8 ms·

I don't know of any student who, in interest of their project, couldn't save $7 or $12/mo. That's only one or two Starbucks purchases!

lallysingh 18y ago
They can, but students can be cheap for its own sake.
- epall 18y ago
  I'm so cheap I'm teaching myself Python so I can use App Engine's free hosting! And I even have a research stipend.
  - lallysingh 18y ago
    .. unless you've got honest-to-god spare time as a researcher (which is a trap -- you never have spare time as a researcher), may I suggest that you're learning Python more for your sanity?
mdolon 18y ago
When I was in college, food was a necessity in order to survive and was a justified expense in my head. Starbucks, on the other hand, was an occasional luxury that I typically tried to avoid. For a college student who is probably paying for hosting and domain names on top of all their required college expenses, it makes more sense to use a free alternative or a completely different system (svn) rather than add on another monthly expense. At least that was what college was like for me and so now I'm stuck on subversion. If I had the opportunity to try out GitHub for free, I would have jumped on the opportunity and would probably eventually switch to a paying customer.
- qhoxie 18y ago
  The alternative to GitHub isn't svn, it's git.
PStamatiou 18y ago
how about a onetime fee of one month worth of whatever they are requesting, if you are going to go to the free for students route
catch23 18y ago
I never went to starbucks as a student... cmon, when you're making zero cash, you're basically living off of whatever you made during the summer, or begging parents to help pay for stuff. Or you're using student loans that you'll have to pay someday. Could you beg your parents for $7 to drink coffee? come now!
nostrademons 18y ago
There's a qualitative difference between "pay" and "no-pay", particularly among students with no income. When I was in college, I had essentially no cash flow. Nothing in, nothing out. The college dining hall was open 7 days/week, so I always ate there instead of eating out or cooking. (The only times I ate out were the TYPO - "Take Your Professor Out" - dinners, which the school paid for.) Room & board was completely paid for, and we weren't allowed to live off-campus. Internet access was provided by the college, as was webhosting. Student activities (I did sailing, orchestra, taiko, some artsy-crafty stuff, and a variety of other things that would've otherwise been expensive) all came out of the student activities fund, which was paid with our tuition. I bought books once a semester with a credit card that went to my parent's account. After the first year, I didn't bother signing up for a room phone, instead using my cell phone, again paid for by my parents. The only thing I ended up paying for was ordering Wingz or pizza at midnight, or alcohol contributions to parties. There were many purchases that I could easily have afforded that I didn't bother with, because it meant I would've had to worry about money. They included Starbucks, going out for meals or ice cream, paid LiveJournal accounts, actually buying music, and basically anything that required a credit card (I didn't have my own until I got a job after college). If GitHub had existed back then and charged, I would've said "Screw it, I'll setup my own git account on a college server, and we can all pull from that." The cost isn't just $7-12/month. It's all the time spent balancing bank statements or checking over credit card bills that you wouldn't otherwise need to worry about if you never use money.
- icco 18y ago
  I'm rather curious were you went to school, this sounds kinda nice. It's the direct opposite situation here (very little on campus housing, cook all my own food, don't do too may extracurricular activities because it's all rather expensive) but I come to the same conclusion. Except that our school servers don't let us host git repos, so I need an external place to store code.
  - nostrademons 18y ago
    Amherst College. It's pretty common at top private colleges, and it also seems more common at rural schools than urban ones. If every college student in Amherst needed to get an apartment, I think the townspeople would panic, since there were 7000 of them and 35,000 of us. (Okay, this is misleading, since about 32,000 of those college students are at UMass, which occasionally does house students off-campus. Amherst and Hampshire don't, though.) (Irony: many of these same students who go through 4 years never having to manage money are then hired on Wall Street to...you guessed it...manage money. Maybe that explains the current crisis.)

lallysingh 18y ago

They can, but students can be cheap for its own sake.

epall 18y ago
I'm so cheap I'm teaching myself Python so I can use App Engine's free hosting! And I even have a research stipend.
- lallysingh 18y ago
  .. unless you've got honest-to-god spare time as a researcher (which is a trap -- you never have spare time as a researcher), may I suggest that you're learning Python more for your sanity?

mdolon 18y ago

When I was in college, food was a necessity in order to survive and was a justified expense in my head. Starbucks, on the other hand, was an occasional luxury that I typically tried to avoid. For a college student who is probably paying for hosting and domain names on top of all their required college expenses, it makes more sense to use a free alternative or a completely different system (svn) rather than add on another monthly expense. At least that was what college was like for me and so now I'm stuck on subversion. If I had the opportunity to try out GitHub for free, I would have jumped on the opportunity and would probably eventually switch to a paying customer.

qhoxie 18y ago
The alternative to GitHub isn't svn, it's git.

PStamatiou 18y ago

how about a onetime fee of one month worth of whatever they are requesting, if you are going to go to the free for students route

catch23 18y ago

I never went to starbucks as a student... cmon, when you're making zero cash, you're basically living off of whatever you made during the summer, or begging parents to help pay for stuff. Or you're using student loans that you'll have to pay someday. Could you beg your parents for $7 to drink coffee? come now!

nostrademons 18y ago

There's a qualitative difference between "pay" and "no-pay", particularly among students with no income. When I was in college, I had essentially no cash flow. Nothing in, nothing out. The college dining hall was open 7 days/week, so I always ate there instead of eating out or cooking. (The only times I ate out were the TYPO - "Take Your Professor Out" - dinners, which the school paid for.) Room & board was completely paid for, and we weren't allowed to live off-campus. Internet access was provided by the college, as was webhosting. Student activities (I did sailing, orchestra, taiko, some artsy-crafty stuff, and a variety of other things that would've otherwise been expensive) all came out of the student activities fund, which was paid with our tuition. I bought books once a semester with a credit card that went to my parent's account. After the first year, I didn't bother signing up for a room phone, instead using my cell phone, again paid for by my parents. The only thing I ended up paying for was ordering Wingz or pizza at midnight, or alcohol contributions to parties. There were many purchases that I could easily have afforded that I didn't bother with, because it meant I would've had to worry about money. They included Starbucks, going out for meals or ice cream, paid LiveJournal accounts, actually buying music, and basically anything that required a credit card (I didn't have my own until I got a job after college). If GitHub had existed back then and charged, I would've said "Screw it, I'll setup my own git account on a college server, and we can all pull from that." The cost isn't just $7-12/month. It's all the time spent balancing bank statements or checking over credit card bills that you wouldn't otherwise need to worry about if you never use money.

icco 18y ago
I'm rather curious were you went to school, this sounds kinda nice. It's the direct opposite situation here (very little on campus housing, cook all my own food, don't do too may extracurricular activities because it's all rather expensive) but I come to the same conclusion. Except that our school servers don't let us host git repos, so I need an external place to store code.
- nostrademons 18y ago
  Amherst College. It's pretty common at top private colleges, and it also seems more common at rural schools than urban ones. If every college student in Amherst needed to get an apartment, I think the townspeople would panic, since there were 7000 of them and 35,000 of us. (Okay, this is misleading, since about 32,000 of those college students are at UMass, which occasionally does house students off-campus. Amherst and Hampshire don't, though.) (Irony: many of these same students who go through 4 years never having to manage money are then hired on Wall Street to...you guessed it...manage money. Maybe that explains the current crisis.)