Building a Coder's Paradise Is Not Profitable: GitHub Lost $66M In Nine Months Of 2016 (bloomberg.com) 227
Though not much popular outside the technology circles, GitHub is very popular among coders around the world. The startup operates a sort of Google Docs for programmers, giving them a place to store, share and collaborate on their work. But GitHub is losing money through profligate spending and has stood by as new entrants emerged in a software category it essentially gave birth to, according to people familiar with the business and financial paperwork reviewed by Bloomberg. From the report: The rise of GitHub has captivated venture capitalists. Sequoia Capital led a $250 million investment in mid-2015. But GitHub management may have been a little too eager to spend the new money. The company paid to send employees jetting across the globe to Amsterdam, London, New York and elsewhere. More costly, it doubled headcount to 600 over the course of about 18 months. GitHub lost $27 million in the fiscal year that ended in January 2016, according to an income statement seen by Bloomberg. It generated $95 million in revenue during that period, the internal financial document says. The income statement shows a loss of $66 million in the first three quarters of this year. That's more than twice as much lost in any nine-month time frame by Twilio Inc., another maker of software tools founded the same year as GitHub. At least a dozen members of GitHub's leadership team have left since last year.
Selling private repositories is their money maker (Score:2)
So they make money selling private code repositories. If you want something really private, why use a 3rd party hosting service? So that you have a neck to wring when it leaks? Your private repository is just a NSL away from giving everything up without you ever knowing. Or a hack away. Or just a password-reuse user fail away, as happened 6 months ago.
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They're selling convenience.
Most software managers don't care too much if someone that can produce a NSL gets to see their source code. They are concerned about direct competitors having access, and they're concerned about having to pay sysadmins to handle the development environment. Sysadmin labor isn't cheap, and neither are the servers, storage, backups, auditing, or workflow tools that make development happen.
If your business is making software, you can just pay GitHub for that infrastructure, and focu
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So when you decide to mitigate the risk by bringing it all in-house, you can't. Pretty stupid excuse. For large projects at large firms such as those mentioned in the article (Walmart, Ford, etc), you need these types of people on hand anyway. Farming out shit "for convenience" isn't an excuse for being lazy.
Sure it might cost more, but if you farm it all out your business will consist of workers who are jack-of-all-trades and master-of-none. Perhaps this trend explains the mediocrity of today's products.
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So when you decide to mitigate the risk by bringing it all in-house, you can't.
Not sure why that would be the case. You're still using git as your client for interfacing with github, so each developer should still have the entire source code history. If you want to re-centralize on-site, just have a dev pull the latest from github, add a new remote to the on-site server, and push. You can then delete your github repository, which is supposedly a permanent, non-reversible act.
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Perhaps this trend explains the mediocrity of today's products.
I don't think it covers all of it, but it plays a role in it.
Companies have moved past seeing IT as some magical resource and see it about the same way most first world nations look at a toilet. Unless it's really shitty, everyone just expects it to be everywhere they go and function good enough to get the job done. There a few out there that understand that it's something that plays a role in life three to five time a day and that when shit is serious, you're really going to enjoy having a top of the lin
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So when you decide to mitigate the risk by bringing it all in-house, you can't.
There are reasons to bring infrastructure in-house, but risk mitigation isn't one of them. Your risk is mitigated by having an SLA with a provider whose primary function is to maintain those servers, with penalties attached for downtime to compensate for the loss.
For large projects at large firms such as those mentioned in the article (Walmart, Ford, etc), you need these types of people on hand anyway. Farming out shit "for convenience" isn't an excuse for being lazy.
No, those companies really don't need a devops sysadmin on hand. They need sysadmins in other areas, who can focus on those areas, but they don't need nearly so many supporting the development.
Sure it might cost more, but if you farm it all out your business will consist of workers who are jack-of-all-trades and master-of-none.
Really, it works the other way. If you farm out distinc
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If you want something really private, why use a 3rd party hosting service?
How much do you have to spend on system administrators to keep the server that's hosting your stuff secure? For small organisations, the cost of GitHub is a lot lower than the cost of a private repository with the same level of security.
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Re:Selling private repositories is their money mak (Score:5, Interesting)
If you want something really private, why use a 3rd party hosting service?
