
Paying For Privacy? - precium
http://rayracine.github.io/posts/2013-09-25-github.html
======
cheshire137
My team uses pull requests extensively. The master branch is considered good,
clean, production-ready code. Anything you want to get into production gets
there by way of a pull request. Want to add a feature? Fix a bug? Make a
branch, do your thing, and create a pull request against master. The rest of
the team reviews your code in the pull request; the comments in a pull request
are an excellent feature. My job would be ridiculously harder without pull
requests.

~~~
Scriptor
Right, I thought one of the big benefits about pull requests was that it let
other devs easily view the diffs before merging a change in, not to mention
making it easier for people to discuss the changes. I guess if you don't want
to do that then it's easier to just pass around patches and merge.

~~~
plorkyeran
Viewing changes in a pull request is no easier than viewing the changes in a
patchset (or rather, if it is you're using the wrong tools). For an
established team, a PR-based workflow and a mailing list based workflow (where
you mail patchsets to the mailing list and discuss them there) are not very
different, but PRs are a lot friendlier to outside contributors.

------
freshhawk
Off topic: People who use Mother Teresa as the canonical example of selfless
altruism need to read something about Mother Teresa so they don't look so
silly.

~~~
cgore
Yeah, no kidding. Feeding and providing medical care for the Untouchables in
India? She should have made an iPhone app to help find friends in restaurants
nearby, that would have made he a real selfless altriust.

~~~
gcb1
in her letters she said she was forbiden to provide actual health care. all
they gave was a place for the sick to convalesce.

also, she and most othe rreligious still advocate over population and against
several sane health treatments. not to mention education.

no little good religion does compensate for the long term damage.

~~~
cgore
They were given medicine, not just a place to convelesce, but even just
providing a place to convalesce is a great mercy to people who were (and often
still are) dying on the sides of the street, thrown away by their society as
if they were nothing more than trash.

But then, what do I know, I am sure that you must know vastly more than I do,
seeing as to how as a Christian I must advocate against education now. I
should write letters to all of the universities I have attended, asking them
to please revoke my diplomas on the basis of my religious freedom.

------
jasonlotito
Just a reminder, if you want a private Git repo, you can always use BitBucket,
which provides you free private repos. And, it's also an excellent service in
it's own right.

~~~
imperialWicket
+1

My public stuff all goes to github, and my private repos are all on BitBucket;
virtually no cost to me that way and I use each service as it's promoted
(imo).

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Systemic33
In my opinion, and for almost any other remotely similar service, it's not
about paying for privacy, it's about paying for convenience. You don't go home
to get a beer, when you are going out, you pay extra money for the convenience
of not having to carry around beer, an instead be able to buy it on the spot,
in any wanted quanitity.

------
javajosh
First, I applaud the "rugged individualist" style of netizenship that the OP
is advocating. Hear hear.

But (and you knew that "but" was coming) github is particularly useful and not
amenable to the kind of gaming that Facebook and Google have indulged in. Git
is truly distributed, and if github ever tried to block or manipulate repos
there are full copies all over the place. It would be very easy (and dare I
say such action would come swiftly) to _react_ to any such wayward behavior on
the part of github, mainly because of the nature of git.

So: definitely host your own git repo, but if you use github for collaborating
on public open source projects, you really aren't running any kind of risk
that github will ever hinder your access or control in anyway.

------
ehm_may
I pay github for the same reason I pay heroku. It _just works_ and I don't
have to do anything. That is why they exist. Sure you can set up your own git
server, but what do you do when it goes down?

~~~
shocks
The same thing you do when GitHub goes down...

 _PANIC_ and flock to HN to comment on a minor outage!!! - wait, no. git is a
distributed system. You continue as you were and nothing changes.

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outside1234
yet another article that values our time at $0. come on, we all make something
like $80-130/hr.

Are you really going to spend less than 1 hour maintain this sort-of-github
instance you have?

~~~
drdaeman
He gains not only hosting value from maintaining the instance, but also the
experience. And the experience is a valuable asset that you can't really buy
with money.

