GitHub lost $66M in nine months of 2016(bloomberg.com) |
GitHub lost $66M in nine months of 2016(bloomberg.com) |
By the other hand, Atom is clearly a long term loser and they should let it go. Their contribution to the text editing world was terrific but now they should focus where they are the best.
I put my private stuff on my own Gogs instance or on Bitbucket, tho I like Gogs UI much better, it's closer to github. The community fork of it, Gitea, is also making progress to enable pull request federation.
Would be awesome if I could work together with people using Gitlab, Github or Gitea without them having to sign up to my site. They just fork to their own site, make their patches and submit the pull request to my upstream.
GitHub has little value to me, the social network they built can move elsewhere like it is for many programmers and coders.
I don't feel like my code would be safe on github.
If a company as vitally important to an industry as Github is to software can't do this... it's time to really worry.
Now, the thing is very competitive, and many companies offer "exponential growth". If your growth slows down, if the perspective is not good, divestment starts and that is a downwards spiral.
To stay competitive and to prevent an investor run, companies are forced to take massive risks. And risks materialize into huge disasters... like this one apparently.
This is apparently working very well.
These sort of statements are a little annoying. I understand that Bloomberg has to write for a less technical audience, but the writer must know this isn't an accurate comparison.
>You Don’t Need Venture Capital
>A lot has been written recently about how the venture capital world is changing. I don’t pretend to be an expert on the subject, but I’ve learned enough to say that a web startup like ours doesn’t need any outside money to succeed. I know this because we haven’t taken a single dime from investors. We bootstrapped the company on a few thousand dollars and became profitable the day we opened to the public and started charging for subscriptions.
I guess VCing up and losing money is a choice. They probably figure the odd $100m cash loss will end up as $1bn+ on the market cap. He looks quite cheerful in his rich list write up http://www.forbes.com/profile/tom-preston-werner/
As soon as a company starts parroting political messages like "white middle managers have no empathy" instead of, you know, building good tools, I know it's time to find another solution. I was a paying customer, and when github got into the political game, I dropped them like a bad habit.
I'm not screwing around here, I'm trying to build a business and your political aspirations do _nothing_ for me as a customer, so why don't you take them and shove em. Happy customer at bitbucket ever since.
In the developer space, it seems pretty much the same. SourceForge was good/cool until it wasn't, so people moved to Github. Now, as Github perhaps gradually loses steam or coolness (might not happen either), another company will emerge (maybe it's Gitlab) who will take share while Github perhaps spins into irrelevance. Wash, rinse, repeat - but each time the software tends to get cheaper and cheaper, creating a massive deflationary environment as the particular developer tool set becomes commodity.
Or maybe AWS or Google step in with an actual good product (hasn't happened yet as far as I can tell in CI/CD but hey you never know), and they charge nothing for it because it's part of a basket of services. Margin for the standalone company goes to zero.
Developers have, as far as I can tell, almost zero brand loyalty - and that probably makes sense - but it's very tough in my opinion to create great products for developers and make money as a company at the same time.
It seems logical that GitHub will eventually figure out how to make money, even if it is just by following the tried and trusted "project management system" model
I feel like part of this stems from the fact that every service now wants to charge a monthly fee instead of offering a one time purchase.
If you want me to pay $X/mo, that fee has to correlate to the value you are providing me each month. The minute that equation changes, people start to consider other options.
One of the benefits to SaaS is that you can make more money and your revenue is more predictable, but on the other hand it means your market is more susceptible to competition because companies are comparing their options more frequently.
If I am not mistaken Imgur is doing quite well for many years now.
They certainly made a lot of mistakes, had changes in the leadership team and are successful despite that not because of it, but I don't see them dying anytime soon.
$60M burn over 9 months after raising $250M isn't horrible either. If they continue to grow which seems to be the case, they will be break-even long before they run out of money.
The numbers aren't surprising to me; I'm more surprised why Bloomberg makes such a big deal out of it. GitHub's bigger problem is certainly that they stopped improving, had internal team issues, etc. but that's only a small part of the article (vs. a big focus on those numbers).
What are you basing that on?
The article says that in 2015 they had revenue of $95 million and lost $27 million.
For the first 3 quarters of 2016 the article says they “surpassed last year’s revenue […] with $98 million”, but also that they lost $66 million in that same period.
So while revenue doubled, the loss more than doubled, which does not look like they are on the path to break even.
Of course there are many unknowns, but going by the numbers in the article alone, it does not look like a slam dunk.
They're probably sounding alarmist to try maximising attention. :/
this is a pretty bad hit piece from Bloomberg, they should be ashamed
That, ironically, makes me REALLY not want them to go under: they don't deserve to.
It seems like other smaller companies have exploited the profitable parts of Github's niche out from under them.
I think I here a bell tolling.
Supposedly competitors may be cheaper or offer more in the free tier, and I could imagine you'd call Git itself a 'misstep', but otherwise I can only think of incredible cultural and technical achievements by GitHub?
I'll take Oracle, SalesForce, or Microsoft over Google any day of the week. The worst Oracle will do is start charging me more, but god only knows what kind of sleazy ad tracking Google will add. No thank you, I'll move everything over to BitBucket.
Fortunately, I don't think Google will bother. They already shutdown Google Code when they couldn't use it to increase ad revenue, so hopefully they'll leave GitHub alone.
It's a git web interface written in Go and is much more friendly on a VPS with small amounts of memory.
P.S. to put a bit more effort into my post: I really do wonder if the discoverability problem of a decentralized web can be better solved for things like social networks, code sharing, etc.
The only downside is that for a toy project, you have to spend money and resources on it.
Only half-kidding. So many big and small projects are using GitHub as their primary repository and sometimes their only homepage. And there's all those benefits of it being something of a social network as well, and an issue tracker and so on.
I'm sure something else would take its place, but it would take a while before it gets as much momentum.
4 years ago I thought that my GitHub account will get more important, the identity will matter but is that really the case? I don't see the typical network effects and behavior of a social network.
I think all there's is the perception of GitHub being the default choice. That's powerful but far less powerful than truly increased value for me as an user because of the size of the network, you being an user too (eg. Twitter or Uber).
Many people have warned that using these added-value features makes you dependent on GitHub (Linus Torvalds has a kernel mirror on GitHub, but for this reason refuses to use its other features). Migrating all that metadata is hard (is it even possible?).
That said, we don't use issues, the wiki, etc.
In these roles, GitHub is of tremendous value and not immediately replaceable.
There are obviously alternatives but the Github UI just makes it so easy to work with others.
What purge? I'm personally aware of some projects which are still on SourceForge which haven't been touched in >10 years. If there was a purge, it must have been limited to projects with no activity whatsoever.