Most companies don't need "really" private. They just need "normal" private. I don't wan't to just open all my code to the world, but it isn't something I lose sleep over.
I once consulted for a company that was considering open sourcing their main product. Some people were opposed, and thought they would be giving away their "crown jewels", but they decided to go ahead. A year later, we checked, and the OSS repo had been downloaded this many times: 0.
The hard truth is that nobody cares about your crappy code, and even if you give it away, you will often need to work hard to get people to use it.
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The issue isn't that they are selling something people don't need, because tons of companies use their service.. and the issue isn't that it doesn't make money because clearly it does... the issue is that it take 600 people to run the business which seems insane.
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Honestly, a github organization with solid policies and 2FA for all users is pretty solid. Sure github could get hacked, but they have entire security teams to mitigate that risk. Your average basement git server doesn't have any security teams.
Perhaps (Score:4, Insightful)
GitHub should worry about actually building their core product rather than spending all their time on social justice crusades.
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Having some fixed sane rules and sticking to em would be a good start.
Before or after? (Score:5, Informative)
Before or after they started pissing people off by deciding what "was" and "wasn't" an acceptable repo, which magically lined up with SJW views.
"Opalgate", anyone? Read the comments yourself.
https://github.com/opal/opal/i... [github.com]
https://news.ycombinator.com/i... [ycombinator.com]
Hiring a SJW, Coraline Ada Ehmke, to run "anti-harassment." (Good thing people on the left never harass anyone.)
http://www.breitbart.com/tech/... [breitbart.com]
The second you start judging what is, and isn't, "moral" (as opposed to acceptable to your standards ala no porn), then people are going to 1) get worried their repo might get affected, or 2) say "fuck you" altogether.
Re:Before or after? (Score:4, Insightful)
SJW are emotional children acting out against whatever injustices they can imagine.
Re:Before or after? (Score:5, Insightful)
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I am gonna steal this :-D
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Well played, sir, well played.
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Wait. You're saying that SJW's can give out a tongue lashing for "causes" but everyone else has to just silently take it? You're saying you want to dish it out but you're too pathetic to take it in return? It's not the priests who are attempting the rape here.
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SJW fake outrage only to causes that they feel important. Cops killing black men is an outrage!!!!! But Black men killing black men (http://heyjackass.com/) results in crickets.
Here is the question, as a black man, you are more likely to die in police interaction (entire USA) or in a Chicago Shootout? And guess which one SJW are up in arms about? (ignoring all the times SJW have been wrong about the police)
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Show me the anti-PC crowd blocking traffic, holding rallies, burning their neighborhoods, protesting on campuses, boycotting Israel (but only when convenient) ....
Yawn.
Re:Before or after? (Score:5, Insightful)
Threatening to close down a repository (your second link) because someone used the word "retarded" is retarded.
People who are offended can stand on their own two feet if it's that important to them. SJWs telling them that SJWs need to defend them is just infantilizing them. The whole SJW thing need to die, as do the people milking it for money.
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Threatening to close down a repository (your second link) because someone used the word "retarded" is retarded.
"Retarded" is also a perfectly cromulent engineering term. We no longer manually advance or retard the timings in out cars as part of a tune-up, but people still write software that manages advancing and retarding.
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It's not the word itself they objected to, it's the context and meaning.
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In code comments or something? I mean, how did anyone notice? Sounds like it wasn't wordfilters or something silly like that.
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If you check the link, it was fairly prominent.
Github isn't 4chan. It's a business platform, designed to make money one day. A lot of its value comes from the fact that businesses do use it, that people feel they can show it to employers, i.e. that it isn't 4chan.
Free Speech Warriors just need to accept that not every website wants to allow controversial content. They banned lots of controversial things, like the GamerGate harassment organization repo, because Github isn't supposed to be some kind of test o
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Hey dipshit, I never said that anyone was entitled to have a repository hosted for them. Don't put words in my mouth.
And I didn't advocate against it - I was very clear - if you're offended, stand on your own two feet and advocate for yourself. That include the fools who are offended that someone else is offended. I made it very clear that SJWs are parasites, and that people should grow up and defend themselves.
It's the same with "safe spaces." One group is advocating for safe spaces for people with menta
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Re:Before or after? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Congratulations, sitting alone here at home, I actually uttered the words "what the f*ck is this sh*t" out loud when I opened that GitHub link. No mean feat, considering how difficult asterisks are to pronounce.
