I think one of the underappreciated point of github is its excellent business model. The freemium model of providing everything for free if your code is public and charging only for private repositories allowed them to grow exponentially with rising popularity among open source projects.
Sourceforge and Google code tried to cater only for open source projects, while never thinking that code hosting is the problem that needs to be solved.
I wish Sourceforge would have come to that realization.
Anytime I search for something that tends to be older enterprisy-ish code and it shows up in Sourceforge (iText for example) I can never figure out what the hell is and isn't an ad. If I didn't know better I would suspect a malware vendor purchased it and turned it into a honeypot for lazy devs.
"Sourceforge and Google code tried to cater only for open source projects, while never thinking that code hosting is the problem that needs to be solved.
"
Actually, Google didn't care at the time. We weren't catering, Google Code required you be an open source project to use it.
It literally was not trying to solve this problem, because it did not want to.
We knew commercial code hosting was a problem to be solved, we just didn't care :)
> " The freemium model of providing everything for free if your code is public "
I actually prefer Bitbucket model of free private repos for tiny groups. I found myself with a lot of repos that I don't want to share until they are in a minimum quality state.
IMO, Google's problem is that many enterprise customers believe they need on-premise, and realistically, Google cannot deliver on-premise solutions of systems designed to work on their Google scale platforms.
I mean, that google search appliance seems like a reverse engineering / wikileaks dream. 'Here's a box accesses internal customer documents, and nobody knows how to upgrade'.
My understanding is that GitHub makes the majority of its revenue by selling on premise versions. So there's another layer/level to the genius of their business model.
Is it actually a good business model, though? My understanding is GitHub is not profitable, and relies on VC funding to keep operating. At this point it seems like it will never be profitable unless they find some other significant source of income (as there's no reason to believe that there's hordes of companies out there just waiting to start paying GitHub for private repos). What's going to happen when the VC funding dries up?
SF had an "enterprise" version for running in-house, but IIRC it was fairly expensive. I seem to recall $10k+ when I tried to price it out in 2001. Totally not worth it for a small shop. Free tools like gforge sprang up as replacements, but were just as clunky to use, if not moreso, and were rather difficult to install.
For a matter of completeness, this[1] is an article worth the six minutes it takes to read it.
[...]Bruce Sterling calls them “the Stacks”: Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, [GitHub].
[...]
They don’t want much, those Stacks. Just your identity, your allegiance, and all of your data. Just to be your sole provider of messaging, media, merchandise, and metadata. Just to take part in as much of your online existence as they possibly can, and maybe to one day mediate your every interaction with the world around you, online or off.
[...]
It’s very convenient to live in a Stack. It’s easy, it’s seamless, it’s comfortable. And it means putting much, or very nearly all, of our increasingly important online existences into the hands of a few titanic megacorporations. It means relying on their benevolence, not just today, but for the foreseeable future.
Thanks for pointing this out and for the link. I'm sort of surprised to see that sort of opinion published in the tech media. I agree with everything the author says... including how nice Github is to use, and I too use it all the time.
At the same time the secret to Github's success in my opinion is all of you hackers who use it to collaborate, not their genius business model or anything like that.
When git was gaining traction they were quickest to pivot that way because, well, they had nothing to pivot away from. The real test IMO with only come when the git-killer scm tool starts to take off; if they can keep their market share at that point then I'll be really impressed.
Employees of any company in the world can do shady things.
You need to trust your server hosting company, your server OS vendor, your own workstation's software, your OS, all your firmware...
If GitHub employees stole proprietary code from you, and commercialized it, proving "prior art" and theft should be extremely easy for you. IANAL, but it's not something I'd worry about with most companies hosting on Github.
If you want a similar solution to GH instead of just a bare Git installation, you could look into running your own GitLab instance. Their software is open source and freely available. Of course, that way you would have to trust your hoster unless you are running your own in-house server.
I wonder whether something like [0] would work, where the repository is encrypted on push and decrypted on pull. Might be against Github's terms of use, though.
Statistically speaking, without knowing anything about you, your code is probably not "omg this code is so awesome I will risk losing my job/business because I must possess this code" kind of awesome.
If it is, what are the chances of somebody figuring it out when there are literally several million git repos on github.
Just be careful. Don't name your repo something like "Cure for Cancer" or "Warp Drive Firmware", etc. and you will probably be in good shape.
The source code itself is stored in a decentralized way, sure, but the git repository doesn't include pull request comments, wiki pages and issues. Of course, you can fetch these using the (rate-limited) GitHub API, but it's not quite the same (and other social networks typically let you extract your data in the same way).
Legitimate question. Do you think GitHub would accept a lucrative offer from Google? On the order of billions of dollars. How would that look? Where would we all be then? How much would it change things? Is it even realistic?
Google sells ads. Something like 98% of their revenue is ads. I seriously think they are at this point becoming allergic to any sort of for-pay business model.
I think it's perfectly realistic, and wouldn't necessarily mean things would go south post take over. YouTube is still very much alive, brand and all, and it's been many years since the take over.
Actually, I don't think today's Google would make that bet because of challenges in monetizing it without actually incurring a customer service overhead.
I love GitHub, but the "everybody to GitHub!" call makes me worry a little bit in the same way the predominance of Sourceforge didn't sound right back in the day; at least from the point of view of the open source community, because there's nothing wrong with using the best tool available.
Obviously I'd love GitHub to go on for ever, but that Bitbucket (and others?) are still there going strong is definitely a good thing!
I haven't seen anyone mention this but part of the success is that they had git in their name. All social platform successes aside, they had the right technology at the right time.
Before I had ever heard of GitHub, I had seen presentations at the large company I worked for praising git. Git was thrown into the limelight at the same time as subversion, CVS, perforce etc. were being eschewed.
