
GitHub lost $66M in nine months of 2016 - mobee
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-12-15/github-is-building-a-coder-s-paradise-it-s-not-coming-cheap
======
mmastrac
The thought of losing Github to the startup graveyard is kind of scary. It was
bad enough to lose Google Code and when SourceForge had their "great purge" of
inactive projects.

~~~
Analemma_
If they can't stand on their own feet, I imagine somebody would/will buy
GitHub at a firesale rather than see it disappear completely. For all their
missteps, they have developer mindshare that is the envy of everyone. If we're
lucky it would be someone like Google or Microsoft, if we're unlucky it might
be Oracle or SalesForce. Whoever it would end up being though, GitHub won't
just vanish.

~~~
nitrogen
Ignoring the fact that the VCs want to get paid and GitHub's employees want to
keep working, how big of a skeleton crew would it take to keep a site like
GitHub running in "maintenance" mode?

~~~
asenna
Can you really put something in "maintenance" mode without killing it?

Maintaining the app and not moving forward with new features and adding value
(because of lack of resources), I would assume it would just die eventually.

~~~
hyperbovine
I don't understand this obsession with the first derivative of value. GitHub
already provides loads of value. I understand they need resources to keep the
lights on, but they could do that by recouping a _tiny_ fee from their users
and most everyone would be happy.

~~~
Trundle
They're not without alternatives already though. In a changing environment to
stay still is to fall behind.

~~~
hyperbovine
That's not as big an issue when there are network effects -- look at
Craigslist. Plus, what killer feature is bitbucket going to add at this point
to make everyone want to switch? They're practically the same product. All the
major innovation happened years ago.

~~~
rumcajz
Clickable code view would be nice, e.g:

[http://lxr.linux.no/linux+v4.9/kernel/async.c](http://lxr.linux.no/linux+v4.9/kernel/async.c)

~~~
robinhood
Thanks for the idea. This would be awesome indeed. I've created an issue on
GitLab for this: [https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-
ce/issues/25762](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/25762)

------
drchiu
I can't find the blog post, but some blog wrote a while ago why VCs invest in
companies like Github. TL;DR -- basically it provides infrastructure for other
startups.

The business itself may not be a great business due to the amount of cost it
takes to run it -- but it's necessary for the running of other ventures.

Sort of like highways and non-toll bridges.

~~~
cperciva
Are you saying that VCs are investing because they see companies like GitHub
as being public goods? That's contrary to normal investing principles, unless
there's some reason to think that a VC investing will result in their
portfolio companies having superior access.

~~~
jakub_g
The point is more or less, if VC invests (or plans to) in 20 software
companies, investing additionally in something like GitHub or npm makes it
more likely that the other 20 companies will succeed. They don't invest _just_
in GitHub from the goodness of their hearts.

~~~
DrJokepu
I know nothing about investing but I feel somewhat skeptical about these
arguments. How many startups actually failed because they were using a poor
package manager or source control host?

~~~
bmelton
This sounds more like a spin-off of the old investment adage: "Buy stock in
the products you actually use." If you spin that argument slightly as a proxy
purchase, it makes sense that VCs would be investing in the products that
their other startups are using heavily.

As an super-small-time investor who only owns stock in companies whose
products that I use and enjoy, I can't knock them for it. For me, the logic is
that whenever I tire of using something or no longer find it valuable,
presumably I'll have early insight to sell the stock before the rest of the
world catches on. I don't know if that same logic applies to proxy buying, but
I suppose if you're intimate enough with your companies to know if they're
abandoning Github for something else, as I don't know if pulling venture
capital is as easy as selling the stock.

~~~
cstavish
> as I don't know if pulling venture capital is as easy as selling the stock.

There's generally minimal liquidity. During a round, an existing investor may
have the opportunity to sell some shares to new/other investors, but if she
knows something that's not coming out during diligence, there's definitely
something fishy going on. If the round is shaping up to be a major up-round,
maybe an early investor wants to lock in a good return, but that's beside the
point here. And then of course if things really aren't going well for the
company, you're looking at the bad kind of liquidity event--a liquidation.

So if a VC wants to pull out based on a negative hunch, it's probably either
impossible or the signal itself will doom the company if it wasn't already
doomed.

Just my 2 cents as a first-time founder.

~~~
bmelton
Sounds about right to me.

------
Shorel
Everyone is comparing GitHub with GitLab in the comments, but they are
ignoring the other competitor.