This. I read through the first two dozen or so posts, then realised how many posts there were and my first thought was "These guys are morons."
It's like the joke: How do you find a vegan? Don't worry, they'll tell you.
As a developer myself, I don't care what your sexual preferences are, who you want to be in life, what your favourite colour is, what your political beliefs are. Its all irrelevant. What I care about is what your diff / patch / pull request does, is it going to break anything, and is it ok to
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Private companies and organisations are free to enact their own codes of conduct for using their services. This is not censorship...
It is indeed censorship, just not by the government.
But as you said - if you don't like the policies, go elsewhere. Which was GP's point - people are going elsewhere. Developers left SourceForge in droves because of their policies.
Re:Before or after? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, it is censorship in the same way that parents washing their child's mouth out with soap is censorship. Which is to say, companies are having to do it because "parents" (if they can be called that) no longer will. So we have a bunch of special snowflakes that think it's OK to be uncivilized shits as adolescents and adults because they were not reared properly as children.
At the same time you have similar little shits that enjoy taking offense to every possible slight that they can imagine. These people are social retards who delight in picking on the cultural retards. Now we have two apparently socially inept groups engaged in a the most uncultured culture war ever.
This is the world we live in today.
They are all dipshits. Both are trolling each other. It is best to just ignore them. Mod them all to hell and let the rest of us converse in peace.
Add to the mix the professional trolls that are having fun playing both sides. They are trolling us. It is best to just ignore them. Mod them all to hell and let the rest of us converse in peace.
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Private companies and organisations are free to enact their own codes of censorship for using their services. This is just as censorious as having a dress policy. You use their services, you abide by their rules of censorship. It is absolutely censorship.
FTFY
You don't have to be a government to be a censor.
600 employees (Score:4, Interesting)
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The funny part is that lots of the "usual suspects" (who complain about things) on slashdot are complaining about the number of employees, and then I was over at gitlab (who is supposedly the much better role-model) and they have 21 open positions.
It may be that people commenting simply don't have any experience in what staff is needed for this service. For example, I've seen comparisons to craigslist, but craigslist has no corporate services; all they do is offer free consumer services, and advertising. Pa
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The people that voted for Trump are the ones that voted for Romney and McCain. The reason Trump Won is because Clinton was so toxic everyone that voted for Obama decided to stay home or vote 3rd party. Republican votes in Wisconsin and Michigan were essentially flat while Clinton managed to tank Democratic turnout and Johnson and Stein saw massive gains.
But continue to blame the fact that she lost on thinking that he won.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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Agreed. While I'd prefer Github, we found their pricing to be really uncompetitive. We found Atlassian's offerings to be basically just as good but much more cost effective.
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Very few companies have 20 developers and think $5k is more than pocket change. This is a critical service and most of their customers would spend more just doing an evaluation to find out if something else that is cheaper can meet their needs, and what the differences in risk are.
Companies pay $50k/yr just to have phone support from a specialist. $5k for hosting, well is it important to what they do? Yes or no?
For me the answer would be no, it isn't important at all to have hosted code repos, it is a minor
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In the end it's just a Git repo, if you have 20 programmers, you have at least one of them that can set up a server somewhere, there are even VPS providers that will fully manage a container. Sure the UI is nice, but there are better Git programs on the desktop, most of which are free.
The problem seems to be '600 employees'. I can understand a handful of coders, designers and sales people but 600 of them and then sending those 600 people all over the world? That's a huge enterprise, you could run Github on
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In the end it's just a Git repo...
Nope. And if you would be happy with just a git repo, you shouldn't have even been looking at their enterprise services. It isn't a git repo, and it can't be replaced by a git repo.
Not everything that you don't know what it does, does nothing. Some of those things do things you simply don't know about.
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But as I said, there's plenty of providers being able to spin that up and once it's 'figured out' you can always spin up more.
Use GitLab instead (Score:3)
I think GitLab has emerged rapidly the last two years or so as a very viable alternative to GitHub. If you want to use their hosted service, it's free for as many collaborators as you want, for as many projects as you want, that don't have to be public. It includes built-in continuous integration services, Kanban-style issue boards, Slack-style chat, and way more all for free. They're iterating and adding new features at an incredible rate. If you want to host your own, that's also free if you don't need any of the enterprise-edition features, which leaves the community offering still quite good.
