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Comment by modarts | Hacker News Reader

I don't get it, is the value of hosting projects on your own servers worth the substantial leap in cost over GitHub.com?

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A previous employer was dead-set against using Github's public site and insisted on using Github Enterprise. They were simultaneously resource-stingy and thus we had to bend around in all sorts of uncomfortable ways to minimize the amount of employees we had with Github Enterprise logins to keep costs to the bare minimum. Needless to say, this was a messy and stupid situation.

Perhaps there are some companies for which Github Enterprise makes sense, but it seems like the number of potential matches for it being a really good fit is small. Most companies should just use Github.com or if they really need to keep the code out of "the cloud", just use plain old git with gitlab, gitorious or plain old ssh access control.

You can do your own logins such that every employee immediately has their own login and ability to create infinitely private and public repos visible only by others in the org.

Stuff like that.

Keeping their code within their own firewall is a big deal for many companies.

Yeah, and in some cases "big deal" == "legal requirement"

We've considered it for the research department I'm part of at a university. The nice part is that we all know and like github, but need to keep the repos private or on premise, depending on the grant. Further, a lot of research code is based on another project's code, and a git fork is so much nicer than mailing around tarballs, particularly after having had the task of taking a project, and trying to incorporate several teams' individual modifications back in into the core to base further research on it.

The campus site license at $2500/year license seems cheap relative to the normal price

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