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Both this piece, and most commenters, seem to miss the point about where Github's value comes from. It's not for being a social identity for programmers, or ho

• deleted 11y ago
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• arikrak 11y ago
  Github currently may use the "social coding" part for marketing now, but it can build off it in the future. For example, StackOverflow built a whole careers site off Q&A, Github can choose to go further based on real code.
  • MarkPNeyer 11y ago
    "github labs used machine learning to generate a simple english -> python translation algorithm. it crawled the millions of commits, looking at comments and commit logs to understand software"
    • wstrange 11y ago
      But anyone else can do the same (at least for all of the public repos).
    • arikrak 11y ago
      (c. 2028) Github announced today that it has acquired StackExchange, known for its Q&A site for developers and algorithms. This will let Github enhance their own automated software development suite. Github analyzes open-source and closed-source code (under licensing agreements) to produce new software automatically on demand. Currently Github primarily determines a piece of code's functionality from its unit tests, but this acquisition will let them expand their source of knowledge. This may increase the concern among some developers and algorithm managers that Github is becoming too powerful. There has been controversy in the past over Github's restricted API access to open source code on its site. Some developers want to move their code from Github, but they've come to rely on the automatic tools Github provides...
    • arikrak 11y ago
      (c. 2028) Github announced today that it has acquired StackExchange, known for its Q&A site for developers and algorithms. This will let Github enhance their own automated software development suite. Github analyzes open-source and closed-source code (under licensing agreements) to produce new software automatically on demand. Currently Github primarily determines a piece of code's functionality from its unit tests, but this acquisition will let them expand their source of knowledge. This may increase the concern among some developers and algorithm managers that Github is becoming too powerful. There has been controversy in the past over Github's restricted API access to open source code on its site. Some developers want to move their code from Github, but they've come to rely on the automatic tools Github provides...
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• hkmurakami 11y ago
  So it seems that the true test will whether a shop like HP would adopt Github Enterprise and pay $20/mo/programmer for 50,000 programmers and pay $1mm/mo to Github.
  • zzalpha 11y ago
    Probably not. No deal at that scale is done at list rates. But it'd still be a very lucrative deal for GH if it happened.
    • hkmurakami 11y ago
      Good point on the list rates. Then again contract terms will probably be longer right, so both sides sort of "win" there.
• timr 11y ago
  Microsoft Word became a valuable monopoly because it was a proprietary standard. But git hosting is a commodity service. There are already a number of players doing exactly what GitHub does, for less money, and it's trivially easy to migrate a repository away from GitHub to those other providers. Something tells me that the "facebook for programmers" angle is essential to selling the dream here. The so-called "network effect" of open-source projects has some inherent stickiness, but again, there isn't that much that ties a project to GitHub.
  • zachrose 11y ago
    Except for all the things that Github builds on top of git to keep users coming back (wiki, issues, stars, etc.) which seem to be working.
    • cheald 11y ago
      The thing that GitHub has right now is the userbase - the network effect keeps people interested in their service. The technical value they provide is pretty trivially replicable (see: GitLab, BitBucket), but you can't code up a (real) community. It's worth noting that 10 years ago, this same statement was true of Sourceforge.
      • enahs-sf 11y ago
        I wonder what the sourceforge guys are making of this right now.
        • cozuya 11y ago
          Both of them are probably pretty upset.
      • colechristensen 11y ago
        gitlab and bitbucket aren't as good, I've tried them and more. GitHub isn't a commodity that excels only because of it happening to be popular. People choose GitHub because it's both popular and good. It has competition, some of which are better for specific circumstances, but as a whole they don't execute as well. Let me contrast with Facebook – it was only good, in my opinion, for a brief period starting in 2005 which happened to coincide with my freshman year of university. As it grew and changed, I found myself and very many of my peers hating each significant change. The only reason I've kept an account is because it's popular – it stores some weak social connections which would be otherwise lost.
