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A lot of people are concerned about the “what if they make me the product since I’m no longer paying.” A few reasons I don’t think that will happen: - private
by iambateman 8y ago
A lot of people are concerned about the “what if they make me the product since I’m no longer paying.”
A few reasons I don’t think that will happen:
- private, single contributor repos tend to be pretty small. it costs Github very little to service a single account.
- Github is a growing social network for developers. Getting young engineers on the platform for free will pay off handsomely when they join a team and automatically assume Github is their code storage tool of choice.
- Microsoft gets the reputation points for running the de facto developer social network (other than Stack Overflow).
GitHub is in the strange position of being both a successful enterprise product AND a social network. What other product exists with that kind of crossover? Microsoft will continue to optimize their enterprise revenue from GH and I think this is a tremendous step forward toward building the network long term.
- maxander 8y agoAll true, but why mot data mine too, while they’re at it? If you’re not the customer you’re a product... but it doesn’t follow that, if you are the customer, you’re not also a product.
- iambateman 8y agoSure. My point is that I expect them to be respectful, not avaricious. Microsoft's knows they ought not piss off 28 million developers.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- sangnoir 8y ago...or else what? Are the developers going to mass-migrate to SourceForge?[1] Github has a lot of leeway/social capital - they are hardcoded into the infrastructure both literally and figuratively. edit: 1. I literally forgot about Gitlab as a Github substitute when I wrote the comment, interpret that as you may.
- woolvalley 8y agoBitbucket, gitlab, some other new service that takes advantage of the gap left by mismanagement?
- sangnoir 8y agoI remembered Gitlab after I posted but before I saw your comment and made an edit. Github has network effects and inertia on its side - switching to any other service has a cost, and Microsoft has to piss off developers enough to justify the switch - moderate annoyances will be tolerated.
- audleman 8y ago> ...or else what? Are the developers going to mass-migrate Yes, that is the obvious risk. Gitlab is the #2 in the space, right now they don't have much market share but if an avaricious corporation violated the spirit of Github? It might be the chance they need.
- ptx 8y agoMicrosoft have already started doing this to developers (forced data-mining, a.k.a. telemetry) in .NET Core and VS Code - and to everyone in Windows 10 - so I don't see why they wouldn't do the same with Github.
- teddyfrozevelt 8y agoBecause you would destroy any trust you've built up with users and people would rapidly switch to another platform, as well as the developers of the GitHub objecting to having to build that.
- drewrv 8y ago> GitHub is in the strange position of being both a successful enterprise product AND a social network. What other product exists with that kind of crossover? LinkedIn comes to mind, which was also aquired by Microsoft.
- nafizh 8y agoLinkedIn might be successful, but its ugliness and spammy nature is in stark contrast with Github.
- agumonkey 8y agoI never saw real value in linkedin beside being there so people tried to use it as resource pool.. it felt like a status thing.
- paulie_a 8y agoLinkedIn is an HR circle jerk. Low quality posts, meaningless connections, and tons of spam from LinkedIn. They will spam your friends on your behalf. And then the person to person spam.
- benatkin 8y agoIt's currently in stark contrast with GitHub. I won't be at all surprised if I see in-your-face ads on GitHub in the near future. It's not like there isn't a precedent for it (hello, SourceForge).
- dpwm 8y agoI'm not so sure. LinkedIn was always quite spammy. Sourceforge did some absolutely egregious things, including bundling adware with windows binaries. Maybe the people at Microsoft don't know it, but one of the reasons GitHub has such a huge market share is because it hasn't done any of those things. Sure, MS could have bought it to use its reputation as capital and try and maximise income at all costs. It seems that would be somewhat counterproductive, given the long process Microsoft has gone through to start fixing its image with developers.
- moritzplassnig 8y agoWhen GitHub's financials got leaked in 2016, GitHub's personal accounts accounted for 12.5% of their revenue. GitHub Enterprise was 50%, their organization (= business) accounts were the remaining 37.5% [1]. It's fair to say that the personal accounts are irrelevant from a revenue perspective. [1] https://medium.com/@moritzplassnig/github-is-doing-much-better-than-bloomberg-thinks-here-is-why-a4580b249044 https://medium.com/@moritzplassnig/github-is-doing-much-bett... (disclaimer: I wrote the article but the data is by Bloomberg)
- nambit 8y ago12.5% is still a significant percent of revenue.
- nindalf 8y agoSignificant... but the main threat to the other 87.5% is that developers try out Gitlab or other alternatives for their personal projects. These developers find that Gitlab is pretty good, and don't push their companies to pay for Github. Whereas if every developer starts out using Github exclusively for personal projects, it becomes the default choice when they start work. With this change, Github foregoes a little revenue in exchange for securing the vast majority of their revenue.