The business itself may not be a great business due to the amount of cost it takes to run it -- but it's necessary for the running of other ventures.
Sort of like highways and non-toll bridges.
I think Atlassian is the company that makes the most out of the git marketplace, even if they have fewer customers. They are simply more efficient, and are ready to take over with Bitbucket if GitHub fails.
Also, many companies pay for Jira+Confluence even if they use GitHub.
GitHub and GitLab are not bound by the same constraints, and can focus on creating the best end to end Git hosting product. While Atlassian has to be careful about cannibalizing other product lines.
FWIW, with the latest releases, they've addressed most of the remaining features that were missing from Crucible, and I'm very happy now with the PR/code review flow in Bitbucket Server.
Think or know? For enterprise version control, I would be surprised if they made more than Github. I'll take enterprise Github over Stash any day.
(1) They went on a hiring spree in 2015-16, dramatically increasing their costs before their revenue was able to keep up. Something to keep an eye on in 2017.
(2) Half the team is remote! Kudos to them for making this work.
FWIW, I believe they're retrenching heavily on this. I remember reading articles about how they're trying to centralize management, and if you look at their jobs page (https://github.com/about/jobs#positions) most of their eng positions are SF only, at least the three or so I looked at. Only their support positions seem to be remote.
Are you being sarcastic (esp, in light of your point 1) )?
Out of curiosity from someone not in the know, would remote employees cost more or less than ones made to come in every morning?
Definitely not, I work remote. I feel I am more productive as remote employee, probably about 10-20% more. I read somewhere that for every 10 miles you commute daily, it costs you $10,000/year in gas/vehicle wear-and-tear/health and psychological side effects, etc, not to mention the lost hours sitting in traffic.
Would you rather have your employees sitting in traffic, or working on critical projects?
That said, I feel for the engineering staff that has to deal with the availability requirements and the DDoS events. Those folks are heroes.
That said, they should be doing better margin-wise since they would have relatively lower customer acquisition costs compared to the market since they have so much developer recognition.
Can someone explain the rationale behind pumping all this money into firms that clearly don't need such vast amounts of it, which only spurs exorbitant and unnecessary spending? Is it some sort of non-obvious game of unicorn musical chairs hoping for a hyper inflated exit before the music stops?
The hook for the founders? Who knows. My guesses:
- assumption that eventually the enterprise play will win the majority of the $ in the market
- that there is possibly a winner-takes-all dynamic in the market, given the strong ecosystem benefits
Also, it's very expensive to sell top-down to enterprises. In SaaS your cost of sale is up-front (sales salaries, commissions, acquiring the customer etc) whereas the payout is typically over time. Even if the contracts are mostly paid up front, you still have to build the enterprise sales team and ramp the reps, which can take around 6 months. So it's possible that the logical premise "pumping all this money into firms that clearly don't need such vast amounts of it" may be incorrect if enterprise sales success is required for long term success and they don't have the cash to 'go enterprise'.
Will be fascinating to see how this market plays out. My money is on Sid.
Github should be a pillar platform in our community for the next decade, and the only way for them to become that is via profitability.
If anything we should be cheering for gitlab. Atleast we can modify it locally.
Competition & long term stability means that they can focus on the features that are most meaningful for their user base. If their revenue stream continues to be poor, they may begin making short-term decisions to prop up revenue, which ultimately will lead to a much poorer product over the long term.
I travelled for an hour and he sat there staring at his phone between looking at me like something he had trodden in.
At least pointing tens of companies at Gitlab has made me feel better.
I don't care how advanced GitHub is; that is an INSANE number of employees for this kind of business!
If you calculate back from there, let's say $12M in ARR in Sep'13, $6M in Sep'12 and $4-5M in May'12 - that's insane (them raising $100M). Not sure if Bloomberg's data is correct but if we look at the other data points (probably same source data), $90M in ARR in Sep'16, it seems to be accurate.
Sep'12: $6M (assumed) -- raised $100M a couple of months earlier Sep'13: $12M (assumed) Sep'14: $25M (according to Bloomberg) Sep'15: $50M (assumed) Sep'16: $90M (according to Bloomberg)
The Sillicon Valley episodes write themselves it seems haha. This is hilarious.
edit: whoops, businessinsider is shit. Here's the original article: http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/how-silicon-va...
I guess I'm just a lot more frugal, and mostly isolated from this culture.
But when they can't afford it, my eyes start rolling pretty hard.
I had never seen him, so I'm posting this in case others were in the same boat.
It just goes to show that having a profile on a website does not define who you are as a developer. Websites go under, and better ones will rise up. I hope GitHub does stay around... I do not care for their "politics" but I like their service.
How much would you be willing to pay to store your open-source code at github?
Gitlab is superior in every possible way than Github except for it's speed.
That's why I asked the Q. Seems strange that large FOSS projects are hosted but no effort by github made to get some return.
So if you're hosting your own tools, BB still gets paid and you don't have to switch vendors.
(my personal feelings about Atlassian rank somewhere between dislike and dread, but the BitBucket integration is one the least offensive bits).
I had a recent conversation with a prospect and they took issue with the price of our software. Our app is in a specialized industry (ie. a smaller market). We charge a per use fee of $35. This fee enables our customer to immediately earn nearly $200 (a 5x return with no risk to them). Despite the significant benefit and profitability of using the app the prospect took issue with our price and referred to the cost of other apps.
It was that conversation that made me realize how we've become accustomed to the quality and price of software that's been heavily subsidized by massive VC investments.
I think this anxiety is why there's a lot of work being done in the decentralized space right now. The UX-side of "web 3.0" is sorely lacking but I think it's only a matter of time before people begin to crack it.
I'd love to see some research into what it would take (in terms of network size) to provide robust, decentralized replacements for service-as-infrastructure products like Github.
The world would crumble/ it's probably some sort of weird national security scenario.
There's no reason that GitHub couldn't be run profitably if they weren't just out there burning VC money as quickly as possible.
Review groups and Projets (kanban) have both been great.
GitLab started applying pressure and I think GitHub responded well, staying competitive in the face of a competent challenger.
Nice big fat waste of money, right there.
The reality is there is no reason for GitHub to have this much funding and spend so frivolously. This should be a warning.
The good news for them, is they can become much more. GitLab learned earlier on, the value of selling to Enterprise as opposed to startups. They (GitHub) really should have gone on a hiring blitz a few years ago, to find people who understood Enterprise.
GitHub, way over estimated the value of "social programming", when it comes to Enterprise. I would say 80% of programmers in Enterprise, are not passionate about programming and have no interest, in the "social" value, that is offered by GitHub Enterprise. The vast majority of Enterprise programmers see it as a job, and really don't care about what others are working on, unless it directly affects whether or not they can leave work on time.
