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Comment by Sapient | Hacker News Reader

I assume that what the poor twenty-somethings actually want is the interface since alternatives like Gitosis and Gitolite are cheap and cheery, but unpopular amongst that crowd. If that is the case however, then I am surprised noone has made a FOSS clone duplicating the interface ideas.

However your argument doesn't explain why there is not even a single private repo free tier. That wouldn't canibalize their B2B tiers at all, while keeping a lot of very small developers happy.

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It's very easy to message "Free for OSS, paid for other folks", and it prevents you from having a failure to convert moment when a) you start using Github internally at a job/startup/etc and b) you need to add the second repo. If you then have to go get authorization for a purchase, you might do something stupid like a) migrate or b) cheat, rather than go through the authorization process, because you've got work to do today.

It is much easier to say "Look, you know Github, you like Github. You want to use Github for work? Get them to fork out for it. No, not fork(1). fork($)"

Hypothetically suppose a particular company's advantage is UI/UX. If this is true, that company is in less than zero danger of getting FOSSed.

You are probably correct.

I don't even know why I like GitHub as much as I do. I have decided not to pay them as I can't really justify the amount (Dollars are not cheap in Africa) - so I host my repos on one of my Linodes and have them backed up to S3 every day. This works perfectly well, and I have no problems doing it, yet I feel like I am missing out on not having them tucked away on GitHub.

I suppose the feeling is similar to my feelings of Linux vs OSX. There is nothing (apart from Photoshop) that I cant do just as well on Linux, but I still feel like I am missing out by not being on OSX.

Its probably just that it seems all the "Cool People" are using GitHub.

We love Github, we pay for Github, we host a private instance of Github on our network for which I am sure Github is going to charge us any day, we've even done work for Github.

But we won't host our public code on Github, because then Github has a nonzero chance of ranking higher on Google for "Matasano" than "www.matasano.com".

So I know the feeling.

Wow, though: internal Github one of the all-time no-brainer best purchases we've made.

What's that, you say? We could run something called "gitosis" and not pay thousands of dollars for a prettier UI on fundamentally free software? FIND MY PITCHFORK. LIGHT THE TORCHES. BURN THE HERETIC.

And we don't have more money than god. The pricing dynamics work the same way for software startups as for BigCos. There's another thread going on right now where at least one person made a (facetious, I think) case that developers ought to ask for the '11 MBP upgrade if they have the '10 MBP, because the cost is a rounding error compared to their salary. And nothing Github sells costs more than an MBP.

Genuinely curious: why don't you just make all your apps public on github? Note that you can still explicitly state your license terms so why wouldn't that be a reasonable choice?

I am ashamed of the code in some of the older ones, and I don't trust that certain of my clients to keep to our maintenance contracts in others.

Certainly there are some which I would feel okay about sharing the code. But since there is a non-zero chance of there being security holes in the apps, I think the risk could be too great.

I understand that making the code public could result in patches from other people using it, but I just don't think anyone else would be interested in using for that reason.

I assume that what the poor twenty-somethings actually want is the interface since alternatives like Gitosis and Gitolite are cheap and cheery, but unpopular amongst that crowd

Don't forget the network effects. With github it's very easy to contribute code to another project using github.

It's like Facebook vs. $UNPOPULAR_SOCIAL_NETWORK. Sure, you might not like facebook's page layout and $OTHER_NETWORK has a nicer layout, but you can only take to you mum on facebook, so it doesn't matter.

> Sure, you might not like facebook's page layout and $OTHER_NETWORK has a nicer layout, but you can only take to you mum on facebook, so it doesn't matter.

I think that's a pretty strong selling point for $OTHER_NETWORK to be honest.

gitorious is a pretty good FOSS alternative to github. It doesn't support private repositories at all, but you can host your own server and make it not public (which is what I'm doing for my projects).

That's what I considered doing. And then I thought about the amount of time I'd have to spend setting up and maintaining that server. And what if I wanted to give my friend access to some of my projects. And what if I wanted to give a client read only access to a certain repo. And what about backup and ssh keys and ...

.. and then I realised, github does all this for me, and for $50/m or something for an org account, and that is an absolute no brainer for a working professional. I cannot fathom these complaints about $22/m or what not. If you have enough knowledge to participate on HN and that amount of money is meaningful to you, you're doing something wrong.

"And then I thought about the amount of time I'd have to spend setting up and maintaining that server. And what if I wanted to give my friend access to some of my projects. And what if I wanted to give a client read only access to a certain repo. And what about backup and ssh keys and ..."

I already had a server setup with redmine and some other internal services that I needed, so the added overhead for backups and so forth was pretty minimal.

I also want to keep control over any privileged client data and not trust them to "the cloud".

For sharing repos I grant people access to the corresponding redmine project (I have a script set up that make accessing things from there trivial, and redmine has support for private projects).

But yes. $50/month is really very cheap and if I didn't have my privacy concerns with github, and the problem of integrating it with my other services, I would probably use that.

Pricing aside, I love redmine. I use it over GitHub, just because I like it better than GitHub.

I share your concerns about data security etc, and I didn't make the decision lightly - in fact I used to host my own git repos (raw git, not web sites like gitorious). However, my trust in them grew in time and when genuine rock stars like Aman Gupta joined them (I use his stuff everywhere) I realised their brain trust far exceeded my own. They can probably do a better job than I can of keeping my data safe. And paying them for it helps; I'm just one customer but collectively we keep the lights on over there and I know they take it seriously.

Anyway YMMV but out of all the outsourcing decisions I've had to make recently, github was one of the easiest.

You can also want to have your own server, because you don't want to need to trust Github, or because you think that rolling your own is fun and makes you learn.

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