

GitHub adds Organizations - kneath
http://github.com/blog/674-introducing-organizations

======
siculars
These guys are great. They keep innovating even while they are in the drivers
seat in their field. Thats the way to do it.

Kinda reminds me of how WoW evolved over time to have better guild features.
Perhaps the engineering resources weren't available to implement them, but
more likely they learned what their audience wanted from watching their
audience actually use the system.

~~~
heresy
FYI, WoW has a grand total of around 30 engineers working on the game doing
development. The majority of headcount is support and ops (~4000).

~~~
TeHCrAzY
I would gather that there are a huge number of Testers as well?

~~~
endtime
A lot of testing is put on the actual users; WoW has "public test realms" that
they use for betas.

~~~
TeHCrAzY
Interesting! I guess the motivation to test comes from seeing what advantages
you can wring out of upcoming changes, and/or ensuring opponents don't receive
advantages over you.

~~~
endtime
Some really competitive users do want to get used to new raid encounters, but
a lot of users just do it because they are anxious to try out new content.

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xal
We have been testing this feature for a few months now at Shopify and it
seriously takes GitHub to the next level. Really amazing and kudos to the
team.

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kuahyeow
Out of interest, can anyone remember what the prices were for the Large, Mega
and Giga plans ?

I can think of a situation where a small start-up is on Medium, and switching
up to the next level at $100 per month is looking quite dear. Would be good to
have a comparison with the old prices.

Edit: Found it via Google Cache:

Large $50/mo Large 50 Private Repositories 25 Private Collaborators Unlimited
public repositories Unlimited public collaborators

Mega $100/mo 125 Private Repositories 60 Private Collaborators Unlimited
public repositories Unlimited public collaborators

Giga $200/mo 300 Private Repositories 100 Private Collaborators Unlimited
public repositories Unlimited public collaborators

~~~
jpcx01
Looks like they still have the large plan in the system, just not listed.
<https://github.com/signup/large>

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rubyrescue
biggest question is whether there's a price point missing - $100 for lowest-
priced organization support is pretty high.

~~~
jpcx01
Agreed, I'd love to use organizations but paying for 50 repos is just outright
crazy. We have a 12 person dev team, and 10 repos. Can't justify 100mo just
for that. Will need to stick with unfuddle for now.

Chris/Tom: please provide a lower priced entry for organizations.

~~~
pavs
I don't want to be rude and I am making some assumptions here (also no
knowledge or experience of running a company). But if you have 12 people dev,
assuming they are being paid for their work and not working pro-bono. Assuming
its a company. You are probably spending somewhere around 600k - 750k per year
on these developers. Surely 100/month is not too much?

Like I said, I am making some assumptions. Maybe I am missing something.

~~~
drewcrawford
It's a question of opportunity cost. Are the new features worth $100/month as
opposed to the old way of paying $10-20/month?

Some people will say yes. Some people will say no.

It's a little silly to say "Well, you're spending 600k-750k a year, you can
afford it." They can also afford a bouncy castle.

The _right_ question is--does this provide enough value to justify the cost?
For the parent, no, it doesn't.

~~~
pavs
I don't follow the logic here or the bouncy castle analogy. A private repo
adds more direct value to a company that has 12 devs than a bouncy castle (ok
maybe indirectly it might make them happy and more productive, but its
stretching a bit).

I understand the question of whether it provides value, and it would be
sufficient argument if you are company with lets say ~50k/yr on expenses. But
when you are spending (assumptions of course) 600k-750k JUST employing your
dev team, I just don't see how this $1100/year is too much; esp when the cost
is associated with a core aspect of your business.

We are not talking about renting a water cooler here.

~~~
drewcrawford
> A private repo adds more direct value

They already have private repos. The new features are permissions and a
dashboard. Those particular features might be nice to haves, but for many
small or midsized dev teams are not "a core aspect of [their] business."

It's not unreasonable to look at the new offerings ad say "I'm not going to
pay 5x for a dashboard and better permissions."

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cmelbye
I see a lot of mentions about collaborator limits, so I though I'd mention
something. GitHub does not limit private collaborators. The posted limits are
soft limits, and they're there to protect themselves from users that simply
seek to abuse the service to use it as a shared file host, for illegal
activity, etc.