What GitHub needs to focus on, is doing the hard things, that GitLab and Bitbucket will not be able to do, without serious R&D. I personally think, they should abandon Atom at this point, and use those resources to work on solving harder problems, that Enterprise would gladly pay for. Like better searches, better analytics/reports, better code reviews, and so forth.
As GitHub makes certain parts of the software industry significantly more accessible or cheaper, its complements will succeed commensurately. For example, easy access to, and encouraged proliferation of, skilled talent and robust open source (free) software.
That GitHub provides infrastructure for other startups makes sense, but I'd strongly push back on the idea that VCs will invest in a particular company like GitHub primarily because they think it will improve their investments elsewhere. That's a leap in market forecasting, and the simpler (Occam's Razor) and more rational explanation is that they expect(ed) a good return with some added benefit to "the ecosystem."
I'd be more in favor of this argument if you restated it slightly as, "Investors like investing in companies like GitHub because they can initiate feedback loops with their existing investments that result in mutual prosperity."
A scrappy low-budget startup can do just fine with a medium sized vm on one of the several places renting vms, running a simple source code control system server. Blowing dozens of megabucks to build a palace in a high-rent district to replace something that's close to free seems, well, dumb.
I suspect they see it as a charity case, if true.
On the back end, software programming tools and Internet-based services make it easy to launch new global software-powered start-ups in many industries—without the need to invest in new infrastructure and train new employees.
But without that development we'd be stuck with less security, less features, and a blockchain that took weeks or months to download and verify (instead of days). Bitcoin is only possible because of the massive amount of development going into this unprofitable codebase.
And I believe that Blockstream's investors are well aware that they will never have direct ROI on many of those upgrades.
The latter half of the statement applies to Stripe as well. The big difference between GitHub and Stripe is that Stripe's business model is more directly tied to the growth of entrepreneurship economy: the more money goes through Stripe-powered businesses, the more money Stripe makes. In GitHub's case, the correlation is less direct and less predictable.
You probably meant this:
If your lead really understood that they would "immediately earn a 5x return with no risk", and that was the truth, they would be cartoonishly foolish to not take that offer. Furthermore, wouldn't that mean your company could be printing money with its results? It's hard for me to believe a rational customer wouldn't take that deal, so either they didn't understand or believe that would be the result, or you're exaggerating here for the benefit of your point.
I know it's easy to think I'm just griefing you over this, but I'm trying to make a point in good faith. There are certainly legitimate reasons to dislike the profit incentives that venture capitalists encourage, but I think you portray their impact on small companies as unrealistically bad (and perhaps your product in a more favorable light than is warranted), to the detriment of a discussion about it.
None of this is personal, mind you. Just a comment.
We don't live in a world of rational agents. And even if we did we don't live in a world where most business purchases are made with people's own money. People have complex and contradictory goals and in my experience pointing out the value customers get for the price they pay is the least effective sales strategy.
Regarding your disbelief, you assume (like economists) that consumers are rational actors. They aren't. There are 2 reasons why the customer pushed back. One, they thought the price was unfair--e.g. "Hey MS Office costs me $5/mth, and your software which does less costs me several hundred a month, you charge too much."
Second, the customer is already earning a significant salary, so an extra $5,000 a year isn't meaningful for him. (Yeh, crazy isn't it). This is our first sales effort and we are learning how to position the product to overcome these objections--part of the problem was that we didn't anticipate push back and didn't properly position the product to avoid these concerns.
Folks are trained to get many types of products for free. I've seen similar cases where businesses refuse to pay for things like licensed information that have a clear and obvious value.
Leaving aside the question of what their intentions are, do VCs do something economically equivalent?
And now bringing back intentions, if the economic effects (and the resulting impact on customers) are the same, does the intention matter?
Not to mention open source, sponsored by big companies, universities and passionate individual contributors. E.g. try and sell a compiler, a JS framework or an IDE.
I think JetBrains is doing fine...
If you use a totally-permissive BSD-style license, you're stuck trying to charge for a support contract or custom plugins or something.
[1] https://itunes.apple.com/nz/app/tunelab-piano-tuner/id335568...
The software is so cheap now...
Oh, and provide a 10% discount of they buy the $99 version NOW. Offer ends soon. ;)
There's something strange going on here. What software do you produce?
- An industry that has a slight disdain for maximizing profit (healthcare here is a public good) - The physician in question is already running at 100%, so the extra workload to make an extra $5k/yr isn't worth it for him. - Other docs in the clinic are all over our solution and are seeing the increase in their billings
So, this doc, and another in the clinic looked at the fee and said they'd rather not realize the extra revenue because they thought someone else should be paying the software fee (the someone else being the government that runs healthcare).
See: Uber
My thought is that, apart from core infrastructure, and expanding internal capabilities, there's not going to be governmental protection of businesses/American internet entities (aside from what protection already exists in the form of legal code), if only because it would compete/displace with already existing businesses (CloudFlare, Akami, etc) which is something the US is loathe to do (which is part of the reason why flood insurance is so messed up - there exists a program to help homeowners get flood insurance, but it's by law required to not displace existing insurers).
Stop building systems with single points of failure. Doubly so when you don't control them!
Our risk plans should mitigate the immediate and permanent loss of GitHub at any moment, or we should be ashamed to use the title "engineer."
They even let you add your own analytics key
https://docs.gitlab.com/ce/workflow/importing/import_project...
In my experience, both are lightning fast compared to GitHub over the internet.
I have no problem donating to free software (I donate $10/mo to Neovim, $10 to SirCmpwn (sway), and other bits and bobs here and there -- as well as donating my time to openSUSE, runC and the OCI). The only condition is that I have to use it enough that I feel that they are owed some money to make the software even better.
This basic CRUD app is just user-facing thing, and now remember that they are making money not because of you, but because of publishers. This is where main functionality is.
Exactly. That's what drives features and improvements.
VC money lets you buy new sneakers but if you're looking to lose weight, a tiger chasing you is a much stronger motivation.
I'd also like to point out that Github was probably the most important change in OSS software by a wide margin. People easily forget comfort they've grown accustomed to, but it's worth to take a trip into the past from time to time: https://sourceforge.net/projects/avogadro/?source=frontpage&...
(and that's today's sourceforge – they didn't do much, but 10 years ago it was definitely even worse)
However, you did clarify your example, which makes it easier to accept. Phrased this way, it seems as though a potential upside of $5,000 wasn't worth it for someone who is skeptical of your product and has free alternatives. Stated this way, I can understand how VCs cause market incentives that make your job more difficult.
https://findery.com/Du/notes/githubs-oval-office-lobby
Hard to have much sympathy for that.
