GitHub Hits 1,000,000 users

[xorglorb]

They provide a great service, and I use them all the time, but I don't like how their pricing scheme works for freelancers. You end up with a million small private repositories, and BitBucket has much more reasonable options.

[KVFinn]

Yeah, it's ridiculous. I have enough repos that I'd need the Platinum 200 dollar a month plan.

All the repos are small and most are updated once or twice a year -- but the pricing is the same as if I had a whole team of people pushing to github every day.

[percent20]

Another new service on the scene, providing cheap unlimited git hosting repositories, is sourcehold.com specifically to help solve this problem.

Full Disclosure: I am writing it, and it is still in beta.

[ergo14]

Then use bitbucket, recently after they updated the website its actually really good service

[slig]

RepositoryHosting.com

I've been there for years and I couldn't be happier. The only downtime was when AWS went down for everyone.

[Suan]

http://projectlocker.com/ provides free private git repositories. Sure, their GUI is nowhere close to Github's, but you get what you pay for.

[rs]

Have a look at http://xp-dev.com which does not have any limits on number of projects

(disclaimer: I run it)

[insanecanadian]

Disclaimer: I haven't used these company before, but they do seem like an okay option: https://codeplane.com/

[0x12]

I suspect one of the reasons why github just hit a million users is that people use more than one account to get around that limitation.

[guelo]

Wow, that number almost doesn't seem believable. A million people must be a good chunk of all programmers in the world. This Wikipedia article[1] says there are 612,000 programmers in the US and 522,000 in India. Admittedly old incomplete data but it's easy to see how a million people might be 10-20% of all programmers worldwide. In corporate drone offices I've been in my guess is maybe 10% of programmers have even heard of git.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_engineering_demographi...

[shabble]

Do you need an account to be able to report issues or watch projects? Interested bystanders and responsible bug-reporting OSS citizens may account for some of that.

I wonder how many of those accounts have active repos of their own?

[ddbeck]

I imagine there's also a small, but non-trivial number of people on GitHub who wouldn't be readily identified as programmers. For example, I'm acquainted with a civil engineer that's on GitHub so he can contribute to software used with his astronomy hobby.

[mrpollo]

I know Project and Account managers that have github accounts, you are probably missing those or similar users in nature

[bdunn]

Many of our non-technical clients have Github accounts and are collaborators on our projects - we treat the commit log as our way of reporting status updates.

[swlkr]

I was wondering this same thing! I wonder if someone can provide more recent data on how many programmers there are worldwide.

[pestaa]

I'm very happy for their success, I really see GitHub as one of the most rapidly evolving services; my only wish is for BitBucket to receive the same care.

[zoul]

I love GitHub and when our company recently migrated its code to Git, we were much interested in hosting the code on GitHub. I was surprised that they have a repository size limit, or more precisely I was surprised by how low the limit is. They have no hard quota, but they "don't recommend repository size over 1GB". Plans don't make a difference.

We're a small four-people workshop, but our repos are easily several gigabytes in size because of the artworks, source photos and similar stuff. We would probably have squeezed under their limit, but did not want to live under the constant threat of growing out of it.

So, I love GitHub, will continue using it for my public stuff, but I am surprised you can't easily host 10-15 GBs of private code even though you're willing to pay $50 a month for it.

[frisco]

How are they measuring users here? Is this all-time-registrations? Or "actives"? Because if this is registrations, I thought they were a lot bigger already. Regardless, awesome!

[phillmv]

>Because if this is registrations, I thought they were a lot bigger already.

No way. How many programmers are there in the first place? I bet you it's <100M, hell <50M.

EDIT: Back of the envelope by other people put it between <12M to <24M http://stackoverflow.com/questions/453880/how-many-developer...

Under that perspective, one could say that Github has captured the attention of 4-8% of everyone capable of understanding the app.

[kneath]

Registered user accounts (meaning this does not include Organization accounts). We also purge spammers fairly often, so it should be our best guess as to real people who have registered.

[prudhvis]

Github is the best place for Social Coding. Can't tell you how easy it is to manage a Repository being a Release Engineer with Github.

[bprater]

Well deserved. The team has consistently brought the kinds of functionality we need as developers since they launched the service. Kudos guys!

[dasil003]

This made me curious what my user number was. You can see it on your Account page source:

https://skitch.com/e-dasil003/f5nx6/safari

Unfortunately I couldn't figure out a way to explore user numbers like going to /users/5603 for example. That is actually the route for DELETEing your account, but it doesn't have a GET redirect or anything.

[derwiki]

".. and as a gift to you all, we'll be building side by side diffs!"

(j/k -- congrats to the Github team, you can pry my account from my cold dead hands)

[frabcus]

If anyone's interested in their growth curve, this scraper of their search engine using date ranges gives you figures for their number of users every month since they started. https://scraperwiki.com/scrapers/github_users_each_year/

[thomasfl]

If you don't like GitHubs pricing model, just download and install Gitorious on your own server. It's open source.

[bambax]

When was this reached? I setup an account a few hours ago and have to wonder if I am the millionth user?? ;-)

[technoweenie]

It wasn't you, we already contacted the 1 millionth user. Nice try though!

[thedjpetersen]

Good work GitHub team! Using github as part of my workflow has greatly helped my efficiency. Their interface makes reviewing code and making comments much easier.

[bad_user]

GitHub is basically the Facebook of software developers and I think it is eating LinkedIn's launch.

[karlzt]

such a coincidence that this happens the day I created a Bitbucket account :)

[jcborro]

How many users does the biggest public SVN repo have?

[bitops]

Well done GitHub! Keep up the good work.