
How GitHub Conquered Google, Microsoft, and Everyone Else - Libertatea
http://www.wired.com/2015/03/github-conquered-google-microsoft-everyone-else/
======
shubhamjain
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.

~~~
jbigelow76
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.

~~~
eevilspock
Dalton Caldwell, who once worked at SourceForge, blames the ad-supported
business model as the underlying reason Sourceforge sucked[1]. The users were
the product and the real customers were the advertisers no matter how much he
and his coworkers wanted to believe otherwise. He credits GitHub's straight up
reliance on just user revenue as the key to the quality of their product.

We've all been duped into thinking that ads give us things for free.
Sourceforge and all other ad-supported sites are not only _not_ free, they are
costing us more than if we just paid[2]. We users neec to hear Maciej
Cegłowski[3] exhortation, "Don't Be a Free User"[4].

I can't wait for the day when more people realize that entire web is being
held hostage by advertising and a web without ads would be to today's web what
GitHub is to Sourceforge.

[1] [http://daltoncaldwell.com/an-audacious-
proposal](http://daltoncaldwell.com/an-audacious-proposal)

[2]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8585237](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8585237)

[3]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=idlewords](https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=idlewords)

[4]
[https://blog.pinboard.in/2011/12/don_t_be_a_free_user/](https://blog.pinboard.in/2011/12/don_t_be_a_free_user/)

~~~
jsprogrammer
Is there a reason/ability to pay Github if all your work is open source (ie.
no private repos)?

~~~
dasil003
There's certainly no reason to, but the brilliance of the model is that you
repay open source generosity in kind with a killer tool. Naturally open source
developers also tend to have day jobs, and then which commercial option do you
think they'll be pushing for in all those companies?

Of course it only works because the product is brilliant, and the product is
only brilliant because it was created by open source developers scratching
their own itch. I don't think the lessons really apply to the wider web.

------
oAlbe
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._

[1] [http://techcrunch.com/2013/08/18/the-internet-were-doing-
it-...](http://techcrunch.com/2013/08/18/the-internet-were-doing-it-wrong/)

~~~
bcg1
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.

~~~
dasil003
Never say never, but I don't see the git killer anywhere on the horizon. Look
at how hard it was for git to beat out svn, and that was with the advantage of
svn being built on an irredeemably broken repository design that no objective
engineer could ever put on the same playing field with git, hg, etc.
Nevertheless there was a definite period of flame wars where large groups
clung to svn religiously until they were dragged kicking and screaming.

Now git has its own weaknesses with large objects, steep learning curve and
complex UI, and difficulty of central control. But the difference is that
those things are all the result of tradeoffs which make git very very good for
the most talented programmers, and open source in particular. You're not going
to magically make something that solves all those problems but still is as
good as git for versioning the average small to medium open source software
project.

But even if you do, will it be good enough to convince the greybeards to
switch? Did Sublime kill vim? I actually think that whatever kills GitHub will
not be the same thing that kills git. It will probably be a convergence of
trends that remains unforeseeable for the time being, much in the same way
that GitHub rode a series of trends which would have been utterly
unpredictable 10 years ago.

~~~
jacobwcarlson
> I actually think that whatever kills GitHub will not be the same thing that
> kills git.

While GitHub has obviously spent enormous resources around hosting git repos
there is nothing tying them to git as an SCM. If for some reason Mecurial or
something brand new becomes the new hotness GitHub would be able to
accommodate. Their business strength is around the community and users, who
they seem to keep happy.

~~~
dasil003
Let me also add explicitly that I think GitHub is more likely to be killed (or
at least marginalized) than git.

------
MollyR
I'm a little paranoid about my code. I want to like github's private repos,
but I don't want my code to be stolen by github's internal employees.

I've heard that their employees do shady things on occasion (2nd hand
knowledge).

~~~
caipre
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.

[0]:
[https://rovaughn.github.io/2015-2-9.html](https://rovaughn.github.io/2015-2-9.html)

~~~
duaneb
Why would that be against github TOS? Encrypted files in git are not exactly
unusual.

~~~
caipre
My thinking was that it's effectively a private repository (albeit publicly
visible), so it would subvert their business model.

~~~
soperj
they were talking about it being a private repo anyway that they were worried
about.

~~~
duaneb
Well, it'd be pretty shitty. Diffs would be binary and practically useless;
merges would have to be entirely manual. Github would lose more in brand trust
than they would gain in saved costs on those repos (or lost revenue).

------
Canada
Github hasn't centralized all open source code Because git itself is
decentralized. If only other social networks let you extract your data so
easily.

~~~
panic
_git itself is decentralized_

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).

~~~
xPaw
It is actually possible to clone/push wiki pages using git:
[https://help.github.com/articles/adding-and-editing-wiki-
pag...](https://help.github.com/articles/adding-and-editing-wiki-pages-
locally/)

------
wink
> a site bootstrapped by a quirky San Francisco startup of the same name.

When they bootstrapped, weren't they called Logical Awesome? :)

------
chuhnk
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?

~~~
hyperbovine
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.

~~~
aurora72
Just as a little correction, Google makes 6% of its revenue throgh Youtube, so
saying 98% is from ads is wrong. Link:
[http://www.digitalmusicnews.com/permalink/2015/02/27/10-year...](http://www.digitalmusicnews.com/permalink/2015/02/27/10-years-
youtube-still-isnt-profitable)

~~~
maratd
> Google makes 6% of its revenue throgh Youtube, so saying 98% is from ads is
> wrong.

Doesn't Google make money on Youtube by showing ads?

~~~
duaneb
YouTube also sells and rents movies.

~~~
ugh123
I highly doubt even .5% of their revenue comes from that.

------
reidrac
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!

------
deanotron
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.

------
storrgie
Now if only Github could conquer the aging mess of forge.mil.

~~~
imroot
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.

------
cpeterso
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?

btw, the slideshow is broken by a flexbox fix in Firefox 33 (October 2014):
[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1142690](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1142690)

------
esja
With a bit of work their Enterprise product could be huge... it's a real shame
they've not invested in it properly.

~~~
icey
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](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 :)

~~~
mcintyre1994
Can I email you some information on why a large company I interned at
mentioned they didn't use Github (they were adopting Atlassian)? I'd rather
not post here but happy to share.

~~~
icey
Please do! Shoot me an email at pauln@github.com; the feedback would be very
appreciated.

~~~
scoggs
I just wanted to say I love the blog posts on the enterprise portion of the
site. Each release's page is an awesome snapshot of what you guys were focused
on for that release and everything, right down to the screen shots, is
beautiful.

Even a simple image like:
[https://enterprise.github.com/assets/releases/2.1.0/screensh...](https://enterprise.github.com/assets/releases/2.1.0/screenshot-
maintenance-dash-ae772faadb148955a08c3bef6754c43a.jpg) looks beautiful and
makes me want to use GitHub Enterprise even though I don't have any good use
for it outside of work :). Keep up the good work!

------
visarga
Good thing they used the word "fork" between quotes, as to not offend anyone
who might think it's a sexual innuendo.

------
supercoder
GitHub sounds very interesting !

------
xkarga00
I hope they will do something about merged commits in history logs though

------
aaddaarrsshh
Yes yes yes!!

------
daddykotex
Possibly the worst font of all time. Now that I've said, I can read :P

edit : (font of the title)

