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Comment by nitrogen | Hacker News Reader

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?

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Ask Craigslist, or soon Twitter?

Post VC investment, GitHub would never be allowed to exist in maintenance mode. It would be liquidated in one form or another if things were that dire. Once they took the venture capital, the possible outcomes narrowed considerably.

They could go non-profit like the Mozilla foundation.

But not if the owners (investors) want their money back instead.

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.

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.

don't they already attempt to do that though? i don't consider $7/month a large fee. (granted, they could probably get more subscribers at $3-5, but i'm assuming they landed on $7 for a reason)

They make vast more quantities off of actual businesses. The $7 repo fee is literally a soft wind on the face of Everest.

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

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.

Clickable code view would be nice, e.g:

http://lxr.linux.no/linux+v4.9/kernel/async.c

This would be wonderful.

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

And to move is to risk a quick death. I wished existing brands stopped innovating so much. That's e.g. what got Pebble killed.

Doubly so when a brand reaches infrastructure level - like Github, or arguably Dropbox. Just don't screw with the product that's working well. Not breaking things isn't expensive.

...it's a source control company. What additional features could I possibly want? They serve their purpose just fine.

I really hate this, because this is what bloats and kills products. It's never complete, it always needs more features, until it implodes.

It's the corpse model of product development.

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