- sokoloff 8y agoExactly this. Just this weekend, I setup my first CodeCommit (AWS) repo because I needed a private git repo for a new project and didn't want to pay github for it. It turned out to be damned easy (and very cheap) and that's a serious threat to github's future growth because once people start to default elsewhere for one type of their work, it tends to drag along other types of their work.
- philwelch 8y agoThat was always the case, though. It's just that Github's network effects were always powerful enough to counteract this effect. But, for one very obvious reason, people have grown more and more interested in finding alternatives to Github, and they're forced to compete.
- mpweiher 8y agoWell, MS corporate culture very much believes it is doing you a favor by mining all your data in order to “serve you better”
- fharding 8y ago> Getting young engineers on the platform for free will pay off handsomely when they join a team and automatically assume Github is their code storage tool of choice. Github student pack was already a thing. https://education.github.com/pack https://education.github.com/pack
- ergothus 8y agoNot everyone looking to have a repo today and joining a team tomorrow where it will pay off for Github is a student. Being able to pay doesn't mean the same as willing to do so, particularly if they've not used github yet and have no idea if it will be worthwhile.
- smaps 8y agoNot every young developer is a student. If Github had offered free private repos a couple of years ago I'd probably be using it instead of Gitlab.
- dwild 8y agoYeah, but it's only the case up until you graduate, at that point you are forced to pay or move out. I'm one of them that moved to Gitlab afterward and right now I currently hesitate to go back to Github, even if its free.
- ihuman 8y ago> Github is a growing social network for developers But in a social network I am the product
- dpods 8y agodepends on how the social network is monetized. There are no ads on Github. Unless github is selling user data to third parties, their monetization method is well known (paid enterprise features)
- madamelic 8y agoI feel like your entire comment could be ended with "...yet" I'm sure the screws will tighten on it. Unless Microsoft's entire plan is to run it forever, giving blank checks to GitHub, as a way to endear developers to Microsoft. Maybe.
- bduerst 8y agoI can't remember - Did Skype have ads before or after Microsoft acquired it?
- marcolussetti 8y agoI really don't remember any, however they might have just been less prominent.
- Zekio 8y agoIt had ads for a long while before Microsoft acquired it, but IIRC then you could actually remove them by removing a checkmark in settings
- philwelch 8y agoEndearing developers to Microsoft is probably the entire strategy behind the Github acquisition in the first place.
- deleted 8y ago
- sgt 8y ago>>GitHub is in the strange position of being both a successful enterprise product AND a social network. That's interesting to think about. Who knows, maybe GitHub will become the next LinkedIn for developers? Or for everyone? LinkedIn is nearly unusable these days, in my opinion.
- ProAm 8y agoYou think with all the telemetry MS put in Windows 10, there is not going to be any sort of customer reconnaissance going on in free GitHub? There will be a lot of data mining going on.
- TheReverend403 8y agoWhat gives you the idea GitHub weren't already doing that?
- ProAm 8y agoI think they were, I think MS will put more emphasis because they product catalog is much wider and deeper than vanilla GitHub's used to be.
- curiousDog 8y agoWell then you could pay for your account. You can’t have it both ways.
- smartmic 8y agoIt is no surprise but sound business reason that private repos will be available for free. For some background, check this HN classic: "Commoditize your complements" (https://www.gwern.net/Complement#2 https://www.gwern.net/Complement#2)
- dhh2106 8y agoInteresting article. Any literature/thoughts on when to commoditize complements rather than trying to vertically integrate? Private repos might be a complement to github's other business, but it doesn't naturally follow that they should commoditize it in all situations
- sah2ed 8y agoYou’d get a lot of value from reading an old but still relevant book from 1998: Information Rules: A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy by Hal Varian & Carl Shapiro that discusses several of these strategies. “Commoditize your complements” is a phrase popularized by Joel Spolsky but the book uses the broader of term: “maximize your value”. Commoditization is one of a few ways to maximize your value.
- franciscop 8y agoVery interesting article. It could be argued that the webapps/internet/browsers are now doing the same to the OS. For casual uses any OS is the same.
- xapata 8y agoYes, Microsoft realized that long ago. Gates and Balmer prolonged the inevitable through monopoly power, but Nadella has accepted the future and is "turning the aircraft carrier." It's amazing that Microsoft came back to life from being a zombie company. In hindsight, it was such a large zombie that it had sufficient time to change business models. Somehow Sears wasn't. There's a business school case study and tenure buried in there.
- 8y ago
- emmelaich 8y ago> private, single contributor repos tend to be pretty small. Free is pretty cheap though. Is there going to be a size limit? If not I can see people uploading all sorts of "interesting" data to github.
