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Comment by nn3 | Hacker News Reader

The question is how long the free party at github actions will last. That must be a considerable drain for github's Microsoft internal budget.

I predict that will eventually end too as they aim towards profitability.

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> I predict that will eventually end too as they aim towards profitability.

Honestly, I don't really think so. I think MS's goal for GitHub is to be a "loss leader" to keep developer mindshare. They lost a lot of developer mindshare to linux, open source, etc. in the migration to the web and cloud.

Providing GitHub and CI for free to open source/students is a great way to keep developer mindshare. Make sure it's nicely integrate into Azure cloud for deployment and devops and you have a streamlined pipeline of leading large numbers of developers to your cloud platform.

AFAIK GitHub isn’t losing money. They have a ton of enterprise users and that’s where the big money is. I could be wrong since they don’t publish the numbers. I wish GitHub IPOd and remained independent. Not a huge fan of Trillion dollar corps gulping everything that threatens them.

Think of it more as part of a suite and it makes sense: host your code on GitHub, use actions to deploy them, and deploy them to Azure. Make up money on 2 from 1 and 3. Google cloudbuild has a free tier too. Looks like AWS Codebuild has a comparable free tier too (do people use that?)

(MS employee, not anything related to this though).

Don't forget that providing the service for free to open source projects brings in money as open source developers in their younger years (school, college, university) tend to be low on budget, but are likely to use something they already know when they start to work for companies later on in their career.

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