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Comment by boramalper | Hacker News Reader

Competition in a free market is good, but in the presence of monopolies, it's a self-destructing concept.

TechCrunch wrote[0] "This feels like a sign of goodwill on behalf of Microsoft, which closed its acquisition of GitHub last October, with former Xamarin CEO Nat Friedman taking over as GitHub’s CEO." I believe it's more of a sign of an attempt to kill GitHub's rivals by hurting their revenue streams. As Aaron Levie, co-founder and chief executive of Box once said in 2014, “These guys will drive prices to zero, [...] you do not want to wait for Google or Amazon to keep cutting prices on you. ‘Free’ is not a business model.”[1]

[0]: https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/07/github-free-users-now-get-...

[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/25/technology/box-dropbox-an...

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It's tough when your competition can give away their product and fund it through their bottomless pockets and money they make on other products.

I used to work for a great company in the developer tooling area, one of the big players came directly after us, ramped up a team, started copying our features and gave the product away for free. We were still doing well when I left, but it'll be interesting to see how it goes over the next few years.

This might be a naive comment, but isn't that predatory pricing. By dropping prices to zero and trying to purposely hurt your competitors, you effectively gain a monopoly on that industry.

Github's competitors are already providing the same service for free. Github is dropping their prices from $7 / mo to free to compete.

But they're not. They created a new, feature-reduced repo type to make free/private. The marketing hides this, and you need to dig to the "Comparison" section to see it:

https://github.com/pricing#feature-comparison

Good point, it's not the exact same. But their new offering is much closer to what their competitors are offering, so I'd say it's still a move to try to better compete with the free offerings from other companies.

Code storage is a free market and GitHub is not a monopoly.

It’s currently the de facto solution, and it’s on the way of becoming a monopoly.

9 out of 10 companies I’ve applied to asked for my GitHub profile explicitly; I presume they would be equally happy with a link to Bitbucket or GitLab but it just shows that GitHub has already won the mindshare by far -which comes as no surprise-.

Now that they are acquired by Microsoft, they have more resources than any of its competitors.

The term monopoly has a meaning in economics and even in normal conversation. Saying they have monopoly because they have lot of mindshare is crazy talk.

I said “it’s on the way of becoming one”, not that it’s currently a monopoly.

Its the most popular option but its far from a monopoly. Last job I applied for asked for my github account and I sent them a gitlab link. They hired me and internally they use bitbucket.

So, it's a loss leader.

Seems like we've been here before.

All the breathless hyperbole AGAINST "EEE," and yet, we're watching Microsoft destroy another market.

But they "love" Linux, and open source.

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