I think Atlassian is the company that makes the most out of the git
marketplace, even if they have fewer customers. They are simply more
efficient, and are ready to take over with Bitbucket if GitHub fails.

Also, many companies pay for Jira+Confluence even if they use GitHub.

~~~
sdesol
Bitbucket is in a weird position, in that Atlassian can't make the best Git
hosting solution. It's not that they can't technically, it's just that they
have complimentary products that cripples how good you can make code reviewing
(crucible), issue tracking (jira), analytics (fisheye), wiki (confluence), and
so on.

GitHub and GitLab are not bound by the same constraints, and can focus on
creating the best end to end Git hosting product. While Atlassian has to be
careful about cannibalizing other product lines.

~~~
itay
We're a big Atlassian shop, and switched from Crucible to Bitbucket Server
(then Stash). I do not get the sense that Crucible is the future as far as
Atlassian is concerned - I believe they see Bitbucket Server as what they are
going to focus on.

FWIW, with the latest releases, they've addressed most of the remaining
features that were missing from Crucible, and I'm very happy now with the
PR/code review flow in Bitbucket Server.

~~~
sanjayts
I agree; Bitbucket Server is a smash hit in _big_ banks who are now moving
away from SVN to GIT to stay relevant. It simply makes more sense to use
BitBucket Server offering by Altassian given that most organizations already
use Confluence for hosting their wiki.

------
joeax
The takeaways from the article:

(1) They went on a hiring spree in 2015-16, dramatically increasing their
costs before their revenue was able to keep up. Something to keep an eye on in
2017.

(2) Half the team is remote! Kudos to them for making this work.

~~~
noobermin
>Half the team is remote! Kudos to them for making this work.

Are you being sarcastic (esp, in light of your point 1) )?

Out of curiosity from someone not in the know, would remote employees cost
more or less than ones made to come in every morning?

~~~
joeax
> Are you being sarcastic

Definitely not, I work remote. I feel I am more productive as remote employee,
probably about 10-20% more. I read somewhere that for every 10 miles you
commute daily, it costs you $10,000/year in gas/vehicle wear-and-tear/health
and psychological side effects, etc, not to mention the lost hours sitting in
traffic.

Would you rather have your employees sitting in traffic, or working on
critical projects?

~~~
soared
According to that I am net negative when I go to work. (Although I too am
significantly more product at home)

------
ThePhysicist
Considering the piles of venture money they received it sometimes startles me
how few new features they have pushed to production in the last two years.
Gitlab, on the other hand, seems to push a new major feature every other
month. Of course it helps that they don't have to worry about running a SaaS
service for several tens of millions of users, but still it seems that Github
is too focused on minor improvements and might just lose the game against the
open-source approach of Gitlab.

------
antirez
It's a few years now I can not see Github focused, from the external POV at
least, to provide good coder tools. All the new things only marginally improve
on what we used to have. I would worry more about that than about the losses
themselves, since I feel the losses mostly reflect the fact the company has no
clear direction so is spending money on workforce in the hope to have larger
effects. Perhaps they don't need more people but more focus.

~~~
politician
Agreed; they need less people and less money. Look at what GitLab's achieved!
Maybe it's time to leave the posh accommodations and go back into the
wilderness.

That said, I feel for the engineering staff that has to deal with the
availability requirements and the DDoS events. Those folks are heroes.

------
cyphar
I'm surprised that they _actually have_ a recreation of the oval office _in
their office_. How arrogant and self-important do you have to be to honestly
believe that such a parody is in any way justified? No, GitHub, you're not in
charge of the free software world. You were just the first decent choice for
code hosting. GitLab is eating your lunch and you're pretending that it's not
happening.

~~~
bswinnerton
The oval office isn't around anymore.

~~~
cyphar
I mean, that's an even more frugal waste of money. Still, the fact they even
had something like that is the problem. It's like something from an episode of
Silicon Valley.

------
nikcub
Interesting that 600 employees sounds like a lot, but it works out that
revenue/employee p.a is $230k+ - which is above average for enterprise SaaS[0]
- and you have the 25%+ annual growth on that

That said, they _should_ be doing better margin-wise since they would have
relatively lower customer acquisition costs compared to the market since they
have so much developer recognition.

[0] [http://tomtunguz.com/revenue-per-employee-
trends/](http://tomtunguz.com/revenue-per-employee-trends/)

------
rexreed
It seemed that Github was doing just fine accomplishing their mission and
goals when they were bootstrapping, but things got ridiculous with a massive
(and possibly unneeded) VC investment. Or at least an investment of that
humongous sum of money.

Can someone explain the rationale behind pumping all this money into firms
that clearly don't need such vast amounts of it, which only spurs exorbitant
and unnecessary spending? Is it some sort of non-obvious game of unicorn
musical chairs hoping for a hyper inflated exit before the music stops?