Early this year, when the open letter to GitHub was posted, GitLab made their own post ( https://about.gitlab.com/2016/... [gitlab.com] )about how they're working to solve the problems presented, even though they weren't specifically the addressee of the letter. I never did hear about GitHub actually responding to that letter, and I've seen very little iteration or change from GitHub in a very long time.
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I've seen very little iteration or change from GitHub in a very long time.
That's just plain disingenuous. They just released some nice code review stuff and projects support a couple months ago: https://github.com/blog/2272-i... [github.com]
Here's their new feature postings: https://github.com/blog/catego... [github.com]
They release something just about every couple weeks. It's not always huge, but they do iterate fairly often.
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this is easily the worst description of any technological subject I've seen on Slashdot for a long time: "The startup operates a sort of Google Docs for programmers, giving them a place to store, share and collaborate on their work." It does give you a way to store, share, and collaborate, but the mechanisms are drastically different. Google Docs collaboration is synchronous, GitHub's is serial. ...
So despite the description being accurate, it's "the worst description of any technological subject I've seen" because of your made-up pedantic formalism? Who cares if it's synchronous or serial, the article did a good job explaining a complex product;
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Is GitLab making any money?
They're a perfect Bubble 2.0 utility company (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm heating 1999-2000 flashbacks. Back then, all the Internet "utility" companies like Sun, Cisco, the ISPs and the telecoms were spending money like crazy building lavish workplaces for all the dotcom kids with the money the VC firms were giving them. Same thing happened back then as is now -- there's a massive arms race to build the best, most all-inclusive employer out there to attract and keep the elusive people who happen to know the flavor of the moment. Remember, Google serves 3 meals a day, provides free bus service from Hipster Central in San Francisco, and basically operates a college campus. They're widely seen as the benchmark, and every tech company seems to be emulating them to as much of a degree as their funding will let them.
GitHub's a perfect example of one of these utility companies. Slack, Atlassian, AWS, Microsoft (for Azure,) are also good examples. All of them make tools to let web developers crank out phone apps faster, which is the flavor of the moment, or provide infinite infrastructure to run the apps on. Traditional IT shops are also getting in on this trend, because GitHub and friends let CIOs push the magic DevOps button. All of a sudden, your siloed coders working on must-run applications in a mission critical environment switch into a Facebook-esque "move fast and break things" Agile model -- or so the Agile consultants tell them. I work in systems engineering/integration for a very staid company writing mission critical applications for an industry that is risk-averse, and our dev organization had the magic button pushed. I think this is one of the ways GitHub is making their VC money -- the VCs see that corporate executives will gladly write a check to tick the Agile box, and their toolset is seen as one part of it. Get all your developers working on Slack or HipChat as well and you're really cooking!
We'll see what happens this time around when the bubble pops. I actually like a lot of the cloud computing, API-focused and agile development stuff, and I think IT is going to adopt most of it regardless of how critical the stuff they're writing is. But some of it is absolute nonsense outside of the sphere of web development companies writing throwaway apps for phones. Just like in 1999 though, if you can spell HTML, let the good times roll. The truly skilled will always survive.
My favorite line (Score:3)
The issue took on a new sense of urgency in 2014 with the formation of a rival startup with a similar name. GitLab Inc.
The article fails to mention what Git is, or why one might reasonably expect a competitor to have "Git" in the name.
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The nice thing about the web is you don't need to waste any column-inches explaining what git is - just make the first use of "git" a link!
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Git is Linus Torvalds's name for Andrew Tridgell.
Cloud company losing money? (Score:2)
66 million is a lot. (Score:2)
It's worth noting that Amazon didn't post any meaningful profits until very recently; but the end game is clear: investing meant owning a share of overwhelming future economic power.
Github is really convenient, especially for ad hoc projects, but I wonder what investors are getting. Investors want to own something but it would be trivial to move your code repositories to a different service. Amazon or Google could crush Github if it ever suited their purposes.
Hookers and blow? (Score:4, Insightful)
How is GitHub blowing through that much money??
