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Comment by eli | Hacker News Reader

I wouldn't normally consider my email address a secret. I assume the concern is over spear phishing?

Email address isn't secret, the use of certain tools for some however is. Enterprise is a different game than your usual early stage web/product startup. Politics are real, exist and credibility is on the line when you stick your ass out to vouch for a company/product outside of the company standard. Base cost for this software is $5k/yr for one seat pack (20 devs), whereas the competition - Atlasssian is incredibly price competitive (10 users for $10, 25 users for $1,800) - keep in mind competition also exists in the form of TFS (ergh) which is free for MSDN subscribers and included in most enterprise licensing agreements.

Sorry, still not sure I follow. So the issue is that, for example, the corporate office could discover that a certain department is using what--in their opinion--is an overpriced solution?

An overpriced insecure solution.

Exactly. Perception management for those who will never read or care about the technical explanation but will know about it tomorrow when the industry publications they read publish it in their early-morning newsletter.

Now imagine some poor developer stuck with TFS or Visual Source Safe right at this moment trying to convince his line manager to change to the "overpriced insecure [non-standard] solution."

For enterprise, decisions on what tools are used (or shortlisted) are almost always made by those who don't use them thus why it is important to manage perceptions. TL;DR - enterprise is broken.

Confirm. Perception management is one of the key things that starts coming into play when you have people far up enough the chain that they don't use the tools.

Perception is actually everything, it turns out. :-(

I've already received an "invite to check out Dropbox" to an email address that only GitHub knew.

As did I... I replied tongue-in-cheek and the kid sent me what appeared to be a pretty heart-felt apology. Probably just saw a quick chance to get some upload credit, and didn't pause to think he was spamming a list of professionals in high-tech :)

If a competitor is looking to market their version control solution to enterprise this email list is going to be a very good place to start.

On the flip slide, if a developer cares about their tools and is looking to jump ship then they now have a shortlist of companies and contact details as to whom to approach within the company. ;-)

Atlassian isn't going to spam Stash or BitBucket to the exposed users. They'd get crucified.

There might be a few users who were already frustrated and switch on their own, but I think the big problems are an ongoing spearphishing risk and a bruised ego.

Come again? Atlassian doesn't email you when you need to repay or when you had paid?

This wasn't "spam" it was an accident email send. Things pretty much every single giant website has accidently done at least once.

I was responding to my parent comment's concern that GitHub's competitors (e.g. Atlassian) would use the leaked/pastebinned GitHub emails as a mailing list.

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