~~~
nslindtner
From the outside it looks like a land grab game. Competetion is heating up
(bitbucket, gitlab, tfs online, etc).

~~~
rexreed
but is throwing all this money at a company who clearly doesn't know how to
effectively deploy it to grab that land (those expenditures are ridiculous)
the best way to do it?

~~~
lmm
Well if they thought another company had better odds than GitHub they'd fund
that company instead. GitHub has got to where they are at the moment so they
must be doing something right, and startups are dead by default - VCs expect
startups to be doing at least some things that defy the established wisdom.

~~~
rexreed
The question is not who or if to fund, but how much. My question has to do
with the sheer quantities of investment in Github and the obvious inefficiency
and excess in that capital. They could have funded Github half as much,
perhaps even less with an equal result in a "land grab" if that's what they
really want. So I sense here something else is at play. There must be some
investment metrics around invested capital and the sheer quantities of which
that have something to do with valuations and expectations and nothing to do
with how much capital the company really needs. Imagine you only need $20m and
someone gives you $100m because the VCs say because the VCs say that's how
much capital they need to deploy. What do you do with that "Extra" $80m? You
waste it, that's what. Seems very inefficient, so there must be some other
ends here.

~~~
lmm
The question of how much to fund by is the same as the question of whether to
fund. As a VC you have to trust the companies you fund to spend your money
wisely and give them a long leash, letting them spend their money on things
you think are stupid - otherwise you're not a VC at all, you're more like the
R&D department of a large corporation (which could be a reasonable and
profitable thing to be, but there's presumably a reason VC has grown so much
and corporate R&D has shrunk).

------
wjossey
I hope this is a temporary blip on the radar for Github, and that they return
to profitability very quickly.

Github should be a pillar platform in our community for the next decade, and
the only way for them to become that is via profitability.

~~~
was_boring
Why should it? They weren't responsive to user demands for years, routinely
break features (checkbox saving is broken right now), and have terrible
discovery and search.

If anything we should be cheering for gitlab. Atleast we can modify it
locally.

~~~
wjossey
Because we should be cheering for Gitlab, and Github, and any other major
competitor in the space to perform well and be stable (and independent,
ideally).

Competition & long term stability means that they can focus on the features
that are most meaningful for their user base. If their revenue stream
continues to be poor, they may begin making short-term decisions to prop up
revenue, which ultimately will lead to a much poorer product over the long
term.

------
throwaway2222c
I once met Chris Wanstrath. He is the most arrogant guy I ever met.

I travelled for an hour and he sat there staring at his phone between looking
at me like something he had trodden in.

At least pointing tens of companies at Gitlab has made me feel better.

------
nunez
SIX HUNDRED EMPLOYEES?!

I don't care how advanced GitHub is; that is an INSANE number of employees for
this kind of business!

~~~
pm
~4000 for Twitter (although I vaguely recall a culling recently, not sure how
many they let go).

~~~
camus2
I'm curious what does these 4000 employees do at Twitter ? let's say half of
them are engineers, what are these 2000 engineers working on ? Twitter is
mostly CRUD and messaging.

~~~
indexerror
This is fitting here: [http://danluu.com/sounds-
easy/](http://danluu.com/sounds-easy/)

------
moritzplassnig
I'm surprised that the author doesn't focus more on the other numbers (the
burn numbers aren't surprising to me - see here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13190371](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13190371)).
According to the author's data, GitHub had $25M in ARR in Sep'14\. That's 2
years and 2 months after they announced their $100M round, so probably 28
months after they signed a term sheet.

If you calculate back from there, let's say $12M in ARR in Sep'13, $6M in
Sep'12 and $4-5M in May'12 - that's insane (them raising $100M). Not sure if
Bloomberg's data is correct but if we look at the other data points (probably
same source data), $90M in ARR in Sep'16, it seems to be accurate.

Sep'12: $6M (assumed) -- raised $100M a couple of months earlier Sep'13: $12M
(assumed) Sep'14: $25M (according to Bloomberg) Sep'15: $50M (assumed) Sep'16:
$90M (according to Bloomberg)

------
sergiotapia
>The new digs gave employees a reason to come into the office. Visitors would
enter a lobby modeled after the White House’s Oval Office before making their
way to a replica of the Situation Room. The company also erected a statue of
its mascot, a cartoon octopus-cat creature known as the Octocat. The
55,000-square-foot space is filled with wooden tables and modern art.

The Sillicon Valley episodes write themselves it seems haha. This is
hilarious.

