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Building a Coder's Paradise Is Not Profitable: GitHub Lost $66M In Nine Months Of 2016 (bloomberg.com)
Though not much popular outside the technology circles, GitHub is very popular among coders around the world. The startup operates a sort of Google Docs for programmers, giving them a place to store, share and collaborate on their work. But GitHub is losing money through profligate spending and has stood by as new entrants emerged in a software category it essentially gave birth to, according to people familiar with the business and financial paperwork reviewed by Bloomberg. From the report: The rise of GitHub has captivated venture capitalists. Sequoia Capital led a $250 million investment in mid-2015. But GitHub management may have been a little too eager to spend the new money. The company paid to send employees jetting across the globe to Amsterdam, London, New York and elsewhere. More costly, it doubled headcount to 600 over the course of about 18 months. GitHub lost $27 million in the fiscal year that ended in January 2016, according to an income statement seen by Bloomberg. It generated $95 million in revenue during that period, the internal financial document says. The income statement shows a loss of $66 million in the first three quarters of this year. That's more than twice as much lost in any nine-month time frame by Twilio Inc., another maker of software tools founded the same year as GitHub. At least a dozen members of GitHub's leadership team have left since last year.
What does github actually do that git doesn't? Ah, turn a great decentralized info storage system into a centralized system controlled by one company.
So they make money selling private code repositories. If you want something really private, why use a 3rd party hosting service? So that you have a neck to wring when it leaks? Your private repository is just a NSL away from giving everything up without you ever knowing. Or a hack away. Or just a password-reuse user fail away, as happened 6 months ago.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
GitHub should worry about actually building their core product rather than spending all their time on social justice crusades.
Github does have a viable market selling private git depots to companies and as the sticker says, they are making $95 million a year doing it. They just need to keep costs in line with income or investments if they see potential for growth.
Seriously, how can you fuck up something as basic as Github?! I get that hosting fees can be expense, but for it to go in the millions!? They are obviously doing something wrong here.
in terms of technology and services, Atlassian (Bitbucket, SourceTree etc.) is far and wide the bigger, and I think because of that kind of leadership, they will eventually prevail over GitHub and become the biggest supplier of these softwares and services.
Before or after they started pissing people off by deciding what "was" and "wasn't" an acceptable repo, which magically lined up with SJW views.
"Opalgate", anyone? Read the comments yourself.
https://github.com/opal/opal/i...
https://news.ycombinator.com/i...
Hiring a SJW, Coraline Ada Ehmke, to run "anti-harassment." (Good thing people on the left never harass anyone.)
http://www.breitbart.com/tech/...
The second you start judging what is, and isn't, "moral" (as opposed to acceptable to your standards ala no porn), then people are going to 1) get worried their repo might get affected, or 2) say "fuck you" altogether.
They're selling convenience.
Most software managers don't care too much if someone that can produce a NSL gets to see their source code. They are concerned about direct competitors having access, and they're concerned about having to pay sysadmins to handle the development environment. Sysadmin labor isn't cheap, and neither are the servers, storage, backups, auditing, or workflow tools that make development happen.
If your business is making software, you can just pay GitHub for that infrastructure, and focus on your software.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
You can make a lot money pushing adware onto popular free downloads.
Why do you need 600 employees for Github? You need a tenth of that, including engineering, marketing, sales and support.
Although Github has an explore feature and search facility, its still basically where code goes to die for the most part. They need a better way of opening up that archive and presenting it to users. Probably a better focus on features for the paid accounts too. I'm sure all the espionage and hacking going on is not providing the market with much confidence in the protection of IP and stopping govs and hackers from exploring backdoors in software. All of that is really dragging down the tech market at the minute.
doubled headcount to 600
Really, 600 people? For what?
I get that designing and running a service like that takes real work. It doesn't happen by magic. Still, it seems like the job for a few dozen people, not the job for 600 people. What are they all doing?
I could understand it if you said, "github has 46 employees".
For business code I imagine your company has its own repository management and mirroring, but for personal projects how do you backup your code? I feel like most students/outside of work programmers just throw it up on GitHub, but that may not be the best strategy. What do you do?
I remember looking at Github Enterprise and finding their licensing model insane. It seemed like a recurring fee of about $5k/20 users/year as a starting point. There was no way I could have solid it to our leadership. $500 for only 20 users, easy sell. $5k? That is a site license of IntelliJ Ultimate or this.
Wow, that was such an intelligent comment. You must have been valedictorian at Trump University.
So when you decide to mitigate the risk by bringing it all in-house, you can't. Pretty stupid excuse. For large projects at large firms such as those mentioned in the article (Walmart, Ford, etc), you need these types of people on hand anyway. Farming out shit "for convenience" isn't an excuse for being lazy.
