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I've long since given up on this one, but the reason I care is my open source work is on GitHub and my business work is on GitHub. I can't justify the cost for my private, personal projects. git encourages you to create repositories for everything. GitHub effectively penalizes you for having a lot of repositories.

As an example, I have a repo for just about every project in every class I did in grad school. I don't want to make that public because other students shouldn't access it. We can argue whether I need to save it at all, but disk space is cheap, so why not archive it? I easily have 50+ personal, private repositories. Well more than my business account. And as such, they're not on GitHub.

Ideally I'd have a common place for everything. Ideally I'd pay for "active" projects or for disk space. But that's not how it works and it's not likely to ever change. And the pricing just doesn't scale for personal accounts.

What I end up doing is putting my "active" projects on github and anything that I'm archiving on like bitbucket or assmbla or just zip it up and put it on S3 or Dropbox.

If I found myself with more than say 5 active projects, I probably need to focus more or charge more.

I don't do any consulting, so charging more wouldn't be an option. I've resorted to just running gitauth on a prgmr server. It works, but it'd be nicer to have everything in one location.

Even if it's not the intention of the github creators, I think this is secretly one of the biggest strength of github. The reason is because it encourages you to publish incomplete or less than perfect code. How many times have you heard "yea I definitely plan to open source that project... I just need to clean up the code a bit" and since programmers are never happy with their code they never release. This coupled with the existence of project pages means that you can easily pick out the 'finished product' code from the 'how the hell do i solve this small problem' code

Sure, but there are tons of valid use cases for personal projects. config files and school projects come to mind (just digging through my repositories). Mind you, the other part that's weird here is there's no requirement that the project be open source, it just needs to be public. It's kinda scary how many "open" projects there are on GitHub with no license attached.

I never really thought about the obvious license issue, that's a good point. It would be awesome if github could add a simple check box that allowed people to choose from various licenses (maybe even a quick questionare that helps you choose the license that fits your needs best)

If you're not going to be actively developing it, or sharing it with anyone, why on earth would you want it up on github anyway? Their value-add is collaboration, as a sole developer on a personal project I can't think of anything useful they bring to the table.

"a common place for everything" for me is ~/code, which is included in my automated daily backups.

Browsing through their Web interface and peace of mind that it's in another archived location.

The problem is the cost per repo... Some people would rather have a lot of small repos to hold all their random stuff, instead of trying to stuff them into a larger repo to save money.

I have personal projects at home that I've started and don't want to release yet. (Maybe not ever.) I'd love to put them on someone else's machine as a backup. But at those prices, it's not worth it.

Even as a business, there's probably a lot of little utilities that could have their own repos, but they don't get modified much, so they don't really need them. Github isn't an option for that scenario.

As for 'Why complain?'? Because money doesn't really grow on trees. Rich people get rich by spending their money wisely.

So buy a $10/month 256MB VPS with 80g of diskspace and go nuts.

RepositoryHosting.com, $6/month, unlimited repos, 2GB and $1 extra per GB

xp-dev.com $5/month 2GB

Try $15 a YEAR and 10-15 gigs disk space if you can set up your own git repository and web front end. See some low cost VPS hosting providers at http://www.lowendbox.com/

And no backups :) Just saying, having a low end VPS is not exactly the perfect solution

Well you have backups of the repositories on the local machine.

So really in this case it shouldn't matter.

A small personal project without collaboration does not really get much value out of GitHub anyway. If you want a backup just rsync it somewhere.

Except that I'm a creature of habit, and I like GitHub... If one of my repos is there, I want them all there. I don't want to have to think about which host I put it on.

Fair enough, but you're asking GitHub to substantially undercut their bottom line by orienting towards individual private repos rather than business private repos. If people keep complaining loudly enough maybe they'll make some adjustments, but I wouldn't hold your breath.

You like github, you just don't want to pay them?

I like GitHub, and I am currently paying them, but I would rather their pricing structure match my needs.

If I had 5 massive repos, the price is perfectly fine. If I have 1 massive repo and 4 small ones, the price is out of whack. Especially since their cost is out of whack in that first scenario.

>I have personal projects at home that I've started and don't want to release yet. (Maybe not ever.)

Who cares if someone sees it? Are you planning on selling it?

"As for 'Why complain?'? Because money doesn't really grow on trees. Rich people get rich by spending their money wisely."

Complaining and spending money wisely are independent activities; you can do either one without doing the other.