~~~
niftich
I'm hesitant to call this, and their hotel retreats and jet-setting travel
'opulence' out of a sense of decency, but...

I guess I'm just a lot more frugal, and mostly isolated from this culture.

~~~
BurningFrog
I don't begrudge anyone all the opulence they can afford.

But when they _can 't_ afford it, my eyes start rolling pretty hard.

------
rampage101
I remember reading a few years ago how GitHub and StackOverflow were the new
resumes. You needed a good profile on both to have any chance of getting
hired.

It just goes to show that having a profile on a website does not define who
you are as a developer. Websites go under, and better ones will rise up. I
hope GitHub does stay around... I do not care for their "politics" but I like
their service.

~~~
iso-8859-1
What do you consider politics? If they insert relevant ad links in the
comments of your code, would you mind?

------
bootload
_" GitHub quickly became essential to the code-writing process at technology
companies of all sizes and gave birth to a new generation of programmers by
hosting their open-source code for free."_

How much would you be willing to pay to store your open-source code at github?

~~~
cyphar
$0. I would consider paying ~$30/mo for GitLab though, because it's free (as
in freedom) software.

~~~
romanovcode
Agree, I would not mind paying for Gitlab private repos some sum of money
(probably not 30/mo tho).

Gitlab is superior in every possible way than Github except for it's speed.

~~~
cyphar
I'd pay for public repos (I don't need private repos, all of my code is free
software). In fact, I would _donate_ $30/mo to GitLab if I used their services
enough (unfortunately the projects I maintain live on GitHub and I don't have
the authority to change that).

I have no problem donating to free software (I donate $10/mo to Neovim, $10 to
SirCmpwn (sway), and other bits and bobs here and there -- as well as donating
my time to openSUSE, runC and the OCI). The only condition is that I have to
use it enough that I feel that they are owed some money to make the software
even better.

------
andrewbinstock
GitHub has some significant challenges ahead that are not mentioned in this
article. As companies move to the cloud, they will run their own development
ecosystems--SCM, CI, defect tracking, etc.--in their own cloud; and hosting
services like GitHub and BitBucket will have a hard time competing. Already
Oracle (and surely other vendors) are offering developer cloud instances that
provide these services all wired together.

~~~
hinkley
BitBucket is owned by Atlassian now. Stash is rebranded as BitBucket and while
it has its issues, its integration with Confluence and Jira is at least as
good as any of the other Atlassian integrations.

So if you're hosting your own tools, BB still gets paid and you don't have to
switch vendors.

(my personal feelings about Atlassian rank somewhere between dislike and
dread, but the BitBucket integration is one the least offensive bits).

------
josho
This is an example of how VCs distort the market for other businesses.

I had a recent conversation with a prospect and they took issue with the price
of our software. Our app is in a specialized industry (ie. a smaller market).
We charge a per use fee of $35. This fee enables our customer to immediately
earn nearly $200 (a 5x return with no risk to them). Despite the significant
benefit and profitability of using the app the prospect took issue with our
price and referred to the cost of other apps.

It was that conversation that made me realize how we've become accustomed to
the quality and price of software that's been heavily subsidized by massive VC
investments.

~~~
dsacco
I agree with the idea that venture capitalists alter ("distort" is a loaded
term) the market in their favor. That's part of the natural process of systems
commoditizing their complements. But I really think that you characterize this
in an uncharitable way with your example, which I have difficulty believing as
it was stated.

If your lead really understood that they would "immediately earn a 5x return
with no risk", and that was the truth, they would be cartoonishly foolish to
not take that offer. Furthermore, wouldn't that mean your company could be
printing money with its results? It's hard for me to believe a rational
customer wouldn't take that deal, so either they didn't understand or believe
that would be the result, or you're exaggerating here for the benefit of your
point.

I know it's easy to think I'm just griefing you over this, but I'm trying to
make a point in good faith. There are certainly legitimate reasons to dislike
the profit incentives that venture capitalists encourage, but I think you
portray their impact on small companies as unrealistically bad (and perhaps
your product in a more favorable light than is warranted), to the detriment of
a discussion about it.

None of this is personal, mind you. Just a comment.