Sure it might cost more, but if you farm it all out your business will consist of workers who are jack-of-all-trades and master-of-none. Perhaps this trend explains the mediocrity of today's products.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
First of all, this is easily the worst description of any technological subject I've seen on Slashdot for a long time: "The startup operates a sort of Google Docs for programmers, giving them a place to store, share and collaborate on their work." It does give you a way to store, share, and collaborate, but the mechanisms are drastically different. Google Docs collaboration is synchronous, GitHub's is serial.
I think GitLab has emerged rapidly the last two years or so as a very viable alternative to GitHub. If you want to use their hosted service, it's free for as many collaborators as you want, for as many projects as you want, that don't have to be public. It includes built-in continuous integration services, Kanban-style issue boards, Slack-style chat, and way more all for free. They're iterating and adding new features at an incredible rate. If you want to host your own, that's also free if you don't need any of the enterprise-edition features, which leaves the community offering still quite good.
Early this year, when the open letter to GitHub was posted, GitLab made their own post ( https://about.gitlab.com/2016/... )about how they're working to solve the problems presented, even though they weren't specifically the addressee of the letter. I never did hear about GitHub actually responding to that letter, and I've seen very little iteration or change from GitHub in a very long time.
It should be in the tens, not hundreds.
I'm heating 1999-2000 flashbacks. Back then, all the Internet "utility" companies like Sun, Cisco, the ISPs and the telecoms were spending money like crazy building lavish workplaces for all the dotcom kids with the money the VC firms were giving them. Same thing happened back then as is now -- there's a massive arms race to build the best, most all-inclusive employer out there to attract and keep the elusive people who happen to know the flavor of the moment. Remember, Google serves 3 meals a day, provides free bus service from Hipster Central in San Francisco, and basically operates a college campus. They're widely seen as the benchmark, and every tech company seems to be emulating them to as much of a degree as their funding will let them.
GitHub's a perfect example of one of these utility companies. Slack, Atlassian, AWS, Microsoft (for Azure,) are also good examples. All of them make tools to let web developers crank out phone apps faster, which is the flavor of the moment, or provide infinite infrastructure to run the apps on. Traditional IT shops are also getting in on this trend, because GitHub and friends let CIOs push the magic DevOps button. All of a sudden, your siloed coders working on must-run applications in a mission critical environment switch into a Facebook-esque "move fast and break things" Agile model -- or so the Agile consultants tell them. I work in systems engineering/integration for a very staid company writing mission critical applications for an industry that is risk-averse, and our dev organization had the magic button pushed. I think this is one of the ways GitHub is making their VC money -- the VCs see that corporate executives will gladly write a check to tick the Agile box, and their toolset is seen as one part of it. Get all your developers working on Slack or HipChat as well and you're really cooking!
We'll see what happens this time around when the bubble pops. I actually like a lot of the cloud computing, API-focused and agile development stuff, and I think IT is going to adopt most of it regardless of how critical the stuff they're writing is. But some of it is absolute nonsense outside of the sphere of web development companies writing throwaway apps for phones. Just like in 1999 though, if you can spell HTML, let the good times roll. The truly skilled will always survive.
The issue took on a new sense of urgency in 2014 with the formation of a rival startup with a similar name. GitLab Inc.
The article fails to mention what Git is, or why one might reasonably expect a competitor to have "Git" in the name.
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
If you want something really private, why use a 3rd party hosting service?
How much do you have to spend on system administrators to keep the server that's hosting your stuff secure? For small organisations, the cost of GitHub is a lot lower than the cost of a private repository with the same level of security.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
If you want something really private, why use a 3rd party hosting service?
Most companies don't need "really" private. They just need "normal" private. I don't wan't to just open all my code to the world, but it isn't something I lose sleep over.
I once consulted for a company that was considering open sourcing their main product. Some people were opposed, and thought they would be giving away their "crown jewels", but they decided to go ahead. A year later, we checked, and the OSS repo had been downloaded this many times: 0.
The hard truth is that nobody cares about your crappy code, and even if you give it away, you will often need to work hard to get people to use it.
So when you decide to mitigate the risk by bringing it all in-house, you can't.
Not sure why that would be the case. You're still using git as your client for interfacing with github, so each developer should still have the entire source code history. If you want to re-centralize on-site, just have a dev pull the latest from github, add a new remote to the on-site server, and push. You can then delete your github repository, which is supposedly a permanent, non-reversible act.
Apparently wizard is not a legitimate career path, so I chose programmer instead.
The issue isn't that they are selling something people don't need, because tons of companies use their service.. and the issue isn't that it doesn't make money because clearly it does... the issue is that it take 600 people to run the business which seems insane.