But, let's take some of those numbers: $25M in Sep'14 (subscription revenue annualized => ARR), $95M in Sep'16 ("revenue" - let's assume it's ARR; recognized revenue would be even better) - that's very impressive growth.
If that continues slowly, let's say they went from $25M to $70M, then growth slowed and they grew to $95M and can get to $120M by the end of next year and grow from there - that's a lot of additional revenue to offset the burn.
Burning $88M per year ($66M in 9 months) after getting $250M from investors + probably a large credit line - even if they don't grow at all, don't reduce cost, that's cash for 3 years.
If they reduce their costs (let's say by $15M), make $25M more in revenue, then it's a $40M lower burn ($48M), and they would still have plenty of the $250M in the bank (+ credit line + what they had before they raised the round).
I'm not saying it's easy or that they are doing phenomenally well. I'm just saying that they can get it under control relatively easily compared to other companies that have high burn rates.
I got the feeling that they are selling rather aggressively right now.
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the Git repository data (GitLab 7.7+)
the issues (GitLab 7.7+)
the pull requests (GitLab 8.4+)
the wiki pages (GitLab 8.4+)
the milestones (GitLab 8.7+)
the labels (GitLab 8.7+)
the release note descriptions (GitLab 8.12+)
the references to pull requests and issues are preserved (GitLab 8.7+)
https://docs.gitlab.com/ce/workflow/importing/import_project...
Maybe I'm too nice to them, but that doesn't seem like Microsoft's modus operandi anymore. These days they're all about getting people to buy more CPU cycles from Azure, rather than trying to seriously pursue Windows platform lock-in (which is a lost cause and they know it).
I imagine if Microsoft did buy GitHub, they'd have all kinds of offers like "get automated tests and CI to your Azure machines every time you push", or allowing you to host the repo on your own Azure VMs but still use the GitHub interface, stuff like that. They'd probably keep the free GitHub mostly as it is, with some nagging to upsell premium Azure stuff but nothing worse than that.
As for Google, I agree that they tend to get easily distracted and drop things, but I would hope that GitHub is popular enough (both inside and outside Google) that there would be serious pressure not to let it die on the vine. Contrast with abandonware like Wave and Google+ which never got enough mindshare that anyone felt like really fighting for it.
That being said, the product itself is stellar.
The problems are issues, code comments, pull request discussions, etc, which may be harder, and their API helps here.
The question I'm asking is whether it's better enough to justify a vast investment. New businesses -- startups -- need to take actions to conserve their cash, and sometimes "good enough" is good enough.
It's especially important to get this right when one choice is an unprofitable unicorn-style company with vast cash outflow.
Which is a bummer. I wish there would be somebody more closely analyzing the industry. There's so much going on and I believe that surfacing more of that to the broader community would be beneficial for all of us and result in stronger companies. I think nobody wants to see GitHub going out of Business. We need health competition (as consumers of their products). That GitLab forced pressure on them to improve the product is awesome. I wish Bloomberg would have put more focus on the cultural/leadership issues because a more diverse/inclusive GitHub, again, is better for all of us.
And it shouldn't be different. If the financials are not well, then the financials are not well. Docker, like github, DOES NOT have their future "locked up" 100%. There are a lot of reasons why both could ultimately fail and burning piles of cash seems pretty darn relevant despite the echo chamber that is Silicon Valley.
For me, it's especially not surprising because GitHub needed to heavily invest into GitHub Enterprise, start doing Sales, etc. to keep growing at the rate they wanted and they probably made a lot of mistakes when they started Sales. It's hard, and especially if you put Sales into a very developer-driven culture (=> takes you longer to figure it out => more mistakes => costs you more money). That all being said, some things they did are certainly a sign of being a bit too confident (office, etc.).
But, that's all not their biggest threat. You can get the burn easily under control and reduce cost especially if they are primarily in Marketing/Sales. The bigger issue is a decrease in product quality, a (perceived) slower pace for innovating/improving than their competitors (GitLab) and all the internal culture/team struggles. Having changes in your key positions, 2 out of 4 founders leaving, CEO change, etc. - that's all far more dangerous. A good leadership team can control the burn and reduce it if necessary. A good leadership team sets the right culture.
git remote add neworigin ...GitHub commoditizes (or more accurately, pressures costs lower to commoditization for) several complements that would otherwise reduce the profitability and viability of software based businesses. It provides widespread, free access to software as a hosting provider of open source software. It also provides widespread, comparatively low cost access to proven software talent as a sort of professional social network. As the costs associated with one part of an industry fall, the company that causes that decline and the companies that are complementary to those costs benefit greatly.
It is hard to start a new company offering a product for a market inefficiency that has been thoroughly solved for most use cases by commoditized, open source software. However, companies with a complementary relationship to that software will benefit greatly, either because they will have a wider market potential through new customers or because their own costs will drop precipitously. Similarly, developers commoditize themselves and their own costs to a company if they cease differentiating themselves or make it easier to find a supply of them. As an exercise, who do you think is better off in the video game industry - video game studios who make games with a de facto maximum price of $60 (ignoring DLC and in-game purchases), or Microsoft and Sony, who can charge for access to all of those games on an initial (hardware) and monthly (network) basis? Do you think it is in Apple's favor as a company that sells expensive hardware to have developers on their platform charge more or less for their software?
Anyway, my main point was acknowledging that, yes, GitHub makes a lot of other software companies easier through this principle, but no, I don't really agree that venture capitalists have this as an explicit investment strategy. That attributes to them spectacular market forecasting ability and there is a much simpler explanation, which is that they actually believe the company will do well.
But... we're talking hundreds of millions of dollars in investment. I believe that's too much cash to be just about subsidizing some other companies.
IMO: GitHub has a business model, a reputation and recurring revenues. They may be a "normal"[1] business, with long term value and stable returns over time.
[1] i.e. not yet another ephemeral app with no plan for monetization that grows 100x then sells for 20B and dies 5 years later).
That being said, I think it's inaccurate to characterize the people using GitHub as a CDN uniformly as "cheapskates". Many are just open source developers, often of limited means, trying to expose their work to the largest audience possible.
When you just start your project you may use github as your CDN and hope no one notices, but when you are as big as homebrew using someones elses resources like this is a pretty bad practice.
It was certainly a valuable tool and definitely the GitHub of its time, but man- soooo spammy.
https://www.softwareheritage.org/
There are other github mirrors too.
Beyond that, there is no "should." You price the product at what the market will bear.
jesus wtf
Email me if you want help on this. No BS or strings. Check profile.