Obviously, a sort of pre-built image to spawn "own" Gitolite/Gitlab/whatever
instance would be nice, so noone but those particularly interested in the
process would have to spend their time setting things up. But I suspect such
images/build scripts already exist, it's just that I didn't even bothered to
search for them.

~~~
addandsubtract
Check out turnkeyliniux.org. They offer prebuilt linux images of popular apps
- including Gitlab:

[http://www.turnkeylinux.org/gitlab](http://www.turnkeylinux.org/gitlab)

------
zdw
I keep a lot of personal/private data in git repos. I'd rather have this data
on my own hardware or servers I admin, can audit, can apply unusual SSH
security policy to, etc. gitolite and gitlab are great Github replacements for
this purpose.

That said, I still use github (or bitbucket, etc.) when I want to share code -
it's still the best place to do that.

I just don't need their private service, which appears to be the same case as
the author.

------
xentronium
If you don't use or like github features, you don't really need to pay for it.
Sounds like common wisdom. OP listed points which do not define github. If you
want unlimited private repos "in the cloud", just use bitbucket.

Github provides excellent interface and workflow patterns for code
collaboration. I don't know, maybe for some it's reasonable to swap patches
via mail, but for me hassle of downloading attachments from gmail into the
right folder is just not worth it.

Also, laugh all you want, but rendered README.md and having all code at glance
are life-savers. It's so much easier to get a hold of what another open source
library does, if it has nicely formatted README with examples. Bonus points
for gh-pages hosted docs.

------
zrail
Watch out with the sending email directly from an EC2 instance. You don't
really have a fixed IP so rDNS isn't going to work very well, and that's still
a front-line filter for a lot of big email providers.

~~~
toomuchtodo
If you are an Amazon EC2 user, you can get started with Amazon SES for free.
You can send 2,000 messages for free each day when you call Amazon SES from an
Amazon EC2 instance directly or through AWS Elastic Beanstalk. Many
applications are able to operate entirely within this free tier limit.

[http://aws.amazon.com/ses/pricing/](http://aws.amazon.com/ses/pricing/)

You could also use Mailgun, mandrillapp.com, etc. I believe they all provide
at least 10-12K emails/month for free, by calling a RESTful web api.

~~~
zrail
Yeah, those are all great options. I know for sure Mandrill lets you send SMTP
through them and I think Mailgun does too. It's just a matter of configuring
your Postfix server to relay through them.

------
rarw
I applaud the writer for his approach to making his own hub for his team.
However, this is not a real 1-1 swap. In terms of pure functionality this may
be an even exchange; his own platform might meet his needs just as well as
GitHub. Yet it lacks major benefit - the community/public aspect of that
environment. Duplicating that factor would take too much time an effort when
you could just pay 7 bucks a month for the same thing.

Sometimes, while its fun to reinvent things, it just makes more sense to use
what's there.

------
programminggeek
I pay because github is a fantastically useful tool. I am willing to pay for
quality software. If I wasn't and other people like me weren't willing to pay
for software, a lot of us wouldn't have jobs.

------
gcb1
summary: paying a vps is cheaper and gives you more than git hub.

in my experience, pros: \- full control (he is not using this as he and all
other probably commit as user git) \- commit hooks

contra: \- you take the time to setup, debug, maintain. (track all those pesky
security updates) \- you have to backup. \- people already have their keys
setup at github.

also, about the paying for privacy... i have two github accounts. one with my
real name another with a pseudonym.

and to conclude, after some time, i just moved all my code to bitbucket.
initially because i rather mercurial and they have both. but then because you
get a few private repos

~~~
drdaeman
> i have two github accounts. one with my real name another with a pseudonym.

Until relatively recently (at least that was the case about an year ago)
having multiple GH accounts was a TOS violation. (And I needed a pseudonymous
account, so that drove me off to BitBucket.) They seem to have changed that,
so you're not allowed to have more than one _free_ account per human.

------
NovemberWest
Kind of OT: I have just opened a free github account to follow a project. Any
tips for a painfully pathetic n00b for learning to use github generally?

~~~
jgoldsmith
If you understand Git well enough, then the only major difference Github adds
is pull requests, which is a pretty intuitive concept once you understand Git
branching.

Try [http://git-scm.com/](http://git-scm.com/) for a great (official)
tutorial.

~~~
NovemberWest
I actually know nothing about Git. But thank you for replying. Will check the
link. :-)

~~~
axus
I'd saved this link of an interactive "Learn Git" training program:
[http://pcottle.github.io/learnGitBranching](http://pcottle.github.io/learnGitBranching)

------
joshontheweb
How are you only paying $7? The lowest tier I can see is $25/month for 10
private repos.

------
lukehorvat
How does using Amazon's services make you any less of a "product"?

