Github is MySpace for hackers

I agree that this product seems very nice, and that it might be cool enough that it will do just fine. On the other hand, as you point out, they have competition already. More will be coming. They could easily get lost in a sea of competitors within the next six months. Every geek on this site probably imagines that they could build a site like gitweb in their spare time. I know I do. And it's not like the cost of moving a project from gitweb to a competitor is going to be that high: you do one "git pull" and ask your clients to update their URLs. Maybe you clone a couple of wiki pages.

The biggest problem with free private beta is that, when they finally announce some prices, they probably will get another round of P.R... in the form of unreasonable people complaining that the prices are too high and talking up the alternatives. Even if their prices turn out to be incredibly reasonable, they will be higher than they are now... and folks don't like having things that were free taken away from them, no matter how polite and logical the sales pitch is. It sets off the inner bait-and-switch detector, which is a very highly developed mental organ in a consumer-oriented society like ours, and it just makes you unhappy. Unhappy customers are never a good thing. And this problem defies logic: Just look at all the people who complain about paying $20 a month for a Slicehost VPS because it's so much more expensive than the $6.95 oversold shared hosting plan at VapidHoster.com.

It's a particularly hard sell to convince people that a wrapper around a free-software tool is worth money... and it gets even harder when you consider that 100% of the customers are the kind of hard-core Unix programmers for whom the gitosis docs are light bedtime reading. Launching without a price tag and then trying to paste one on later just makes that whole argument more difficult.