One perspective is that people are trained to be too cheap because of market incentives, but another perspective can be even well-informed consumers make a reasoned pricing decision that concludes with free or low cost software. And if you want to make a normative point, you can say that this is bad for small companies trying to make software for these consumers, but you can also say that consumers are benefiting more by purchasing the software's complements rather than the software itself.
Github's huge win is the network effect of having one account and being able to interact on thousands of issue trackers, create PRs, etc. It would super cool if GitLab could achieve some of that same experience without requiring everyone to all be on gitlab.com. It would go a long way toward addressing the criticisms that Github is too centralized.
Yeah, I think it'd be awesome if there was some form of optional federation between GitLab instances (sort of like Matrix or NextCloud).
I also recommend to check out Gitea (community fork of Gogs) if you haven't yet, it's a nice alternative to Gitlab for selfhosting.
MS has also been working hard into making it usable with a Git repository instead of TFVC, in fact, there's a lot of features and workflows that only work with Git - e.g. branch for work item, pull requests, etc(I'm debating switching from TFVC to Git because of this).
It has a lot of the features you'd expect from an issue tracker - projects, teams, kanban boards, iterations, a dashboard, the "work item" with all its configurable fields.. since it uses TFS as a backend, there's also the awesome query builder which gives you tons of ways to create queries and filters to dig into your work items - this is probably great for management. There's also a very complex permissions system(I assume, again using the TFS backend).
The main con for me however is the abysmal UI around discussions on work items. The discussion by default is stuck in a tiny part of the already cluttered work item screen(this has changed recently as they introduced the ability to fully customize the layout). There's a single textbox with a "smart editor"(ugh) where you can type your comment, and some limited hyperlinking(you can address team members and link work items), and you need to press "save"(which is actually under the default option "save and close") for the work item to add your comment. It's pretty clunky to monitor conversations(email notifications) vs github's notification hub.
Oh, and they're a bit light on various smaller features, but they've been churning out new updates constantly, so I think they'll catch up.
As a top-down, management-heavy approach, TSVS is probably a fine system. As a collaborative workspace for a small dev team with very little management, I find it lacking the killer feature of rich discussions that Github has.
The main discussion point in a work item: https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/docs/work/backlogs/add-wo...
Hyperlinking: https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/docs/work/backlogs/add-wo...
Example of a discussion in pull requests: https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/docs/work/productivity/pr...
I was, of course, not trying to say that Phab was regressing but rather that GitHub had picked up the pace. There have absolutely been good improvements to Phab this year too!
(Not me specifically, but I've been there in past places.)
Most importantly, is it more likely that you're not as well informed as you think you are, that you don't fully understand the competing priorities at play, or that the business is actually being stupid, as you say?
In the example that I was loosely referring to, and are not at liberty to discuss in further detail, companies must pay to be qualified to bid on a specific type of business.
Firms that license some specific information are far more likely (on the order of 50%) to successfully bid. This information is clearly disclosed to them when they get qualified.
So they make a voluntary, significant investment to participate in a process, and then fail to take a simple step that would make them far more likely to make money. I call that dumb, but perhaps I am in fact too incompetent to make that assessment.
Though they all did actually buy in the end, and there was enough income to live on, I found the uncertainty very distracting and not worth it.
Did you ever think why Microsoft is so lazy about enforcing the end-user Windows licenses on non-business customers? Maybe they want kids get used to to running Windows at home, and expect it in a work environment, and value this higher than the lost revenue from "pirates"?
Microsoft doesn't need to, AFAIK pirated copy don't get upgrades and genuine HOME copies only work on the first computer they are installed on.
There are also more than one set of laws, and they're not all compatible with each other, which is why efforts are being made to provide a unified set of laws.
As an super-small-time investor who only owns stock in companies whose products that I use and enjoy, I can't knock them for it. For me, the logic is that whenever I tire of using something or no longer find it valuable, presumably I'll have early insight to sell the stock before the rest of the world catches on. I don't know if that same logic applies to proxy buying, but I suppose if you're intimate enough with your companies to know if they're abandoning Github for something else, as I don't know if pulling venture capital is as easy as selling the stock.
There's generally minimal liquidity. During a round, an existing investor may have the opportunity to sell some shares to new/other investors, but if she knows something that's not coming out during diligence, there's definitely something fishy going on. If the round is shaping up to be a major up-round, maybe an early investor wants to lock in a good return, but that's beside the point here. And then of course if things really aren't going well for the company, you're looking at the bad kind of liquidity event--a liquidation.
So if a VC wants to pull out based on a negative hunch, it's probably either impossible or the signal itself will doom the company if it wasn't already doomed.
Just my 2 cents as a first-time founder.
Is that a skewed view? Are there many big companies that would disappear without being able to move to a different platform in under 2 weeks?
I believe no VC is going to invest $50 million dollars purely in hope of vaguely helping the rest of their portfolio. While at the same time vaguely helping every other startup in existence, thus negating any advantage that might accrue to their own companies.
Maintaining the app and not moving forward with new features and adding value (because of lack of resources), I would assume it would just die eventually.
It's the corpse model of product development.
With that many eyeballs on your site it's no surprise that even their subtle advertising style [1] is profitable. I'd personally much rather see sponsored posts everywhere than pandering direct marketing and spying/tracking.
~20 years ago Oracle handed out a stripped-down "personal edition" of Oracle Server, their then crown jewel, with basically no strings attached, just to get people on the bandwagon.
That is, politics is not something you can opt out of. Choosing to do or not do certain things impacts certain individuals and groups. The result is politics. It comes to you. If you operate any system by which humans can communicate, politics is inevitable.
The ban hammer is not wielded impartially.
Then again, Snapchat.
(it's not about politics, it's about money)
https://github.com/opal/opal/issues/941
TLDR: Some possibly transphobic person said something on the internet that got traced back to his github account. Some person not connected to the project complains and get's transphobic person removed from github. Github hires complainer to "improve diversity".
That and a couple of other things like their code of conduct have indicated that github wants to be the PC police more than a service provider. I want a dumb service provider.
I don't know if google has cleared out their "fake news" but the top hits on the subject are from heavily biased sources (geekfeminism.com and breitbart).
That was the thing that got me to delete my private repos and stop paying Github for its services - that day, they stopped being a neutral platform and became an opinionated service provider, and while I don't tend to do anything that would run afoul of their policies, I am exceptionally uncomfortable with the prospect of a platform provider exercising editorial control over others' code. I still use it for open source stuff, but I moved all my private stuff to Gitlab and have been exceptionally happy with the choice to do so.
What I do find unsettling is the fallout, including GitHub's behaviour. I like GitHub as a product, and I use it all the time, but it seems at least moderately prudent to migrate repositories to Gitlab (or somewhere else) and keep them up to date, if only to have a backup other than my local copies if GitHub decided to close my account(1).