• hga 11y ago
  I'm not aware of Microsoft Word or any editor I've ever used or heard of forbidding me from using the word "retards" or any other. Heck, Gnu Emacs allows me to write proprietary software, a user freedom RMS is no doubt not entirely happy with. I require that general freedom of expression in my tools and do no tolerate vendors who engage in these sorts of damaging stunts. I suspect I'm not alone, and I note GitHub has a further problem of not being all that sticky, e.g. I moved all my repos off it earlier today after we got confirmation of this.
  • seanflyon 11y ago
    Could you explicitly state what it is you are referring to? I'm not familiar with github's content restrictions.
    • gizmo686 11y ago
      https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9966118 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9966118 This was on the front page recently. 741 comments and only 480 upvotes, so it wouldn't suprise me if it set off the flamewar filter and got pushed off.
      • jessaustin 11y ago
        It was surprising how long that stayed on the front page: it was still there when comments were ~550 and upvotes were at least a hundred less.
    • hga 11y ago
      https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9966118 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9966118 tl;dr: Observed fact, GitHub disappeared a repo (this I personally know for a fact) and all its forks, the only reason we can surmise is that it described itself as "X for retards". I believe it's this one https://github.com/WebMBro/WebMConverter https://github.com/WebMBro/WebMConverter now described as "WebM for bakas." (Japanglish for idiots or fools). Per this https://imgur.com/QC51FZz https://imgur.com/QC51FZz it was indeed for the use of that word. I'd be more willing to extend some slack to GitHub if they hadn't precipitously turned off their service for these repos, that's worse than this example of their "tolerance", but who knows what it'll be next? Who knows how this will play out in the long term; their trashing of their meritocracy rug suggests this is not a one off (ADDED: and erics32 reminded me of C+=). Why should I or anyone else concerned about long term stability invest in their particular value adds when they show such capriciousness? The great point, in relation to this topic of their latest investment, is that companies that depend almost entirely on their "communities" can screw those up and destroy their value.
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  • cmelbye 11y ago
    That's what he was saying. When companies move to enterprise, they pay per-user instead of per-repo.
    • wslh 11y ago
      Yes, it was my fault, I am a GitHub customer but never realized they have a specific enterprise option.
• serve_yay 11y ago
  It's kind of crazy to me that its value even needs to be argued for. But then again, I use it every single day.
  • hueving 11y ago
    and how much money do you give them? Also, how painful would it be for you to switch to a different company (e.g. bitbucket)?
• fragsworth 11y ago
  > That's why Github is being valued at $2B. Also, keep in mind, we can't see the terms of this deal, and how much special treatment the investors will be getting from it. The valuation is just an upper limit to the true measured value of the company until we can see the terms of the deal.
• kevin_thibedeau 11y ago
  There aren't enough programmers on the planet to justify this valuation.
• bmir-alum-007 11y ago
  The value is a premium considering Atlassian was valued last year at $3.3B even though it has significantly more enterprisey features/ecosystem in the wiki/issue tracker/CI space, although it's not yet owned the social VCS enterprise/SaaS space. Atlassian has an interest in dominating the enterprise-side with JIRA (issue tracker) & Confluence (wiki). Atlassian's Github non-Enterprise competitor, Bitbucket, has unlimited private repos for free or $200/enterprise. Atlassian also offers FishEye/Crucible and Stash to compete with GE. The big plus with JIRA/Confluence are the plethora of free/paid plugins and lots of enterprisey features that aren't available in Redmine/Chili, Trac, etc. without significant work. In those circumstances, IT shops appreciate Active Directory provisioning, fine-grained permissions and such when any of mediawiki, google docs/quip, asana aren't often up to task without lots of extra work. (Yes, deploying Atlassian to production used to be a PITA, but it's much better than it was some years ago.) Atlassian's HipChat is basically a 37signals' Campfire clone, and Slack/FlowDock are significantly better for most use-cases. In the CI market, most shops end up deploying Jekins/Hudson because of it's cross-platform slave builder agents and massive plugin ecosystem. I wouldn't use Bamboo. CI needs to be deployed when enterprise can't use TravisCI or similar.
  • qwerqweq 11y ago
    What is "Active Directory provisioning"? Is this just an alternative way to authenticate users with the wiki similar to LDAP?
