Bitbucket passes one million users

- bitbucket wants enterprise developers to use it. (so it must be free for the private repos the enterprise needs). It's a gateway drug.

- github wants its offering to be directly valuable to its users (which might be open-source, startup, small, medium or enterprise team).

This predicts that github will be a better as a whole package (including issue tracking etc); and bitbucket will be great for git itself. But there's also much commonality: they both want to attract new users; "viral marketing" (in the sense of social projects pulling more people into the ecosystem) is helpful to both. But I think bitbucket sells itself as "free private repos* so there isn't really an overlap.

I predict that bitbucket must not become a viable alternative to atlassian's paid offerings; but github isn't restricted in that way (of course, they might well add paid offerings).

It seems there's also a danger for bitbucket: if users adopt their issue-tracking etc, it might be painful to upgrade; and so users might as well switch to github or other. Bitbucket should have an auto-upgrade (or, I guess their present issue tracking could evolve into a freemium model... that probably makes the most sense).

I haven't used bitbucket for larger projects yet, any insights there also appreciated.

It's a free offsite backup, and if you ever need to add another machine (or developer) to the project, your code is already sitting there on bitbucket. And you never need to worry about firewalls, NAT, one of the machines being off, whatever, because bitbucket is (almost) always up and accessible. And if you forget to push after working, or if bitbucket is down, you can still fall back to your existing workflow.

In addition, if you're doing anything web based, sooner or later you'll need to deploy to a sever out on the internets. Being able to pull from bitbucket makes deployment really easy, again without tinkering with firewall ports or anything.

It's not so much a question of "need" it's "why not do this thing which has some benefits, and no real downside?"

Github issues - bare bone basics, but I hear they're working on improving it. You cannot currently run something like a Kanban board off of GH issues without outside assistance.

For simplicity, boards like Trello and AgileZen are, IMHO, in the lead.

I have a billion opinions about JIRA in general, but I doubt anyone is interested besides Atlassian. ;)

One system that I'm curious to try is called AtTask[0]. They're located here in Utah (just down the street from me!) and have quite the lineup of large customers. I don't personally know anyone who uses them though.

[0] http://www.AtTask.com

Also until recently, from Melbourne it took just under thirty seconds to load a page, any page, from scratch. Sending 2MB (for a while it was 4MB) of uncached JavaScript on every page load helped with that. Quite why one would use Ext 3, Ext 4, YUI and a couple of other libraries all on the same page, I don't know. Now, I think it's down to only about half a megabyte, and it's mostly cached.

And I can just keep going on and on about it...

JIRA is something where it can be configured well or poorly. Configured poorly, it's nasty. Configured well, it's enormously nicer than Rally can ever possibly be.

I use JIRA at work, and honestly it's completely fine. It's a goddamn bug tracker. If I can make bugs and close them it's doing its job. Nobody in my organization reads email or tracks their stuff anyway. Sometimes what you have are organizational/management problems, and no amount of wizzy technology is going to fix that.

Github will approve people for using a student email address even if their school doesn't give them an email account, but it happens on a case by case basis, with requirements such as requesting that you forward a scanned copy of your student ID.

The difference is that Bitbucket does not ask you to be a student for the free account, so there is no process to prove that you are a student. Github has many advantages, but hassle-free, free private repositories is not one of them.

What I was saying is that with the increase in students who are encouraged to use remote version control who may not have a student email account, or even a student ID, has likely contributed to the increase in users on Bitbucket. It is worth noting that some of these courses have more than 100,000 people sign up. Even if only a small fraction finish the courses, a small fraction use version control, and many are smaller, there have already been dozens of these courses conducted in the last year on Coursera, Udacity, and EdX.

If I need to use a GUI then I find the built-in Gitk and GitGui more than adequate. They're not pretty, of course, but they do the job just fine.

With my issue it seemed like Bitbucket was a one man shop and I suspect that if I had thrown a fit things would have happened quickly. Jesper was attending pycon and I was fine with addressing it after that, but then it was not promptly attended to afterwards. I have no records of how long it took to fix but it was at least several weeks and may have been months. He did dispute "easily guessable". (The Bitbucket service at the time was also overwhelmed with languishing tickets.)

In my own view, private data being accessible no matter how improbable is always an immediate issue. Issues that initially seem improbable get turned into the probable very quickly by the bad guys who are far more imaginative.

But as I said this was late in 2010. I have no idea if the culture of Bitbucket has changed since then or is better.