Look... I'm not saying they shouldn't be spending any money. I know server infrastructure has costs. But they lost 66mil in 9 months ... that means they SPENT at least 66 mil in 9 months. On what?? How much server do you need to host a text repository, with SVN and a website?
And GitHub had been around for nearly a decade, so it's not like they were building a whole new server farm from scratch. That's 66 mil on salaries, maintenance and upgrades.
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I can easily see spending $30M on sales to big clients (convincing IBM to give you a contract isn't cheap) and $30M to work on new features to try to avoid someone eventually offering a better alternative.
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Salaries are probably a big one. If we assume an average cost of about $150k per employee per year, that's $67.5M for 600 employees in 9 months.
Bad business models fail (Score:3)
Only insightful-rated comment that even came close to the roots of the problem. The BitHub financial models are failing.
Why doesn't anyone offer a project-centered cost-recovery system to fund the software people are willing to pay for? The hosting organization (AKA BitHub in this case) should EARN a percentage of the project funding my making sure the project proposals are complete, by evaluating the results against the success criteria, and by reporting the results to the donors (and the world). Complete
On GitHub becoming a critical SPOF (Score:3)
The conveniences conveyed by GH are undeniable - ready-made code dev environments with widely-used issue and progress tracking, integration with other project management tools (zenhub, jira) and all in all eliminates and centralizes one's OSS and private project interests.
However, as more and more Internet Infrastucture-ish projects have moved to GH, either completely or in major parts, I've become worried. OpenSSL, several Apache.org projects, some OSes (Linux, FreeBSD, illumos), and so on call GH their home now, or at least use it in some substantial way. Eggs in Baskets analogies apply, and given the security landscape of things now, one must at least pause and weigh the Pros and Cons of this centralized and trusted repo for so many important pieces of code.
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Fortunately DVCS makes it trivial to keep mirrors.
I'm no programmer, and I don't get paid to be one (Score:2)
on TV, so as an occasional, nonprofessional user, let me say: the user interface at GitHub is awful. You click a link that looks like a binary file ( with a .bin extension) and sometimes you get html, sometimes a binary file, sometimes a text file. Trying to figure out how to grab the stuff you need from GitHub is incredibly annoying. That's all I have to say about it.
Re:Never saw the point of github (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Never saw the point of github (Score:5, Interesting)
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Are you going to stop Geoblocking?
It's easy enough. Flag repositories containing keywords like "OpenSSL", "AES", "RSA", etc...
That should open up a big chunk like say 60% of your projects immediately open to outside view. Then go through the projects which were flagged manually, sorted by downloads and popularity and just review that it's indeed not for export.
And if a few get through now and then and need to be blacklisted... so what?? Slashdot isn't geoblocked and there's plenty of one line DeCSS Perl de
Re:Never saw the point of github (Score:4, Funny)
Redesign coming soon as well.
Awesome! That never goes badly!
Re: Never saw the point of github (Score:5, Informative)
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More or fewer years than that story about sourceforge bundling crapware together with the downloads from projects hosted there goes back?
Re: Never saw the point of github (Score:4, Informative)
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So your company has some odd thing for sinking ships? :-)
Re: Never saw the point of github (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Never saw the point of github (Score:5, Informative)
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Nice move! But please also eliminate the pop-up for the newsletter. There are enough ads that the pop-up on top of them makes it come off as a sketchy site where the only safe move is closing the browser tab.
Re: Never saw the point of github (Score:5, Insightful)
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As a long time Slashdot user, longer even than my UID suggests, I'm glad to see someone take an interest in improving the site.
I imagine you're going to get a lot of snark & flak, along with a few feature requests and the odd helpful suggestion.
About the only thing on my wishlist is comment editing. I think that feature is long overdue here.
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I agree. (Score:2)
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Hosting for open source projects, providing a cheap service to companies. The bug tracking stuff and attached wiki is useful. You can host release binaries.
It's a useful service.
Re:Never saw the point of github (Score:5, Interesting)
Ah, turn a great decentralized info storage system into a centralized system controlled by one company.
You make that sound like a bad thing. My company uses Github, and a reliable centralized system with a standard interface works great. Of course, we have our own local clones, so we are not "controlled" by github.
Anyway, I can't imagine why they would need 600 employees. I always assumed that they were three guys working out of a loft in SF.