Looking at the wider context in the developer community, and across society, I am concerned by the number of people who want to immediately resort to the metaphorical thermonuclear option in the event of a disagreement. I mean this in terms of unyielding aggression, complete disengagement and exclusion.
I'm not specifically talking about gender issues either: Brexit and the US election are other prime examples. There's a complete lack of empathy from all sides in many online debates. It's starting to make me think psychopathy isn't so much a disorder as a spectrum on which we all sit.
On that cheerful thought, back to work...
(1) There's no reason they should that I'm aware of, but who knows what might happen in the future? Old chestnut about all eggs in one basket, etc.
some of these people have a point - their small minority though is pretty rabid and off point. i've never seen "RESPECT ME!" ever not backfire, on any scale and for any group.
it'll be interesting how we will resolve this kind of emergent social angst - before too much of our future falls victim to it.
there was a code of conduct that people working together adhered to back in the day, and as long as it was kept minimal and professional things are just fine - but it's always over applied, and it always contributes to the fall of its parent. PC and SJWs fall into that catigory these days. they should revise their tactic, i think it does them more harm and causes them to lose credibility, rather than gain any. they might win a few battles, but we'd all lose the war.
i belong to a majority that gets shit due to what a minority does - in my head, i think the way to change that is by serving as an example for the good - and fight the bad together with everyone willing.
the Opal folk should have just apologized, said they'll talk to their dev about his actions and closed the issue, then moved on. instead, that thread's curator u/meh just fanned the flames because of his own spartan approach to community health that overshadowed project health, and ended up causing more damage than it set out to avoid.
here's hoping github survives this.
As far as I can tell projects are still managing themselves as they and their leaders see fit. Seems fine to me.
The spectre of spooky SJWs haunting silicon valley shouldn't be the thing prompting people to consider redundancy in their source code management.
They suddenly decided to be a PC/feminist stronghold, with the associated reverse-logic, claiming words like "meritocracy" were actually oppressing and not empowering, and what not.
http://readwrite.com/2014/01/24/github-meritocracy-rug/
After that stance was lost, you would every now and then read about just another piece about Github where PC politics were being inserted as Github policy.
https://hacked.com/github-promotes-reverse-racism-sexism/
It's been a gradual, but noticeable process.
You may or may not agree with the means/politics itself, but there should be no question that Github itself has been getting increasingly political recent years.
And when you do that, you are bound to alienate someone. I, like many others, would prefer Github to remain a dumb/neutral service-provider. That's what I use it for. I don't need it to throw a political platform in my face.
There was the bruhaha over banning someone from the whole site for using the triggering eggplant emoji: https://mobile.twitter.com/evilaubergine/status/679108445421...
https://www.google.com.tw/amp/s/amp.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAct...
Noticed, didn't give a shit.
Frankly it was a complete over reaction based on virtue signalling, band wagoning and the general mesd that is any kind of nuanced debate online.
When I run into that stuff now I just close the tab, life is literally too short for it.
It's corporations that need upgrades and support. With corporations, I'm sure, MS is not lax and enforces the licensing policy.
I'm sure most of these could be re-imported into an alternative service through its API, even if with some loss of fidelity.
(for others: he's also the creator of git-annex, an out-of-band file storage extension to git, and for a long time was the maintainer of critical parts of Debian's ecosystem. He likes to live in a yurt: http://joeyh.name/yurt/)
Disclaimer: I work at GitLab.
I understand that people would be annoyed by a forced switch, github has a working issue tracker, wiki, and not to mention the awesome github pages. But, I just think loosing them is not that dramatic.
Github's UI makes sense. I can find anything in the blink of an eye and it's blazing fast. The team I'm currently working with is completely fed up with Gitlab.
The GitHub ecosystem will be the biggest hurdle for GitLab to overcome. (Disclosure - I work at ZenHub)
citation needed
Copied:
(Just found this thread; sorry for the late reply!)
if we postulate that moving all of bevry's projects to gitlab creates a snowball of other projects and communities doing the same I disagree. When a field is as dominated by one player as OSS development is dominated by GitHub, it is extremely hard to break that hold.
For example: Facebook dominates social media. Within Facebook, there are several organizations, many of which are reasonably sized, and which do good work. Now…suppose one of those organizations left Facebook for a more benevolent social network. Or even two or three of them. Do you really believe this would create a “snowball effect”, resulting in a mass exodus from Facebook to the more-benevolent social network?
Of course not. Everybody knows that Facebook is quite possibly the sleaziest, least trustworthy company on the Web. (If you disagree, I’d feel confident that you’d concede that it is in the top five such companies, at the very least.) And, in fact, people have tried to create trustworthy, privacy-respecting alternatives to Facebook (like Diaspora, Friendica, and Tent).
Diaspora launched in 2010. Although its decentralized nature makes it harder to get concrete numbers for its user base, the best I could find puts the number around 380K. After four years.
Four.
Why? Well, it’s not because people prefer to have their privacy invaded, and it’s not because people like one central company to amass dangerous amounts of personal information to sell to advertisers (and god knows who else!). It’s because people are on Facebook. It has all the social capital, and—from the standpoint of where people choose to put their time in—that is more important than ideology, decentralization, technological advantage, and privacy.
I dislike this intensely, but it’s true.
For a while, people were pretty angry at Twitter (even though it is a more ethical company than Facebook, by orders of magnitude). So, some people tried to get a “snowball effect” rolling for their alternative, Identica.
At 1.5 million users, it’s been a more successful “benevolent alternative” to Twitter than Diaspora was to Facebook. But that’s still less than 1% of Twitters 241 million users (source).
GitLab may have more merit going for it than GitHub, but that’s not enough. Moving everything to GitLab will:
Cost a lot of time and effort to migrate the codebase Cost a lot of time and effort for existing developers to readjust their workflows and learn the differences of GitLab Most important of all, it will reduce the visibility of every last project to a small percentage of the current size. And don’t think that linking to the new location will help. The alternative social networking sites I mentioned above had massive campaigns, many of which were prominently featured in tech magazines and blogs with millions of viewers. Linking from a popular old location to an unpopular new location does not work like forwarding e-mail; traffic won’t simply follow the link and continue the same behavior at GitLib like nothing’s changed. Perhaps a few individuals might…but you’ll still lose far, far more contributors in the end.
And what happens to open source projects that cease to be developed? They die. And the communities that once breathed life into them die, as well.
I cannot protest this idea strongly enough. If you move to GitLab, perhaps you can keep the company’s core developers active enough to keep the projects alive. Perhaps you might even find some short-term success in convincing a few contributors to keep working on your projects.
