

Time to Stop Paying GitHub's Toll - anotherbot
http://cloud.dzone.com/articles/time-stop-paying-github-their

======
onebot
"GitHub hit one of the great gushers of the last decade (and let's face it,
they mainly hit it for reasons that had little do with, um, their actions)"

Really? If they didn't do anything why would you even be paying them your $100
to begin with. They essentially built a social network around version control
with an amazing user experience. Do you remember Sourceforge? Which would you
rather use?

It isn't fair to discount the value of GitHub or the effort they put into
building a great product just because it costs more than you want to pay.

~~~
rdw
The author appears to have awoken from this binary worldview. He didn't
realize that there were other services out there beyond github and
sourceforge. Kind of like people who don't know that there are browsers other
than Internet Explorer or Chrome.

In the case of source hosting, bitbucket turns out to be pretty great! So it's
natural that someone who's just discovered it will be pretty enthusiastic
about jumping over to it.

What's baffled me over the years is how bad bitbucket is about marketing
themselves. It's been improved somewhat by the Atlassian purchase, but still,
they are totally underperforming their potential.

~~~
pyre
Part of the issue is that they historically were a mercurial hosting shop, so
it's not like they were a direct replacement for Github. It was only in the
last year or so that they added git support.

~~~
rdw
It's almost precisely a year since they introduced Git support. That's cool.

Part of the history to remember is that Mercurial and Git started at about the
same time and on almost equal footing. GitHub was frequently cited at the time
as a reason to use git. As in, "yeah git has kind of a crappy interface, but
look at how big that community is!" The GitHub team really grabbed the
momentum and never let it go. Now git is so common that supporting it is
basically mandatory.

But it didn't have to end up that way. In a counterfactual history where the
positions were reversed and HgHub and Gitbucket were founded, I think that
HgHub would have dominated through a better focus on acquiring a community.

~~~
pyre
Github may have been part of the reason, but the support of Linus/kernel devs
plus the very active mailing list probably had a lot to do too. I knew people
that were git fanatics prior to github. Git was also the vcs of choice for
Ruby / Rails developers.

------
AceJohnny2
This article is a great troll that purposefully ignores the work behind
GitHub, the value it provides, and how it changed the code hosting landscape.

I regret feeding the troll.

~~~
obilgic
This is called competition.

Because of that work, Github changed the code hosting space, and they enjoyed
their time(when they offered more). Now there is virtually no difference
between github and bitbucket. Competition is always good, and it drives value
to consumer.

~~~
snogglethorpe
Indeed competition is good, and I'm sure github is watching their potential
competitors and customer actions like a hawk (despite their huge presence,
github is definitely not stodgy and slow-moving).

Github charges as they do because they have _so much mindshare_ —for now, at
least, github is the place to be, and the default choice for many—that they
_can_ charge that much, even if it's painful for some. That's probably only
going to change if their paying customers start moving elsewhere in
significant numbers.

Of course there are very poor startups etc that want private repos, but cannot
afford github, and that clearly represents a niche and an opportunity for
their competitors. That's a good thing, and will tend to keep github honest.
Github's appeal will in turn motivate their competitors to improve and
innovate. Win-win!

That said, the article title (I'm not going to give them a pageview) is
nothing but trolly flamebait, and never should have made it to HN. [EDIT: I
notice they've tried to tone down the title since the original posting...]

------
obilgic
This is the plan I want github to offer:

For 5(or 7) bucks, unlimited private repos, with no(or 1) collaboration

~~~
animal
I moved to bitbucket to get exactly that, but for free.

------
comex
I love GitHub, the quality of their product, and what they've done for the
open source community. But I've always thought a decentralized version control
system deserves some kind of decentralized social network. Wouldn't it be cool
to see an implementation of GitHub (following, pull requests, issues, all the
rest) on top of, say, tent.io?