"In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson
Read the article (I know, heresy here but still) - they make their money from large corporations, the ones who (like their customer IBM) should be able to eat their own dog food.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
No surprise. The only ones who will end up making money in cloud technology will be the people hosting the cloud. All others will engage in a race-to-the-bottom in terms of pricing, simply because the cost to start a cloud company is minimal - but the cost to operate a cloud company is pretty static for all (AWS, Azure, etc), and there is ALWAYS someone who thinks they can do the startup cheaper and somehow break through the hosting costs (and fail, yet again, to do so).
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
We're talking about people securing the local server that would now run the repository - something that their customer IBM should be able to do instead of using github, if only to better position themselves with yet another sales option to their customers.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
It's worth noting that Amazon didn't post any meaningful profits until very recently; but the end game is clear: investing meant owning a share of overwhelming future economic power.
Github is really convenient, especially for ad hoc projects, but I wonder what investors are getting. Investors want to own something but it would be trivial to move your code repositories to a different service. Amazon or Google could crush Github if it ever suited their purposes.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Frankly I'm really surprised by all the github negativity here, apparently /. is not comprised of the people I thought it was.
I'm not going to list all the features and benefits of github, to which there are many, they are easy to find with a quick search. I will say that, in this day and age, If you code for a living github is your resume. So, if you don't 'get github' and you are surprised about your job opportunities, don't be....
?? I don't understand what you're bitching about. It's the same reason people farm out their e-mail to Google, Microsoft or Intermedia. Yes they have people on staff who could do the job but they've got other shit to do. It's cheaper and more reliable to outsource discrete functions like Git or e-mail to a company which has the scale to do it cost-effectively.
Though not much popular outside the technology circles
They're losing money because of the high sales costs. And when they cut sales staff, they'll lose market share and customers. That's the problem when you sell a commodity that anyone can compete with you - you don't have any real differentiator except cost - so you create the market, and someone who has less overhead steals it from you because they can charge less. They are pretty well hosed.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Why would IBM need GitHub? They own Rational and that is the industry Cadillac.
Why in the world are they saying this is, "a software category it essentially gave birth to"? There were loads of others with far more features for years before git, let alone github. It's like saying facebook gave birth to social networks.
I really admire GitHub for the technical work they've done. Take into account the online management of folding in pull requests, really impressive (although it made me wonder a bit who would do that online where they couldn't test the effects of rejecting some changes!)
However, as impressive as GitHub is, to me the pricing model has always been a little high end, and so I've ended up using BitBucket more. They also do a great job hosting Git repositories and have some impressive technical abilities as well.. they are like the Avis of Git repos, "They Try Harder".
So I do worry a little about GitHub having some kind of implosion but it's great to know there are other very worthy choices to move to, in the meantime the git repo completion is good for everyone.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Why can't they secure it, again? Because you've arbitrarily decided that the only alternatives are some 6-figure security consultant on staff or completely giving up and using a third-party host? Technically the second isn't a real option compared to the first. And the first is of dubious quality in most circumstances.
There is a difference between "popularized", "refined", "simplified", and "gave birth to". They might be able to claim some of the first options, but not the last.
"Anything you say can and will be used against you in a targeted advertisement" - Adam Harvey
Really?!!!
You don't say...! Finally figured out that nobody can't make money losing money?!!! If you give away everything for free, there's no money to be made.
Very sharp guys...!
How is GitHub blowing through that much money??
Look... I'm not saying they shouldn't be spending any money. I know server infrastructure has costs. But they lost 66mil in 9 months ... that means they SPENT at least 66 mil in 9 months. On what?? How much server do you need to host a text repository, with SVN and a website?
And GitHub had been around for nearly a decade, so it's not like they were building a whole new server farm from scratch. That's 66 mil on salaries, maintenance and upgrades.
This signature is false.
Most small startups or contracting gigs, don't worry about things like that... It's much more valuable to not have a sysadmin managing, scaling and patching a server running git locally...
Honestly, a github organization with solid policies and 2FA for all users is pretty solid. Sure github could get hacked, but they have entire security teams to mitigate that risk. Your average basement git server doesn't have any security teams.
The conveniences conveyed by GH are undeniable - ready-made code dev environments with widely-used issue and progress tracking, integration with other project management tools (zenhub, jira) and all in all eliminates and centralizes one's OSS and private project interests.
However, as more and more Internet Infrastucture-ish projects have moved to GH, either completely or in major parts, I've become worried. OpenSSL, several Apache.org projects, some OSes (Linux, FreeBSD, illumos), and so on call GH their home now, or at least use it in some substantial way. Eggs in Baskets analogies apply, and given the security landscape of things now, one must at least pause and weigh the Pros and Cons of this centralized and trusted repo for so many important pieces of code.