And if you move to GitLab…I really, really hope that they do. But I think that moving to GitLab will do as much good for your repositories as moving them to a private server for bevry employees only. Slightly better than that, perhaps…but not by much.
I would love to be proven wrong about what I’ve written here. But I don’t think that I am.
Please: reconsider this. Not just for the company, and not just for the good of your software, but for your extended community.
I believe that what is good for your extended community is also good for your software, and your company, too.
Please reconsider.
A few people making a lot of noise.
Any suggestion this had a material impact on githubs business is pure speculation.
Not any more - https://techcrunch.com/2016/05/25/reddit-image-uploads/
Actually that is still the case. He said "de facto" not "official". Imgur still represents the majority of image links on most subreddits.
https://www.reddit.com/domain/i.imgur.com/
r/all shows more imgur links than i.reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/all/
Your article dates from half a year ago and they still couldn't snuff imgur out with built-in upload facilities, suffice to say, as far as the users are concerned, imgur is the defacto beloved service. People on twitter are more likely to use twitter's img upload than redditors are to use their own.
We appreciate open source projects moving to GitLab.com and we're seeing more and more of that. But it does reduce the visibility of the project so people should take your warning into account. Our focus right now is making GitLab.com more performant for the people that do use it.
"Cost a lot of time and effort to migrate the codebase" => hopefully we solved that, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13189475 that says "GitLab has a migration feature that "just works". Was painless here"
Also, it seems some people are really scared of changes and would do anything to keep the status quo.
i've never seen "RESPECT ME!" ever not backfire, on any scale and for any group.
[1] clearly not meant to be an exhaustive list
When deployed during a minor skirmish, going nuclear often risks similarly nuclear retaliation.
But what I meant is the "REAPECT ME" that leads to being "tolerated" rather than it being earned respect.
Should I take from this that what is being done today is likened to what suffragettes did back in the days of first wave feminism?
Doubly so when a brand reaches infrastructure level - like Github, or arguably Dropbox. Just don't screw with the product that's working well. Not breaking things isn't expensive.
The opening/home page of Github is still better though. What really got people into Gitlab was the self hosting. Github has depended on selling their enterprise version. I was at a talk where Wanstrath said something to the effects of their expensive enterprise version that only people with money to spend need. .. (Years after I left my job at a state university ... they bought a license. -_- I hated how they paid for a lot of stuff they didn't need).
Even though Gitlab may lack in some UI elements, it's more than good enough and it doesn't hinder work. I'm at a shop that still uses the community edition too.
Gitlab and Bitbucket really cut into Github's model. There are more clones out there now too. If you really want a self-hosted Github like UI, there's Gogs too.
I offered a fixed-price "no win, no fee" rate equal to about a week of my normal hourly rate. I thought it was a great deal given how much they'd already spent, plus it gave some certainty to them around something could have been very messy and open-ended.
The client got hung up on, "What if Tom only takes an hour to solve it? What an expensive rate! What a rip-off!" They were more concerned with seeing me put in time and effort than actually getting results.
* Charge daily or weekly, not hourly.
* Don't anchor your results to "free" (this includes not getting paid unless specific results happen).
* If a customer has been repeatedly burned by other consultants and believes this problem could be solved in an hour, consider either 1) avoiding those customers or 2) working on an agreeable scope that precludes an absurd amount of time.
I'm not saying that will fix all your problems, but if it helps, I've never encountered this issue with this formula.
This can work for the provider of a service, in certain circumstances.
But my opinion is that it is always better to charge a price that reflects the value delivered, no matter how long it takes to deliver that value.
There is a (possibly apocryphal) anecdote I read once in which a consultant was brought in to service a machine with many parts. He replaced one part and invoiced (say) $10,000 for replacing a part worth $1. When asked why his bill was so high, he said: "I charge $1 for the replacement part. The other $9,999 is for knowing which part to replace."
As knowledge workers, those who are skilled must remember that "hours spent sitting in a seat" is not a valid measure of their productivity and should not permit clueless managers/clients from judging them in that way.
Anyway, I'm happy to say that I avoided this customer (and others that care excessively about timesheets) and I have no regrets.
Then why not raise your price to $99, and let them negotiate you down to... $35?
But on the other hand, again, when dealing with enterprise purchases, the purchases department needs to demonstrate that they bring value to the table by lowering costs. So it is typical to make what you suggest and account for a commercial discount of 3-10%,depending on purchase size, etc.
You need to fight for it, but you are safe to grant it in the end.
This might happen even if you don't know about it, if your boss sets the prices and you can request a special discount for special clients.
It was an interesting example of how it's best to not try and please everyone.
> spend 5k to make 50k
I'm sure it has nothing to do with people making numbers up.
Your customers' pride could be one reason why they refuse to spend that, but have you considered that this is an uncharitable perspective? Don't you think it could also be because they have honest reservations about your product or better alternatives for their business than that they are obstinately refusing to just hand over their money to make $50k?
I think it's much more likely that the situation is actually quite nuanced with competing incentives, priorities and perspectives on either side. An information asymmetry is not the same thing as irrationality.
2. There is both opportunity cost and hidden cost for trying your solution.
The other old chestnut is "first they came for the..."
I think you're getting a bit off in terms of perspective here. There's a huge difference between [words on a page] and [Human being I'm talking to]. I might well say something that makes someone on the internet cry, I might laugh and post pubbietears.jpg if they said my comment had made them cry.
If I saw someone crying in close proximity it's likely I'd stop and ask if they were ok (albeit i would also feel very uncomfortable and undecided on said course of action in case it's imposition).
I'm being artificially extreme but it's certainly true that empathy in most people will be more pronounced for a physical person than an online username (who, lets face it, may or may not be representing their reality).
(And, sorry, my wry sense of humour doesn't necessarily work in plain text and I should make more effort to remember that. To me the spectrum idea is interesting, but it's just an idea.)
But when people say that GitHub has better UI, they're more talking about the clean menus and intuitive UI. Some of it might just be getting used to one design over another. Although, BitBucket to me has always felt too cluttered.
The mere mention of a number - any number - "anchors" psychologically in an absurdly strong way.
So in that sense, the statement: "I offered a fixed-price 'no win, no fee' rate" includes the literal mention (like the social security ending digits 0000) of "no fee" -- so it doesn't matter what the sentence is. The sentence could read "Obviously I wouldn't be able to do it for no fee" and it would anchor to $0, whereas, if you said, "I obviously wouldn't charge a hundred billion dollars" it will anchor it to a hundred billion dollars.
These effects are incredibly bizarre. I'm not an expert salesperson but I do know about them.
---
I guess I should give a reference: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/27/books/review/thinking-fast...
Is a good introductory article. Daniel Kahneman is the name most associated with this research, or at least reporting it, and he won a Nobel prize* in Economics in 2002 for his work.