    • roel_v 11y ago
      Active Directory is a whole bunch of stuff build on top of something that looks like LDAP except less sucky, and it lets you do many things from setting permissions to sharing printers and deploying software. It's not something to be installed during a lazy Friday afternoon following a 'AD 101' tutorial though.
      • bmir-alum-007 11y ago
        Yup. Basically, apps that do MS-specific LDAP queries to AD or something emulating it (Samba). It's also often useful for apps to be allow admin users to tweak the actual LDAP queries in case they have a custom enterprise-wise schema. Stanford, for example, used AD as the "single source of truth" with another LDAP setup for *NIX. (In addition to a modified version of MIT Krb5 with AFS integrations.)
• mpdehaan2 11y ago
  I'm a bit curious how much GitHub Enterprise is being adopted. Obviously winning someone like IBM and HP (I don't know what they use) would be big. But I see most companies using GitHub private organizations (paid per repo) even when they are sometimes quite large. I might be totally wrong here, but I'm kinda interested in what the split is. Obviously every software company having a huge chance of keeping their private source control code in you is a big deal, and even "monetize way later" makes sense here considering the dominance they are showing. And mostly showing without any major improvements to the product (.com) in a LOOOOONG time, but I will say the stability has gotten much better, and I do appreciate that at least.
  • cmullen 11y ago
    HP has HP ALM and IBM has Rational. HP also uses CollabNet TeamForge for source control in some groups.
    • danpalmer 11y ago
      I bet there are at least 3 teams each in HP and IBM that use separate GitHub enterprise installations. For these companies, using public GitHub isn't even a question. It would cost far more in terms of lawyers, managers, etc to approve use of public GitHub than to just buy an enterprise installation for a department. Also, just because they have (and sell) a product that does this, doesn't mean that they use it, that it's appropriate, that their devs want to use it, etc. Separate departments in companies of these sizes act like individual companies, IBM even has the term Blue Dollars for money that they spend on other IBM services.
  • ratpik 11y ago
    Paypal, SAP, Vimeo and lots of bug companies uses enterprise github.
  • danpalmer 11y ago
    A lot of companies have regulatory requirements which require them to host a lot of their support services, and for many companies with small dev teams (~1k-10k employees, 10-100 devs), management and policy is strict enough that they will just buy the enterprise version. Remember that inside the enterprise version, you have full control over all the organisational structure - essentially giving you an extra level of granularity on permissions. That's quite important for many companies.
• InclinedPlane 11y ago
  But, if that's true, shouldn't they already be rolling in money already? Why do they need an injection of cash?
• ferguson44 11y ago
  I doubt Free GitHub repository stand any longer 'cause it can't be sustain by any mean.
• mynameishere 11y ago
  Github is basically Microsoft Word for programmers That makes no sense at all. It's like the "track changes" feature in Word, maybe. You know--one little feature on a much, much larger tool.
  • Retra 11y ago
    The point is that it is a standard, critical work tool.
    • hueving 11y ago
      No it's not. I work in open source and very rarely use github. git is a standard tool, github is only a polished frontend that seems to be a standard amongst web developers.
      • leftnode 11y ago
        Yeah, there, are, um, a lot of them.
      • deleted 11y ago
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    • adamors 11y ago
      It's really not. In the last 3 places I worked at we all used Bitbucket because their pricing is more reasonable and it integrates nicely with other Atlassian products like Jira.
      • Retra 11y ago
        Ok, so Bitbucket is also a standard, critical tool.
