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Comment by johndbritton | Hacker News Reader

I work at GitHub on all things related to education. I got a note that this was on HN, so I thought I'd drop by and offer to answer questions and provide some additional details.

Details on the discount:

* We're happy to provide students with GitHub Micro (5 private repositories) accounts for free. So long as you're a student, you're eligible. You can use the private repositories for anything you want.

* We offer organization accounts with private repositories to teachers that are using GitHub in class.

* Academic discounts on GitHub and GitHub Enterprise are available for many academic use cases, including: school administration, IT, and research groups.

Aside from the education discounts, I spend a lot of my time on university campuses. Feel free to email support@github.com if you're interested in having someone from GitHub come by your campus for a tech talk or to participate in an event.

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Bitbucket has offered unlimited free private repositories for years, why should students go through the trouble of using github?

THIS.

Bitbucket is free for personal use. Unlimited private repos. Edu accounts have unlimited collaborators... FOREVER.

and they're super responsive to support requests, support importing code from more sources, and support mercurial and git both.

Also the ticket trackers let you attach arbitrary files, not just those animated gifs :)

Also, BitBucket supports Mercurial, which is used by some major academic projects (for example, the Jikes Research Virtual Machine). I also personally prefer Metcurial, so having the choice is great.

Also, on windows Mercurial get a wonderful tool as to Tortoise, and it works well with Bitbucket...

mercurial (via tortoise, and even cmdline) is much easier to use for simple things (branches, merge, update) I think git has more bells and whistles, but a lot more painfull for novices to use

I have a student account on GitHub and I use BitBucket for private repositories with my employer. I prefer the GitHub website so much more. Better design, better graphs, you can get an overview of who in your team has committed in a time period (Pulse), better README, better commit history layout, more service hooks (no Trello support for BitBucket is annoying considering we use Trello for organizing and managing our projects), to mention a few.

TIL BitBucket is run by Atlassian (i.e. the JIRA people).

Links to save you time, if you're interested:

https://bitbucket.org/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitbucket

For Open Source projects Github > * You just can't beat the tremendous community.

However when things need to be private... Atlassian suite > Github suite

JIRA is so much more powerful than Github issues/wiki. And it is significantly cheaper to boot.

But only 5 collaborators which isn't good when you have a class of 30-60!

Not true for academic licenses/accounts.

"These licences [academic] allow students and teachers to collaborate with an unlimited number of programmers"

[1]https://confluence.atlassian.com/pages/viewpage.action?pageI...

I see, that's pretty sweet

If I can be totally honest, our group had a pretty bad enterprise sales experience recently. We had trouble getting answers to our questions (we are a bit of a non-standard .edu account). We thought we had negotiated a good deal until the PO was about to be cut and then we came to find out there were conditions on the original deal nobody told us about. Our team was just crushed by the end because we love github and it left such a bad impression. I hope we are outliers, but I worry that we aren't.

I'm really sorry to hear that. I work at GitHub, so if you want to talk more about your experience please drop me a line. It's this username at that domain. Or hit up any other GitHubbers in this thread: We wouldn't be hanging around if we didn't want to hear from you.

> You can use the private repositories for anything you want.

Does that include using them for purposes that are not directly related to your education?

Yes.

I wanted to let you know that your email validation is broken. my real university email address does not pass validation.

this is the how the email address looks like:

someusername@mail.huji.ac.il

I see it was fixed since I posted it. Thank you!

This a really cool idea, and great for getting students started without the stress of making code public. Kudos to Github. Does GitHub offer any similar benefits to non-profits or other types of organizations?

We offer free Bronze Organization plans to nonprofits with proof of status.

https://github.com/nonprofit

Is there any opportunity for non-US non-profit associations? That "501(c)(3) status" seems blocking.

Yes, please send a request via http://github.com/nonprofit

You'll need proof of non-profit status from your jurisdiction.

I'm a student. I've filled it out at least three times in the past and never gotten anything.

Me too. Are you from outside the US? That might be it, as my university does not use a .edu.

Nope, I'm in the US with an .edu email address. Checked the spam filter and everything. Nothing.

EDIT: Registered again and it worked! Goodbye bitbucket.

I'm sorry to hear that you didn't get a response. Maybe the emails went to your spam. Email support@github.com and I'll get you sorted out.

I've successfully used it with an *.ac.uk address

Two (semi-related) questions:

* Are high school students eligible?

* If so, my high school doesn't provide us with email addresses. Is that critical? (I have other ways of verifying my enrollment.)

Thanks!

> High school students are eligible as well.

> Since most high schools don't issue email addresses, the turnaround for approval can be longer.

Great, I've sent off a request, along with some information that should make it easier for you to verify me!

What if you're faculty and want to use them for research projects (which may/may not eventually get open sourced)?

In most cases, research falls under our standard academic discount which is 25% off. You can apply via the form, due to manual processing turnaround can be a few days.

If you're start using a private repo for education now but go to grad school do those repos remain free?

So long as you're a student, you qualify. After you graduate you get to keep them until the two years expires.

How would you know one isn't a student anymore? I'm pretty sure students don't lose access to their .edu email after they graduate (with most schools, at least). Not that I would do that, but there are people who certainly would.

replying to iNeal: really? My school turns my school.edu to alum.school.edu.

thanks =D

My school doesn't have a .edu domain, can I still apply? with the school email address? ( .net )

Absolutely! The approval just won't be as automated (i.e., might take a day or two).

Done. Thanks, waiting for the approval.

I had a .ch address. Got verified in 10 minutes.

What kind of organization account do teachers get?

sweet!

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