Calling people who can't afford $22/month 'cheapskates' is very snobby of you. I can't afford $22/month, and it's not because I spend it on luxuries.

>Seriously, you could put out a crappy android app that makes you $100 a month in a weekend and that pays for your github hosting.

Yes? And should I test it against what, my six year old Nokia phone? Besides, some of us prefer to use lesser code hosts than pushing crap onto people just to make a few cheap bucks.

I agree with you that people shouldn't complain. Personally, I just took on Amazon's offer of a free EC2 microinstance for a year and use it both as a dev platform as well as my git repositories hosting.

What about using something like Bitbucket with the git-hg bridge?

Because that means relying on three pieces of software instead of one, which will definitively bring more problems. I'd use a bridge for moving to another system, but not as a fixed component of my daily work.

You're missing the small contractors with 20+ repos, any of which may need to be opened and edited at any given time. Why should they pay $100/month when they really only need 2-3 active repositories and consume a fraction of the filespace?

I'm not saying they can't, I'm saying the model doesn't fit this type of user. Of course they can find another provider (we did), but I think Github needs more models to fit the different types of companies.

Do what I do, factor in the cost of Github hosting into the costs for your clients. The marginal cost for an extra repo on Github is $5/month on a business plan or $2 a month for the smaller plans. As part of the contract for each of my projects, I note that there is a $100 maintenance fee per year to keep the project in an active state, and that any project that becomes archived will have a $250 fee to reinstate as active. So every month I send a letter and invoice to all my clients who haven't had work on a specific project done in the past year to bill them for the maintenance fee or give them the option of archiving the project. I actually have a few clients who pay the fee every year even though I haven't done work on a project in several years, because it's worth it to them to have it available immediately if they need something done in the future.

$48,000/yr isn't a fully loaded developer in the midwest. Mark that number up 30%. And that's not a senior developer salary. Now move to California or NYC. Fully loaded, FTEs can approach 200k.

This is what the internet does.

I've grown up with a price point of $0.

Well you're just going to have to un-grow out of that delusion because in the real world absolutely nothing is free.

Wrong.

The vast majority of the world is free. Friendships are free. Families are free. Nature is free (in Canada, much of it is). Not really the free you're looking for?

Feel free to walk around on public property and enjoy your right to free speech (talking to people is free). Local libraries have free books and free internet, the news is free (CBC), although I'll grant you that these are run by the government but if you're living a near $0 life you're probably not paying a lot of taxes. Running for MP (federal government) here isn't quite free but the $500 you get back at the end unless you don't fill in some forms properly. Facebook is free, Google is free, Hacker News is free... Although these are ad-supported. There's a whole world of free stuff available through .torrent but I'll admit most of that others would like not to be free. How about free music? Jamendo? Wrong sort of free? How about buskers or my neighbours that play guitar and classical music on their balcony (they're actually pretty good).

Oh, you mean other stuff? A $0 price point isn't far off of where many internet services are headed. EC2 is incredibly cheap. Compare that to what a server cost even ten years ago. Name your backbone service: it's aiming for free and making it up in volume.

The $0 price point is not a delusion.

> Families are free.

Ha. Hahaha. Hahahahaha.

Haha. Ok ok, children cost $166k in Canada to raise: http://www.ccsd.ca/factsheets/family/

It is possible to have a family that doesn't cost you money. Having kids is expensive...

"Family" is a bad example. True.

Family costs you money/time because relationships are a two way street. You help people and they help you.

You might not pay in dollars all the time, but you're always paying.

Friendships are a two way street. So is family. You can not hold up your end of the "deal", but see how long that lasts.

Talking to people costs time (something we all have a limited supply of).

Nature and public property? Really? Do you also not pay taxes in Canada? Free speech isn't free, it costs (and continues to cost) lives (and, again, tax for government, judiciary...)

It doesn't sound like you've ever actually run an EC2 cluster either. It's 10 cent/hour for a large instance (2 ECU, 7.5GB RAM) which is close to 900 dollars a year per machine. This is not even close to free.

Films and music have never been free, you just haven't been paying for them. There's a difference.

Just because you don't pay for something doesn't mean it's free. Some of the people can scrounge some of the time, but all of the people can't scrounge all of the time.

for a self proclaimed person named "programminggeek", you should know that we're not cheap, its just the cost vs effort. I could easily spend half a day installing git on a server backing up to s3 regularly or actually storing git repositories on s3. The cost of gihub has to be cheaper than the effort for me to do the equivalent.