Forge.mil is a mess -- and will probably always be a mess until they ditch Collabnet's SourceForge Enterprise Edition as a platform.
There is code out there that would transform GitLab's Open source edition to use PKI for authentication (I wrote it for an employer and threw it on, ironically enough, github), but, the DOD is set in its ways and I'm sure that CollabNet (and Steel Thread) is trying to milk that contract twenty ways from Sunday.
The slideshow on this article doesn't work on Firefox. Not "doesn't work" in some subtle way; clicking a photo produces a white page. How did Wired not catch this problem? Is there no one testing or even casually using Firefox at Wired?
We've done an enormous amount of work on GitHub Enterprise over the past year. Click on any of the release headings for the 2.x series at https://enterprise.github.com/releases and you'll see the pace at which we've been shipping features enterprises have been asking for. If it's been a little while since you checked it out I'd recommend looking at it again :)
[+] [-] shubhamjain|11 years ago|reply
Sourceforge and Google code tried to cater only for open source projects, while never thinking that code hosting is the problem that needs to be solved.
[+] [-] jbigelow76|11 years ago|reply
Anytime I search for something that tends to be older enterprisy-ish code and it shows up in Sourceforge (iText for example) I can never figure out what the hell is and isn't an ad. If I didn't know better I would suspect a malware vendor purchased it and turned it into a honeypot for lazy devs.
[+] [-] DannyBee|11 years ago|reply
Actually, Google didn't care at the time. We weren't catering, Google Code required you be an open source project to use it. It literally was not trying to solve this problem, because it did not want to.
We knew commercial code hosting was a problem to be solved, we just didn't care :)
[+] [-] pmelendez|11 years ago|reply
I actually prefer Bitbucket model of free private repos for tiny groups. I found myself with a lot of repos that I don't want to share until they are in a minimum quality state.
[+] [-] jldugger|11 years ago|reply
I mean, that google search appliance seems like a reverse engineering / wikileaks dream. 'Here's a box accesses internal customer documents, and nobody knows how to upgrade'.
[+] [-] jusben1369|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eridius|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mgkimsal|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] oAlbe|11 years ago|reply
[...]Bruce Sterling calls them “the Stacks”: Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, [GitHub].
[...]
They don’t want much, those Stacks. Just your identity, your allegiance, and all of your data. Just to be your sole provider of messaging, media, merchandise, and metadata. Just to take part in as much of your online existence as they possibly can, and maybe to one day mediate your every interaction with the world around you, online or off.
[...]
It’s very convenient to live in a Stack. It’s easy, it’s seamless, it’s comfortable. And it means putting much, or very nearly all, of our increasingly important online existences into the hands of a few titanic megacorporations. It means relying on their benevolence, not just today, but for the foreseeable future.
[1] http://techcrunch.com/2013/08/18/the-internet-were-doing-it-...
[+] [-] bcg1|11 years ago|reply
At the same time the secret to Github's success in my opinion is all of you hackers who use it to collaborate, not their genius business model or anything like that.
When git was gaining traction they were quickest to pivot that way because, well, they had nothing to pivot away from. The real test IMO with only come when the git-killer scm tool starts to take off; if they can keep their market share at that point then I'll be really impressed.
[+] [-] MollyR|11 years ago|reply
I've heard that their employees do shady things on occasion (2nd hand knowledge).
[+] [-] scott_karana|11 years ago|reply
You need to trust your server hosting company, your server OS vendor, your own workstation's software, your OS, all your firmware...
If GitHub employees stole proprietary code from you, and commercialized it, proving "prior art" and theft should be extremely easy for you. IANAL, but it's not something I'd worry about with most companies hosting on Github.
[+] [-] this_user|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] caipre|11 years ago|reply
[0]: https://rovaughn.github.io/2015-2-9.html
[+] [-] ryanackley|11 years ago|reply
If it is, what are the chances of somebody figuring it out when there are literally several million git repos on github.
Just be careful. Don't name your repo something like "Cure for Cancer" or "Warp Drive Firmware", etc. and you will probably be in good shape.
[+] [-] Oompa|11 years ago|reply
Care to elaborate?
[+] [-] romanovcode|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Canada|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] panic|11 years ago|reply
The source code itself is stored in a decentralized way, sure, but the git repository doesn't include pull request comments, wiki pages and issues. Of course, you can fetch these using the (rate-limited) GitHub API, but it's not quite the same (and other social networks typically let you extract your data in the same way).
[+] [-] yarrel|11 years ago|reply
I do agree about other social networks though.
[+] [-] wink|11 years ago|reply
When they bootstrapped, weren't they called Logical Awesome? :)
[+] [-] chuhnk|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hyperbovine|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Mahn|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ChuckMcM|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] reidrac|11 years ago|reply
Obviously I'd love GitHub to go on for ever, but that Bitbucket (and others?) are still there going strong is definitely a good thing!
[+] [-] deanotron|11 years ago|reply
Before I had ever heard of GitHub, I had seen presentations at the large company I worked for praising git. Git was thrown into the limelight at the same time as subversion, CVS, perforce etc. were being eschewed.
[+] [-] storrgie|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] imroot|11 years ago|reply
There is code out there that would transform GitLab's Open source edition to use PKI for authentication (I wrote it for an employer and threw it on, ironically enough, github), but, the DOD is set in its ways and I'm sure that CollabNet (and Steel Thread) is trying to milk that contract twenty ways from Sunday.
[+] [-] cpeterso|11 years ago|reply
btw, the slideshow is broken by a flexbox fix in Firefox 33 (October 2014): https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1142690
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] daddykotex|11 years ago|reply
edit : (font of the title)