~~~
gizmo
Perhaps you live in a world different from mine, but what you describe as
"cartoonishly foolish" behavior I consider completely standard. Customers
refuse to spend 5000 to make 20.000 all the time, or they're willing to waste
weeks finding a different vendor that can offer the same for 3000. Others are
willing to walk away from a great deal unless they get a discount, but are
content with a tiny discount. Because a discount to them signifies a moral
victory, or that they're not being taken advantage of, or they simply want to
believe they're great negotiators or something like that. I don't get it, but
I have seen it often enough for it not to be unusual.

We don't live in a world of rational agents. And even if we did we don't live
in a world where most business purchases are made with people's own money.
People have complex and contradictory goals and in my experience pointing out
the value customers get for the price they pay is the least effective sales
strategy.

~~~
chrisabrams
I live in the same world as you. My business has a proven model for digital
publishers that generally increases their yield 2-4x yet they refuse to spend
the percentage needed to make the deal happen. Sometimes pride can be so
large...spend 5k to make 50k? No thanks..lol

~~~
m1sta_
1\. They don't believe the benefit will be realised in their circumstance.

2\. There is both opportunity cost and hidden cost for trying your solution.

~~~
dsacco
And to add, these are _reasonable things for a consumer to believe_ that are
_not evidence of irrationality._

------
pep_guardiola
please guys get your shit together. I guess I would be able to figure out an
alternative but a big chunk of my life as a programmer is centered around
Github. It would be a major let down to see them perish.

~~~
h1d
Maybe someone said that about SourceForge 10 years ago.

------
camus2
Fortunately it is easy to push the same repo to multiple hosts with git. So
people, use mirrors instead of putting all your eggs in the same basket. Git
is a distributed CVS, relying only on github means you are using it just like
SVN.

------
alistproducer2
The subtext to this (at least why this made it to the front page) is "github
is lighting money on fire, can't last forever, but github is infrastructure-
status now what if it disappears?"

I think this anxiety is why there's a lot of work being done in the
decentralized space right now. The UX-side of "web 3.0" is sorely lacking but
I think it's only a matter of time before people begin to crack it.

I'd love to see some research into what it would take (in terms of network
size) to provide robust, decentralized replacements for service-as-
infrastructure products like Github.

~~~
daveguy
Wait. We're on web 3.0 now? What does this version add?

~~~
alistproducer2
Decentralized applications and infrastructure.

------
kristopolous
Staying in an annual budget of $98 million sounds feasible for a place like
github. That's an $8.1m/month burn. Just be a little less elaborate, I'm sure
this is doable.

------
pavlik_enemy
It feels that GitHub failed to create an ecosystem and did little innovating
it just turned a single-tenant application to multi-tenant (which sometimes is
no small feat). They could've created other developer-oriented products -
issue management, CI, code review etc and they could've innovated more in
their primary area that is storing code like providing better tools for code
exploration than simple search (see GitQL project).

------
dkarapetyan
This is why the mania around unicorns is not sustainable. The best part is
that github isn't even burning money that fast compared to some of the other
ones.

------
kumarski
I always freak about some other country attacking github.

The world would crumble/ it's probably some sort of weird national security
scenario.

~~~
Asparagirl
An attack on StackOverflow would be as bad or worse. These sites should
probably be protected as areas of national strategic importance, like how the
US protected the NYC docks during WWII.

~~~
untog
Not really. StackOverflow is mirrored and archived everywhere, like in the
Google Cache. Github is read/write, and can't be mirrored anywhere near as
easily.

~~~
BuuQu9hu
These folks are archiving all non-fork github repos:

[https://www.softwareheritage.org/](https://www.softwareheritage.org/)

There are other github mirrors too.

------
galfarragem
Github is too good to fail IMHO: if they raise a bit their prices, all their
paying costumers will still stay and their money problems will mitigate.

By the other hand, Atom is clearly a long term loser and they should let it
go. Their contribution to the text editing world was terrific but now they
should focus where they are the best.

~~~
h1d
Atom lose against which ones?

------
tscs37
I personally moved away from Github, mostly due to political issues,
secondarily because of this funding issue. Can't keep burning money forever.

I put my private stuff on my own Gogs instance or on Bitbucket, tho I like
Gogs UI much better, it's closer to github. The community fork of it, Gitea,
is also making progress to enable pull request federation.