Re:Never saw the point of github (Score:5, Insightful)
This is one of those cases where VC's are killing github. They should never have gone anywhere near VC money.
There are all kinds of companies that should seek and acquire VC money. But a company that's comfortably running a small, scalable service pulling in reasonable revenues... VCs will demand far more growth and market penetration than may be reasonable to expect... so you build a massive enterprise sales organization, burn cash like nothing else, and end up running a perfectly good, small company with solid revenues into the ground hoping to make billions instead of tens or hundreds of millions.
Lots of companies should go this route. Github was never one of them.
Re:Never saw the point of github (Score:5, Informative)
The most valuable thing is a single sign-on service. I leave a lot more bug reports for open source projects if they're on GitHub: their issue tracker isn't the best, but it doesn't require me to create a new account. The same thing if I want to submit patches: I don't need to subscribe to mailing lists or similar, I just clone the repo, send a pull request, and it's done.
Every GitHub project has an issue tracker, a web site, and a wiki, all hosted by GitHub. The issue tracker is integrated with the commit log, so I can close issues by simply putting 'Fixes #42' in the commit message and have things automatically cross referenced. The wiki is a git repo, so I don't have to use crappy wiki editing tools, I can clone the repo and edit the files in my favourite text editor. The web site can either be static HTML that you generate and put in a git repo, or it can use Jekyll to generate the HTML from other markup languages on the GitHub servers.
The pull request mechanism is the thing that GitHub is most well known for. It's closely related to the discussion and code review interface that is the core of the GitHub site. If someone sends a pull request, I can review their code, comment on it, discuss high-level design choices in a thread that's attached to the pull request, and merge it, all from the web interface.
GitHub exposes a bunch of web APIs that other services use (for example, you can get notifications whenever there's a push to a particular repo). For example, I can set up Coverity scans or use Travis-CI to run the test suite on every commit. Even better, things like Travis integrate with pull requests, so even before I start to review code, I can see if it passes tests. This is even better if the pull request comes with new tests: I can see that they pass, without even doing a checkout.
GitHub provides private repos, so once you are familiar with the interface, you can use it for internal projects.
GitHub will generate tarballs from any commit (and they are quick to download). We use this in the FreeBSD ports collection for a load of things. If I want to package something that's on GitHub, it's two lines to specify that it's from GitHub and what commit hash I want and the build system can grab a tarball of that revision and turn it into a package.
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Github doesn't plate, it complements. It makes it easier to discover and collaborate. It does not change how git works, just everything around git.
Re:Never saw the point of github (Score:5, Funny)
What does github actually do...
Absolutely nothing you can't do yourself by renting a cheap virtual server.
Do you also complain to your grocer that other people were already selling vegetables for thousands of years and you could grow your own if you wanted?
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1 to change the light bulb. 599 to write up an action plan about changing the light bulb.
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Wow, yes. This. Craigslist has no more than 50 employees. [craigslist.org]. Craigslist. Let that sink in. A service with a much higher profile, used by a lot more people.
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They are NOT making $95 million a year - they are LOSING tons of money. They've spent $108 million on salaries in the last 6 months alone (February to October). You can't sell stuff below cost and "make it up in volume", and if they cut selling expenses (which is the biggest chunk of salaries) their revenue will also drop, same as any other business.
Their $2 billion evaluation is stupid money talking.
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Sounds less like poor management than a bunch of people who have won the lottery...
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Finding things is easy, just learn the name of the thing you're looking for before you search.
It isn't intended as a buffet, though there are obviously ways of browsing and discovering things. But it isn't a focus. And that is a good thing, just because somebody shared code doesn't mean somebody else, like their hosting company, should run out and promote them. I don't share very much code because most of what I write that is open source isn't interesting to anybody else; a company doing something similar w
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They need to improve their code search function. You'd think that a software code search would be done 'verbatim' but they apparently the same search algorithm as google, filtering out punctuation and the such.
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The problem is that the VCs also don't tolerate companies that grow slowly because they want the firms they have invested in to IPO in a short time frame. That means they have to grow big and grow fast. And unfortunately the company is going to lose money during that growth period. Another round or two of fund raising is expected on the way to an IPO. The only issue for the VCs here is is when they hear about some stupid expenses (i.e. employees jetting around the world) then it's time to bring in manag