* (the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences by the Swedish National Bank)
I do think you're overstating the research though. Many studies of unconscious priming haven't been replicated, and psychology as a whole is very subject to publication bias. [1]
Anchoring is a real effect, and I'm a fan of Kahneman (especially prospect theory), but the evidence about "incidental" influences is very weak.
[1] http://www.nature.com/news/over-half-of-psychology-studies-f...
The phrasing you say you actually use isn't an anchor. But you can still try different ways of phrasing it!
Extremely subtle differences in phrasing can have huge effects on people's reactions. If people are not reacting reasonably, try a slightly different phrasing, as well as different offers :)
I can think of a few comments by family members (aunts/uncles etc especially) on rants by 20 somethings on facebook about how the idiot olds were screwing us all over - being quite hurt by the positions taken in the rants.
Some of this is to do with the weirdness that is facebook crossing virtual/real world interactions. But most of the people who are still obsessed with spouting their personal views on [Global warming/Brexit/Trump/Syria/etc] will quickly find a partner to trade verbal blows with
The Gitlab UI is /fine/, but the speed is what gets me. On github, even if I have thousands of commits, the UI is instantaneous. If I click on something, the load time is less than a second for me. So I switched to Github and paid for the private repositories. I absolutely didn't mind paying for this since Github is so fast for me and seems to be adding pretty cool new features (code review enhancements on PR, for example).
I still have one of my repositories on GitLab and it's still slow when I do things like browse commits, view source files, etc.
It's not just Gitlab though. Bitbucket is pretty slow for me as well, though not as slow as Gitlab. I would guess that Github's caching algorithms are much better than either of those two to really make pages seem snappy.
There's only so much you can solve by throwing more hardware/money at the problem. We have reached a point where we are wasting too much of this, so adding more won't help much.
> (or put some devs on fixing their backend)
We have plenty of people working on the problem, and for quite a while now. We're also hiring more developers to help us out with this:
https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/merge_requests?scope...
https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/merge_requests/...
https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/25421/
There's also this old (and closed) issue which contains a lot of information: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/operations/issues/42
As for the interface, we're working on improving the design of the product and have just hired a UX Researcher to help with that. Would be happy to hear any specifics you have to offer.
I do file bugs against GitLab every now and then, but I haven't done so for this one because I assume that there's an existing item on file for this (and I don't care to look for it) and that this is all part of the the longstanding, "Yeah, we really need to work on our frontend story, especially for mobile."
The end result is that just don't keep GitLab tabs open. Which is a little obnoxious, given the well-known issues with how slow GitLab is to complete requests.
I think you argued the wrong way. The maintainer states it's skill not political views that give merit. If github hired Coraline for her political views, then github stated it's political views not skills that give merit.
> Either they have an obligation to be politically correct as a VC-funded startup that needs to ensure its public face is immaculate
Immaculate? There's no black and white here.
> or Coraline is a fantastic Ruby developer who is good at building community management tools and her politics are irrelevant.
Yes but Coraline will never be satisfied with just being a fantastic ruby developer. It was pretty clear from her comments she cares more (or at least as much) about people than software.
Who is saying this, exactly? The conclusion of that thread was the top maintainer on Opal siding with the originator. If you're worried about him removing you from his projects for your political opinions, don't work with him. This is the argument of the other side in that debate. That this thread happened on GitHub is largely irrelevant. If you're talking about hiring Coraline then you're exhibiting the same kind of intolerance for varying political opinions that people are chiding the "SJWs" for in that thread.
Bluntly: I simply don't understand why you think a controversial issue thread reflects at all on how GitHub will function as a product. It's like switching toaster brands because the toaster company hired a proponent of the Atkins diet.
The parent's point is not that they want a source code platform to agree with them in all political issues. They simply don't want a platform that kicks people off for political reasons. I agree with this. Perhaps an analogy will help you understand:
I don't know or care what the political leanings of my local water and utilities companies are. But I will never willingly be a customer of a water company that occasionally shuts off the tap based on a few tweets they disagree with.
Something may be causing something.
There's no proof of that.
Ah, but is there any evidence that 'Something' is *not* causing it.
There's even a name for it. It's called: argumentum ad ignorantiam (guess what that translates as), also known as an appeal to ignorance.
And just to be clear, "prove they're not leaving" is not a great argument. I mean I guess they might be? But $66m dollars is a lot of money. They'd have to lose over a million paying customers to lose that much from people switching away. This is a simple calculation that returns a boolean, there are either a significant number of paying customers leaving such that it impacts on the scale of millions of dollars (and we're talking about a product that is $7/month for individuals here, that's a lot of $7 subs) or there aren't.
What do you think the ballpark is for paying customers irritated enough by that thread's existence that they leave the service altogether? I honestly don't know, I wouldn't know where to begin quantifying.
so there might be something to it honestly.
Apparently the cliche is right: a large portion of programmers are sorta insular and socially awkward white guys who embrace the concept of "nerd" as a positive and so are a bit defensive and feel threatened about other views and groups and people invading their social space. They may have legitimate concerns here or in similar cases, but the level of energy about it is so clearly defensive and of a magnitude that's wholly unwarrented.
There's just more going on with the sort of people who would get that up in arms over this stuff than just the surface issues themselves.
Why are you assuming that GitHub will discriminate against you for your politics? I fully support your choice and in fact I think it's justified, but if you really didn't care about politics, you would keep using GitHub until they kick you off of it for thoughtcrime, as @meh would have the "SJWs" doing in that thread. It honestly just seems that you want a platform whose politics you agree with, and don't want to use a platform whose politics you disagree with.
That is totally fine and valid and is a thing everyone has the right to do. Nonetheless, it's still a politics. Politics is unavoidable, it is a consequence of being able to think and disagree. You can dislike the internal politics, but to do so you have to hold contradictory views yourself. That is the essence of disagreement, and cloaking it in anti-politics does nothing to change that.
I do care about politics, but it is irrelevant to my projects. The time to care about losing access to your source code is before you lose access to it (like backups). Github has shown that there is a signifact risk to hosting my code there so I'm moving off it.
> It honestly just seems that you want a platform whose politics you agree with, and don't want to use a platform whose politics you disagree with.
No, it want a platform that doesn't get involved with politics. Just like I don't care about the politics of any other service I use, as long as it doesn't interfere with my using it.
> Nonetheless, it's still a politics. Politics is unavoidable, it is a consequence of being able to think and disagree.
So you'd be happy to shop somewhere that doesn't allow gay people?
So I'll ask again. How, concretely, do Coraline's politics interfere with your current usage of GitHub?
And how do you know Coraline wasn't interacting in the same vein?