• ghuntley 11y ago
  Yep, you are right on point. Developers use the commodity version at home and want to use the same (awesome) tools in the workplace. Enterprise companies who wish to differentiate their hiring/talent pipeline recognise this and consider it a commercial advantage. Additionally these same enterprises have strict IP policies which prevent the IP from being hosted in the cloud. Win Win. The enterprise product VMware/Xen/HyperV image is *the exact same* ruby/chef codebase as used in production on GitHub.com. They are making an absolute killing via price discrimination - have you seen the enterprise pricing? https://enterprise.github.com/features#pricing - 10 developers -> $2,500 USD a year. - 50 developers -> $12,500 USD a year (+/- enterprise negotiations) - 150 developers -> $37,500 USD a year (+/- enterprise negotiations) - 500 developers -> Telephone number of a sales/account rep appears. IMHO this (cheap) cash is going to be used to grow their sales and enterprise support teams to accelerate this loop. https://jobs.github.com/companies/GitHub
  • peteretep 11y ago
    Any CTO signing off on $37,500USD a year for 150 developers, when you can get unlimited developers on Bitbucket for $2,400, probably needs to be fired.
    • vdaniuk 11y ago
      Are you sure? The price of the Github's service is ~$20.8 per developer per month. This is about 10-30 minutes of developers time worth per month. Adapting to Bitbucket's workflow and learning its UI would take much more time.
      • peteretep 11y ago
        If you've hired a developer for whom using Bitbucket instead of Github takes 10-30 minutes more effort a month, you need to rereview your hiring process.
        • vdaniuk 11y ago
• debaserab2 11y ago
  I agree, but they are a bit of a phenomenon given the amount of marketshare they actually have. They have something else going for them, and I think it's that they are the default option for most new developers as their centralized repository. It's interesting because bitbucket still offers free private repos yet doesn't seem to have nearly as much following as github.
  • spdionis 11y ago
    Imo it's because bitbucket UI is just bad. Especially issues and navigation among repositories. I have a really hard time to get used to it.
• neya 11y ago
  I agree, in fact, I don't understand why it's only valued at $2B, when a platform with no monetization model like Instagram was valued (and sold) at $1B.
  • hueving 11y ago
    instagram has a massive userbase. advertising potential is much larger. people expect advertising on a social network. if github started doing that, developers would throw a shit-fit and bail
• sytse 11y ago
  The social identity and open source hosting have strong network effects that would warrant a high valuation. The enterprise functionally has much less network effects and using the power of open source we're able to offer a compelling product for less than $5/month per user. I wonder what other people think, is the value in the GitHub.com offering that has a moat due to the network effects but doesn't generate much revenues or is the value in the enterprise product that generates revenues but has much smaller network effects.
• NicoJuicy 11y ago
  Microsoft Word as source control for programmers is Visual Studio Online, which also supports git. Not Github ;-) PS. Visual Studio Online is free up to 5 team members and costs 20€ / user / month for every additional team member ( so essentially saving 100 €/ month). It's also free for msdn subscribers
• otis_inf 11y ago
  You too miss a vital point: every user of github who doesn't pay for using the service adds to the costs of running the service. The popular it gets among free users, the more costs github has. What you're referring to is precisely the reasons why users use the service for free, and of all these users github doesn't make a dime (well, in practice they might make indirect money of these users by selling profile information and perhaps because some users might purchase services because they know github, but that's not a given) > Companies that need enterprise functionality around security and flow configurability move to Github Enterprise and spend, not $7/month/organization, but $20/month per programmer. This is not a given at all. Github is used by many because it's a great free service. When you have to pay for the service however (or better: you're going to use a service offered by github which costs money), there are other alternatives which might be cheaper or even free. E.g. private repositories are free on bitbucket. Private repositories don't need the social aspects of github at all, as they're private and the group of people using the repo is limited and known up front. I find the article missing this point as well: sure they got funding and that's great, but their popularity among the users of the free service is not a reason to think they'll be a very profitable company: only the paying users can make that happen.
• devy 11y ago
  Github Enterprise is essentially a self-hosted version of Github. And there are similar open sourced alternatives like GitLab and Gitorious too. I wonder why those alternatives didn't threat Github Enterprise? First-mover advantage? Branding?
• nivertech 11y ago
  IBM acquired Rational Rose and was selling ClearCase to F500 companies for if I'm not mistaken: $13K/developer/year and ClearCase Lite for $2K/developer/year.
• spectrum1234 11y ago
  Maybe it was obvious? But maybe not. It's no different than any company offering a really solid app for free, and then even more amazing features for a cost.