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Everyone suggesting that they simply charge users for commits to drive off AI-heavy users forgets that Github is owned by Microsoft, who has a big incentive to
by arn3n 1mo ago
Everyone suggesting that they simply charge users for commits to drive off AI-heavy users forgets that Github is owned by Microsoft, who has a big incentive to keep having developers use AI.
I suspect that Microsoft would even prefer to have Github operate at a loss, if that loss were because all its users were using their models and paying for OpenAI subscriptions to generate the code.
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- OJFord 1mo ago> I suspect that Microsoft would even prefer to have Github operate at a loss, I assumed it does, do you know that it doesn't?
- madeofpalk 1mo agoI presume there’s a lot of companies out there paying GitHub very large sums to host all their private repos.
- OJFord 1mo agoNo doubt. ...You can have non-zero revenue and still be loss-making though.
- conductr 1mo agoConversely, what suggests GitHub has a huge operating cost? Running a GitHub clone at their same scale as a customer on cloud pricing would likely be insane. But y’all know infra is actually quite cheap when you run it yourself right? It’s usually the case with these M&A deals that the profit just never quite makes sense to justify the purchase price, unless you can truly scale up the user base or revenue model. GitHub was already so mature as a solution when they bought it, I don’t know that they could have added that type of value just by slapping a Microsoft logo in the footer.
- boldlybold 1mo agoIt used to be, and buying a few servers was a cheap way to get off the cloud (if you can manage them efficiently). But with RAM and other costs these days... I've had to rethink it a lot.
- inigyou 1mo agoIt's at worst ten times as expensive as it should be. But AWS was already ten to a hundred times as expensive, so even in the computer parts crisis, self hosting is still ahead.
- boldlybold 1mo agoI agree for personal projects, do you still think buying hardware makes sense for business use case at the current time?
- otterley 1mo ago> what suggests GitHub has a huge operating cost? They just added 3 million CPU cores to the fleet. That’s a lot of cheddar.
- conductr 1mo agoAbsolute numbers aren’t useful in this analysis. We know capital is easily available for the expenditure. You have to consider it as a relative number to revenue or users otherwise big numbers always look scary.
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- scottchiefbaker 1mo ago[dead]
- skeeter2020 1mo agooperating at a loss and non-operational because of outages are very different. If they can't maintain service levels nobody - AI super user or quant, old-fashioned human - will be happy.
- fastball 1mo agoWhat Microsoft models?
- RunSet 1mo agoMicrosoft has a financial incentive to push LLMs and also an existential reason since LLM-generated code is incompatible with the GPL.
- inigyou 1mo agoThe GPL is irrelevant nowadays anyway since everything is MIT (corporations won the license propaganda war). I think my computer has, like, five GPL programs? Ten? It's just that two of them are coreutils and Linux, and that basically holds up the GPL as a concept.
- functionmouse 1mo agoMicrosoft, who would also have an incentive to extinguish the largest hub for open source development, having already embraced and extended it. 15 years from now, they'll say it was obvious.
- stillpointlab 1mo agoThey could do this in a way that lessens external pull requests. For example, bolting co-pilot on to github, or a Codex in the web kind of thing that gives unlimited check ins. It's like how Grok Heavy gives the user X premium or whatever. You charge for the tokens and give the unlimted premium access as a bonus. Basically, bundle it.
- jen20 1mo ago> bolting co-pilot on to github They already did this, no?
- stillpointlab 1mo agoI meant as a prerequisite to unlimited checkins. Right now anyone can publish to public repos in an unlimited manner. They could choose to limit that and elevate unlimited to a paid co-pilot of codex bundled plan.
- bentt 1mo agoThis is like letting someone stay in your house for free while charging them to burn it down.
- zombot 1mo agoThe long view is that MS will sell those developers the tools that slow down or put band-aids on the damage they inflict on their own codebases by using AI.
- asdfsa32 1mo agoIf you can sell them fuel, it might be a lucrative business.
- asdfsa32 1mo agoThinking more, the object of the "house" is to extract value, whatever it is by rent or letting them burn it down, as long as the correct dues are paid, the mission is accomplished.