Github seems to be a pretty good or "safe" investment. Developers have already entrusted them with something as precious as their code itself. They also have pretty clear pathways for being profitable with private repos and so on, I'm not that surprised they are getting a lot of funding.
Sorry to say, but any time I need a private repo I just head to BitBucket. GitHub provides tremendous value, I hope they find a good way to capture some of it.
I get that when it's just a personal project, but the Github workflow is also very nice to have. When I want a buddy to access my private repo, I just add his/her GitHub user name, I don't need to have them create a BitBucket account. I don't need to figure out how issues and PRs work with BitBucket, etc. It's the network effects and UI that I'm paying for - one UI private or public. Plus, it supports a service I value very much.
On a more important note, you're probably not GitHub's target market. It's more like agencies and in-house dev teams.
My agency is considering switching to bitbucket from github because bitbucket's pricing per team member would cost us 10 times less than github's pricing per repository.
That's the reason we use it. I love GH and use it personally, but the pricing for companies with a lot of private repos (like agencies) is not ideal. We save a considerable amount of money using BB over GH.
BB is pretty great though, so aside from the social factor, the functionality is pretty much the same.
> On a more important note, you're probably not GitHub's target market. It's more like agencies and in-house dev teams.
That's technically true, but ignores the fact that the target market is only paying GitHub because it's popular among developers. If GitHub upsets enough developers, they'll switch to something else for their personal projects, and start recommending other things at work. The type of companies that use GitHub are also the type of companies that listen to their developers about things like what source control to use.
When you need a private repo why do you use BitBucket? I've used the private repos on GitHub and found them to work just fine, but I'm new to coding...
Because when your team gets to 6 people, you A) have money (hopefully) and B) your code is already in BitBucket, so choosing to pay them over GitHub is a no brainer.
So, when you're looking to not pay for something to head to a BitBucket, but if someone else is footing the bill (like a company with a real budget for more than $7/month) you'd prefer GitHub? Sounds like a win-win for GitHub.
Really? I trust a private repo I am paying for to be there in a few years. Perhaps I am still of the "buying a cd" generation but someone somewhere has to pay for a saas service. It's just more real this way.
True, a paid service is probably more likely to be around in a few years (in general), but does that matter for distributed source control?
I guess if you depend on non-git features, like issues, there's a chance that there's some lock-in. However, most of the ones I use have a migration strategy [0].
The beauty of DVCS is that it really doesn't matter if your "main" repository suddenly vanishes. As long as you've got it checked out locally, just push it somewhere else.
The main point is that I have to pay someone - otherwise hosting and indeed it seems every web service out there is running on the Greater Fool Theory.
Well many companies are profitable (actually, it's the only prerequisite to stay alive). And arguably, Github isn't profitable enough to fuel its own growth, or they wouldn't need to take $250m from investors in exchange of shares. The question is: is it worth 2 billion dollars? As a developer my guts say yes, but I have no idea what their numbers look like...
When you want to reach a monopoly position, fueling growth with only your profits it's not sustainable. They are getting (cheap) money to scale faster than their profits would allow them to do.
It's the same reason why Uber, although making billions of revenue, still raises money: cheap money that boosts growth.
What kind of situations would result in previous investors looking for liquidity? Assuming it is a trade for equity, it would be counter-intuitive do divest a fast-growing company if you are at least risk-neutral, which VCs should be?
It's a bit like a social network. There are better technologies out there (e.g. bitbucket), but like you said, developers have chosen Github for now. However, it would be possible for a mass exodus as they turn up the enforcement on the offensiveness bans.
Being able to mark certain branches and non-rebaseable is enough to make it better IMO. Perhaps GH has finally added this functionality, but it wasn't there the last time I checked.
