a social service 2. it has "the momentum", which is paramount for social services 3. git has "the momentum" wrt adoption of dvcs There are assumptions implicit within these arguments that I've accepted, based largely on the summation of 'soft' and anecdotal evidence that has built up over the last couple years. People are right to challenge them, and right in their criticism that I take them at face value.

MikeW 16y ago

I don't believe there will ever be a clear "winner" because the landscape is constantly changing. Sourceforge was THE place to store your OSS code and provide downloads and there was a really great broad selection of code and a way to discover it. But they didn't build good ways of managing it and the whole experience became cluttered and confusing. I saw many projects move to Google Code who provided a clean interface. And now I see many of those projects move to github and everyone I know is a big fan of the forking and pull requests. But the landscape will change again and github keeps needing to iterate and innovate on their product. Just about every time I use github, I curse their disastrous search. There is just so much innovation they could develop around code management which they don't have, a competitor could jump in and they too could become the darling of the development world. They too will have "won".

sdesol 16y ago
When I started developing my product two years ago, I seriously thought about throwing my product into the source code hosting ring. I knew I had a product that could compete but as you pointed out, the landscape is constantly changing and it is also one of the places where you have compete by price. Look at the recent shift by Bitbucket after being purchased by Atlassian. Bitbucket can now afford to be a money pit so that Mercurial can gain further adoption. Atlassian is really trying to build an enterprise solution around Mercurial (they've said this publicly) so they don't care if they lose money with Bitbucket. And this is going to affect Github. Only time will tell how much of an impact this is going to have. So yeah I'm glad I decided I didn't want to get into this market space. I decided I was better off focusing on developing the innovations and be a complimentary asset for sites like Github, Bitbucket, and other hosting sites instead. My product certainly has overlap with some of the things that Github and Bitbucket has, but it's not designed to be a hosting solution. It's more of a competitor for Atlassians Fisheye and Fogcreeks kiln. If you are curious you can see a bit of my tool in action at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MfEDwirFO1s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MfEDwirFO1s Sorry it has no sound so it might not make any sense.

csomar 16y ago

I started using bitbucket a month ago and everything went fine. I'm new to version control and selected mercurial as my VCS, so I was happy by finding a github counterpart. I think it's wrong to compare bitbucket to github. You won't move to github because github is superior, but if you want to move to git, you'll probably do. Bitbucket has all I need. I don't think I need any other fancy features, I already get things done the right way. I'm using the free version, but would upgrade if needed. Also, make sure you read the down times before you argue about it: "Bitbucket will be unavailable for approximately two hours starting Monday, Nov 1st, 01:00 GMT for a kernel upgrade."

kaffiene 16y ago

Come on. Saying "yay Github" does not mean that Git/Github have 'won'. What does it even mean to say that, anyway? "Yay Mercurial!" there we are, hg wins!! Whoo!! Who the hell thought this counted as news? Even as opinion, it's wishy washy.