Would be awesome if I could work together with people using Gitlab, Github or
Gitea without them having to sign up to my site. They just fork to their own
site, make their patches and submit the pull request to my upstream.

GitHub has little value to me, the social network they built can move
elsewhere like it is for many programmers and coders.

~~~
new299
Which political issues? I'm honestly curious.

~~~
tomp
I'm guessing parent is referring to stuff like the "meritocracy rug" and "code
of conduct".

------
vacri
> _The company paid to send employees jetting across the globe to Amsterdam,
> London, New York and elsewhere._

If a company as vitally important to an industry as Github is to software
can't do this... it's time to really worry.

------
partycoder
If you are an investor, you want to invest $1 to get $2 back (aka shareholder
value). If your dividends are not growing, you divest and invest somewhere
else.

Now, the thing is very competitive, and many companies offer "exponential
growth". If your growth slows down, if the perspective is not good, divestment
starts and that is a downwards spiral.

To stay competitive and to prevent an investor run, companies are forced to
take massive risks. And risks materialize into huge disasters... like this one
apparently.

------
bsder
Apparently "git cash" isn't working very well ...

~~~
flukus
git rm -r --cached .

This is apparently working very well.

------
huntermonk
> "The income statement shows a loss of $66 million in the first three
> quarters of this year. That’s more than twice as much lost in any nine-month
> time frame by Twilio Inc., another maker of software tools founded the same
> year as GitHub."

These sort of statements are a little annoying. I understand that Bloomberg
has to write for a less technical audience, but the writer must know this
isn't an accurate comparison.

------
compsciphd
The thing not mentioned is that Bloomberg is a Github Enterprise customer.
They ran their own git server for a bit and then transitioned the whole
company to github and the pull-request model (relatively quickly too)

------
christop
Interesting to read there (and nowhere else that I could find) that GitHub co-
founder Scott Chacon left the company this year.

------
tim333
It's funny reading Tom Preston-Werner's write up on GitHub in Dec 08:

>You Don’t Need Venture Capital

>A lot has been written recently about how the venture capital world is
changing. I don’t pretend to be an expert on the subject, but I’ve learned
enough to say that a web startup like ours doesn’t need any outside money to
succeed. I know this because we haven’t taken a single dime from investors. We
bootstrapped the company on a few thousand dollars and became profitable the
day we opened to the public and started charging for subscriptions.

I guess VCing up and losing money is a choice. They probably figure the odd
$100m cash loss will end up as $1bn+ on the market cap. He looks quite
cheerful in his rich list write up [http://www.forbes.com/profile/tom-preston-
werner/](http://www.forbes.com/profile/tom-preston-werner/)

~~~
sleepyhead
He was right though. They didn't need it. But it was just too much money for
the founders to say no to. I'm also in the bootstrapping camp but I don't
blame them for filling up their bank account.

------
throwaway1892
A blog that could be relevant

[http://hintjens.com/blog:111](http://hintjens.com/blog:111)

------
DeBraid
Short-selling companies that make very popular and effective developer tools
is low expected value play.

------
Animats
Uh oh. So much is dependent on Github. Is there a full mirror?

~~~
markdog12
You can easily mirror with Gitlab:
[https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/workflow/repository_mirroring.htm...](https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/workflow/repository_mirroring.html)

~~~
Animats
That's not the question. I'm not concerned about mirroring my stuff. I'm
concerned about the disappearance of other people's stuff, perhaps forgotten
by them but still used by others, if Github tanks.

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stefek99
How come such a fantastic product is not massively profitable?

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234dd57d2c8db
You know, I can't say I'm surprised. When github first started, it was just
about code. Nothing else. Then they started with all the identity politics
crap.

As soon as a company starts parroting political messages like "white middle
managers have no empathy" instead of, you know, building good tools, I know
it's time to find another solution. I was a paying customer, and when github
got into the political game, I dropped them like a bad habit.

I'm not screwing around here, I'm trying to build a business and your
political aspirations do _nothing_ for me as a customer, so why don't you take
them and shove em. Happy customer at bitbucket ever since.

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k0mplex
"Lost"

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uiri
The opposit of a profit is a loss. It is unrelated to the non-financial
meaning of the term. They had revenue of $98M, a loss of $66M means they spent
$164M over that time frame.

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pinkrooftop
Maybe they'll be the next Verizon aquisition

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therealjohn
Am I the only one the tone in this article bothers? The author keeps
criticizing and belittling the CEO, who is obviously significantly smarter
than him. There might be correlation there.