- partiallypro 8y agoBesides, Microsoft had already been offering free unlimited private repos through VSOnline for years. It's not a change for them, they are just extending it to their Github acquisition.
- nkkollaw 8y ago> private, single contributor repos tend to be pretty small. it costs Github very little to service a single account. I mean, it costs them peanuts to run them, but a lot of people will cancel their premium accounts (including me).
- fipple 8y agoMicrosoft isn't even trying to directly make money off GitHub Enterprise. What they're doing is plugging GitHub into a giant ecosystem of Azure-related services that they sell to large corporations for millions of dollars per year per customer. They could give away GitHub for free entirely, and might, if there's a one-click "deploy to Azure" and similar functionality that brings people into the Microsoft shop.
- eeeeeeeeeeeee 8y agoYep, exactly, and the lock-in on Azure is much better. It’s near trivial to switch between hosted Git providers. Integrations/hooks/CI add some stickyness which is probably why places like Gitlab focus on offering CI to be more than simply “git in the cloud.”
- exactly 8y agoExactly.
- scarface74 8y agoThere is already a one click deploy to Azure from Github, it was there before the acquisition via the Azure Devops aka Visual Studio Team Service website.
- tracker1 8y agoPersonally, I think Azure DevOps is the logical progression from Github at a professional/business level. I'd be surprised if their business operations didn't merge in that direction.
- archon810 8y ago> private, single contributor repos tend to be pretty small. it costs Github very little to service a single account. Small but important correction, Github is letting up to 3 contributors use these free private repos. "For the first time, developers can use GitHub for their private projects with up to three collaborators per repository for free."
- CodeWriter23 8y agoRight. “Unlimited number of Limited Repos“
- SquishyPanda23 8y agoI'm generally pretty skeptical of these sorts of arguments. People gave similar arguments about why Facebook wouldn't turn against its users or Amazon would always have some of the lowest prices you could find. Among other things, a private repo is a file system with full history. Anything that can be used as a file system will likely get abused. More generally, this kind of argument basically says "this company will likely ignore this revenue stream forever", which doesn't sound very likely in the long run. This might also be an attack on GitLab, which I believe has had unlimited free private repos for a while.
- mikeash 8y agoGitHub already had a business model where they give a lot of stuff away for free and make it up on a premium offering. This just shifts the line between the two very slightly. I don’t see this creating any new concerns.
- mcs_ 8y agoI'm confused about this definition of social network. GitHub is a place where we work. I have thousand of commits and 1 actual friend. Am I the only one or are we changing the meaning of social?
- chmike 8y agoYou are right. This is marketing talk. Github should have a chat/forum functionality to get into social network tools. My feeling is that this is more a move to fight competitors.
- mitgraduate 8y agoThis came at the right time. I was looking into LambCI but it only supports github. I was using bitbucket for private repos. Checkout: https://github.com/lambci/lambci/blob/master/README.md https://github.com/lambci/lambci/blob/master/README.md It only supports github. For my hobby projects i can't afford to host gitlab CI/Jenkins or pay for premium CI services. Now, i can run my tests on Lambda,yay!
- dogweather 8y agoBut beware and read the pricing sheet --- GitHub created a dumbed-down repo type for these new free private repos.
- chmike 8y agoWhat does "dumbed-down repo type" mean ? How does they compare to public repo ? Are features missing ?
- dogweather 8y agoScroll down to the Comparison https://github.com/pricing#feature-comparison https://github.com/pricing#feature-comparison
- siruncledrew 8y agoEven if Github doesn’t end up being a typical “social network”, this still allows Microsoft to push out the competition (Gitlab, Bitbucket) and become the de facto developer workbench in the industry. MS already released a hit with VSCode and won back a lot of street cred with developers who moved over from Atom/Sublime/etc. Having free private repos just makes sense in order to seal the deal with consumers, and migrate them over to the MS developer ecosystem. It’s very Google-esque. Github was already the ‘Chrome’ of the code repo world, and now it has a chance to pull further ahead. This is what MS wants, because now there is even less reason for users to look to migrate if what they used to have to pay for is now free.
- profalseidol 8y agoDevelopers developer developers developers!
- thaumasiotes 8y ago> GitHub is in the strange position of being both a successful enterprise product AND a social network. What other product exists with that kind of crossover? ...Facebook? WeChat? Those aren't exactly little-known products.
- ForHackernews 8y agoI really hate all the "social network" features of github, and I will eventually delete my non-work github account if they keep pushing in that direction. Adding "emoji reactions" was a really bad sign IMHO.
- herewulf 8y agoI'm not keen on social network-type sites either but the emoji reactions are far better than getting showered with "+1" e-mails.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]