Time to Stop Paying GitHub's Toll
cloud.dzone.com
cloud.dzone.com
Really? If they didn't do anything why would you even be paying them your $100 to begin with. They essentially built a social network around version control with an amazing user experience. Do you remember Sourceforge? Which would you rather use?
It isn't fair to discount the value of GitHub or the effort they put into building a great product just because it costs more than you want to pay.
In the case of source hosting, bitbucket turns out to be pretty great! So it's natural that someone who's just discovered it will be pretty enthusiastic about jumping over to it.
What's baffled me over the years is how bad bitbucket is about marketing themselves. It's been improved somewhat by the Atlassian purchase, but still, they are totally underperforming their potential.
Part of the history to remember is that Mercurial and Git started at about the same time and on almost equal footing. GitHub was frequently cited at the time as a reason to use git. As in, "yeah git has kind of a crappy interface, but look at how big that community is!" The GitHub team really grabbed the momentum and never let it go. Now git is so common that supporting it is basically mandatory.
But it didn't have to end up that way. In a counterfactual history where the positions were reversed and HgHub and Gitbucket were founded, I think that HgHub would have dominated through a better focus on acquiring a community.
I regret feeding the troll.
Because of that work, Github changed the code hosting space, and they enjoyed their time(when they offered more). Now there is virtually no difference between github and bitbucket. Competition is always good, and it drives value to consumer.
Github charges as they do because they have so much mindshare—for now, at least, github is the place to be, and the default choice for many—that they can charge that much, even if it's painful for some. That's probably only going to change if their paying customers start moving elsewhere in significant numbers.
Of course there are very poor startups etc that want private repos, but cannot afford github, and that clearly represents a niche and an opportunity for their competitors. That's a good thing, and will tend to keep github honest. Github's appeal will in turn motivate their competitors to improve and innovate. Win-win!
That said, the article title (I'm not going to give them a pageview) is nothing but trolly flamebait, and never should have made it to HN. [EDIT: I notice they've tried to tone down the title since the original posting...]
For 5(or 7) bucks, unlimited private repos, with no(or 1) collaboration