Hacker News Reader

Comment by avaer | Hacker News Reader

Hm, I like Github but I don't like this. This is a great move, but we already have a code hosting monoculture, and this subtly piggy-backs on it towards lock-in for tooling. Github knows orgs have inertia.

Sorry for the slippery slopeism. I'm just imagining a future where shipping an app without a middleman moves to inconvenient, then annoying, then difficult, then impossible. Because this is exactly how we lost the ability to send email without paying the middleman privacy tax.

View on HN

>this subtly piggy-backs on it towards lock-in for tooling

FTA: "More than a dozen integrators have apps in GitHub Marketplace today, including Travis CI, Appveyor, Waffle, ZenHub, Sentry, and Codacy"

Travis CI and many others were widespread prior to this marketplace. Seems to me that creating a marketplace is a logical way to collect these third-party services in one place.

...and charge the going market rate of 30% of any revenue earned via the GitHub platform.

TravisCI Pro Bootstrap direct is $69: https://travis-ci.com/plans

TravisCI Pro Bootstrap via Github is $89: https://github.com/marketplace/travis-ci/plan/MDIyOk1hcmtldH...

any indication why the prices are different? it's not like they think we won't sniff that out, right?

That's an oversight on Github's part and will end in a TOS change in one of two directions: price parity or complete prohibition of paid services that use GH integrations outside of the marketplace

Ironic that the "hub for open-source projects" could become a walled garden if the latter happens.

Irony is about intentions. Free-for-open is a marketing tactic, pure and simple.

> Ironic that the "hub for open-source projects" could become a walled garden if the latter happens.

I would say that the irony occurred when the "hub for open-source projects" is a closed-source platform.

(And I would say that as a paying user of Github that rather loves it.)

It's different because GH take a cut of any sales via the Marketplace.

People already pay anywhere from 3-10x more for GH than for alternatives like BitBucket. I'm sure plenty will just click on 'buy'.

Honestly, the marketplace doesn't seem like a good fit for Github. I couldn't see my company or any organization that I am in buying services through Github when we have that capability in the following locations already:

- Docker - Heroku - AWS - Google - Direct

Feels more for "discovery" than purchasing.

Bitbucket has more traction than you think. Especially in megacorps who use JIRA. As long as the services have a docker container you can run locally I see no lock-in.

bitbucket was a consideration for my team, until we went through the end of life with their other git saas stash. won't consider it again because of the pain we went through due to that. went over to gitlab after that.

When was stash SaaS? Isn't Stash the on-premise version that was renamed to Bitbucket Server?

> Because this is exactly how we lost the ability to send email without paying the middleman privacy tax.

You want to see a tax? How does $72/user/year for code coverage tooling sound?

What regime forces you to use paid code coverage tooling? What percentage is $72 of your annual per-developer budget?

Would be nice if it were tiered per org size rather than per user.

Yes, seems a bit like Bitbucket/Jira stuff, and I don't know many people who liked it.

Having a complete suite of tools will help Github compete with other options for tooling designed for bigger companies (various ALM suites, Atlassian, etc). I'm happy with it as long as third-party integrations are handled well.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com