~~~
tekkub
The collab limits aren't soft, they're just not strictly enforced right now.
We may start enforcing them at any time.

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d0m
Yep, github price are pretty high. Even the most basic plan, which I use for
my own purpose, kind of cost a lot. I think it's something like 12/month for a
couple of meg and 3 repositories with 1 collaborator.

I think it's a way to encourage open source.. while thinking that if you're a
business, you can easily afford the 100$.

~~~
jackowayed
The Micro (smallest) plan is actually $7/month for 5 repos and 1 collaborator.
It's not cheap given that you could host an infinite number of git repos with
an infinite number of collaborators on any shared host, but that's not the
point.

GitHub is pretty. GitHub doesn't require you to ask for SSH keys to add
someone as a collaborator. GitHub lets you comment on lines of commits. GitHub
lets you host blogs/websites with GitHub pages. Etc.

Everyone's always comparing GitHub's prices to inferior products. GitHub saves
you time and effort, and since most developers are highly-paid, it doesn't
need to save very much time to be well worth it.

And if you do see it as too expensive, maybe you're not their target customer.
If your time is only worth $10/hour, and GitHub only saves you 15 minutes per
month, it's not worth it to you pay them $7/month. The solution isn't to
complain about their prices though--it's to accept that it's not worth it and
switch to one of those cheaper substitutes.

~~~
d0m
Well, maybe you are right about the fact that I don't use github for the good
reasons. Mainly, I don't blog, host website and I don't comments on my own
line of code. I mean, I'm a bit weird to use github to host my git repository.
Now that I think of it, I might try to email posterious my git repository and
blog on github.

I've used github before for school and yes, I was paid 0$/hour to work on
those projects. Even with the "micro" package, we couldn't even be three
students because only one collaborator was allowed. It's relative.. but
7$/month (~30$ for the semestry) for ~15 meg seems over priced for me.

All I'm saying is that the micro package isn't "that" micro and that you
should pay for what you use. And thinking I'm not their "target" is wrong
because there is more chance for me to use github later for real projects if I
have used it during my university time.

But maybe you are right and I should switch to cheaper substitutes. I know lot
of my colleague are doing it and more and more people on internet blog about
them switching from github to other "cheaper" alternatives. In my opinion,
it's way better for github to reduce their prices then to see users leave for
alternatives.

~~~
apsurd
How is github expensive if github is FREE!?

All you would have to do is open source your projects, and pay a big fat $0
per month. Just .gitignore your sensitive data files like database
credentials, api keys, etc. If you are using something like capistrano to
deploy, all you would have to do is upload these files to your server, then
hook a function onto the deploy action that symlinks the sensitive files back
into place.

You can't possibly complain about FREE now can you?

P.S. I love github (and pay 7 big ones a month even though I don't really have
a job and am running out of money like its nobody's business)

~~~
d0m
only public repository are free. School project can hardly be public since
that would be called cheating.

~~~
apsurd
Here you go:
[http://support.github.com/discussions/accounts/709-student-a...](http://support.github.com/discussions/accounts/709-student-
account)

FWIW - isn't it kind of backwards that public code encourages cheating?
Shouldn't we all be working together anyway? I have learned nearly everything
I know from studying, and copy/pasting code from people better than me. What a
shame =(

~~~
robryan
I think the problem is that assignments are usually don't have much variation
in the end code, meaning someone stands to gain just by being able to copy
public code. If the assignments were more open ended it could allow that type
of class collaboration and in the end everyone could learn more.

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kuahyeow
Great to see Github being proactive

[http://support.github.com/discussions/accounts/717-i-need-a-...](http://support.github.com/discussions/accounts/717-i-need-
a-plan-between-22month-and-100month)

