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By this article's logic, virtually every Linux desktop environment "stole" from Microsoft for over 10 years, and have spent the past 10 years "stealing" from Ap

By this article's logic, virtually every Linux desktop environment "stole" from Microsoft for over 10 years, and have spent the past 10 years "stealing" from Apple instead. Hacker News is stealing from a million different old Perl-based forum sites. Sure, you kinda sorta have a point... but it would be very hypocritical for anyone here to care much about that point. I'm also not sure that I buy the main premise of the article, that GitHub's and BitBucket's "communities" warrant comparison. Of course they don't. GitHub's pricing model offers you open collaboration for free, and charges you for private repos. Thus it is ideal for open source development, and open community. BitBucket's pricing model offers you unlimited private repos for free, but charges you by the number of collaborators. It also integrates well with JIRA, a very popular task/bug tracking system in small to midsize shops. In sum, it's not really trying to be an open source "community"... it's trying to compete for the in-house business of small to midsize shops. If you're trying to draw collaborators to your open source project, then BitBucket is a poor host. Likewise, if your company has one or two dozen developers and a large number of repos, then GitHub makes no sense as a paid host. All of my personal projects are on GitHub, and my company is all on BitBucket. I'm not so much interested in their "innovation vs. creative bankruptcy" as I am in the choices they've made with structuring their pricing models.

jedbrown 13y ago
We use Bitbucket as primary host for open source projects to avoid fragmenting access control. Proposal repositories need to be private and most coauthors prefer journal article repositories to be private. GitHub's pricing model would encourage us to consolidate these private repos, but each has a small number of different external collaborators, so that would yield undesirable granularity. Meanwhile, all of our software products are open source, with a much larger group of contributors than the union of the proposals/papers. We mirror the flagship project on GitHub, but all of our development is on Bitbucket.

jedbrown 13y ago

We use Bitbucket as primary host for open source projects to avoid fragmenting access control. Proposal repositories need to be private and most coauthors prefer journal article repositories to be private. GitHub's pricing model would encourage us to consolidate these private repos, but each has a small number of different external collaborators, so that would yield undesirable granularity. Meanwhile, all of our software products are open source, with a much larger group of contributors than the union of the proposals/papers. We mirror the flagship project on GitHub, but all of our development is on Bitbucket.