What a waste! I don't believe VCs tolerate this kind of ROI...
Perhaps this trend explains the mediocrity of today's products.
I don't think it covers all of it, but it plays a role in it.
Companies have moved past seeing IT as some magical resource and see it about the same way most first world nations look at a toilet. Unless it's really shitty, everyone just expects it to be everywhere they go and function good enough to get the job done. There a few out there that understand that it's something that plays a role in life three to five time a day and that when shit is serious, you're really going to enjoy having a top of the line as opposed to a "just good enough" model.
So when you decide to mitigate the risk by bringing it all in-house, you can't.
There are reasons to bring infrastructure in-house, but risk mitigation isn't one of them. Your risk is mitigated by having an SLA with a provider whose primary function is to maintain those servers, with penalties attached for downtime to compensate for the loss.
For large projects at large firms such as those mentioned in the article (Walmart, Ford, etc), you need these types of people on hand anyway. Farming out shit "for convenience" isn't an excuse for being lazy.
No, those companies really don't need a devops sysadmin on hand. They need sysadmins in other areas, who can focus on those areas, but they don't need nearly so many supporting the development.
Sure it might cost more, but if you farm it all out your business will consist of workers who are jack-of-all-trades and master-of-none.
Really, it works the other way. If you farm out distinct areas of your infrastructure, the experts you have don't need to work in those areas, and they can specialize in the areas in which you do need in-house support.
A company I have worked at has reasons (some of them even decent) to have everything in-house, and as a result of that, my sysadmin team was highly fragmented. We had a dozen members, but were expected to support a dozen different efforts, so we had these guys who knew X well, those guys who knew Y well, this one guy who was a Linux expert, that guy who was a Windows expert... and as a result, we were effectively all on-call 24/7 because we were spread too thin. If any system broke, we had to first figure out who the expert was, and then contact them directly.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
on TV, so as an occasional, nonprofessional user, let me say: the user interface at GitHub is awful. You click a link that looks like a binary file ( with a .bin extension) and sometimes you get html, sometimes a binary file, sometimes a text file. Trying to figure out how to grab the stuff you need from GitHub is incredibly annoying. That's all I have to say about it.
Oh, how naive you are. When the sh*t hits the fan, an SLA isn't going to make a difference to your customers when you tell them "yes, it's broken but we have an SLA."
Salesforce brags about a 99.9% uptime. So I guess that being off-line for 20 hours, and being unable to recover 4 hours of customer data, is okay because hey, you have an SLA.
BTW, 99.9% uptime is shitty - that's more than 8 hours a year. Would you be happy with your toilet or fridge if it went down for 8 hours, never mind 20?
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
GitHub Enterprise is great for on-premises, but it's very, very expensive and limits the number of users on it. I have to run my own backups.
Atlassian also does this for their on-premises software.
I don't think this is fair that since we don't use the cloud and provided our own compute, power, space, and network that we should pay by the user, but here we are. I administer it and run my own backups. I shouldn't be paying for each user.
Kriston
Make a great service, get popular, get investments, waste it on things that don't matter, crash the business, and service is history.
Could have used that money to do something useful like funding the site maintenance from interest and then working to expand paid business.
Only insightful-rated comment that even came close to the roots of the problem. The BitHub financial models are failing.
Why doesn't anyone offer a project-centered cost-recovery system to fund the software people are willing to pay for? The hosting organization (AKA BitHub in this case) should EARN a percentage of the project funding my making sure the project proposals are complete, by evaluating the results against the success criteria, and by reporting the results to the donors (and the world). Complete proposals would include the budget, the resources (including people), the schedule, testing requirements (with testing priority given to the actual donors), and, most importantly to me, the success criteria.
This could be done with a kind of "charity share brokerage" where BitHub would hold your donated money while you are picking the projects you want to support. The notion of project should be broad enough to include new software projects, bug repair projects, support projects, enhancement projects, and even ongoing cost projects (for example in such cases as when server-side support is needed to run the feature).
From the donors' perspective, you could review all of the projects you'd supported and even look for related projects to support. Hopefully you'd see how many good things you'd helped with and be motivated to donate for the next year, too.
Details available upon request, but right now it looks like Microsoft and Apple win again. They may have terrible software, but their business models are pretty good. Not like GitHub's.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
It's very clear that you donâ(TM)t collaborate or else you wouldn't be so negative about this service. Working on a project with developers in different countries is a billion times better with the integration from github products than without. I'm constantly surprised at the level of thought and ideas I come across regularly. This can't compare to some in house group from Walmart or some other big company. They'll pay the small pile of money for a pretty awesome solution today.
I have private repositories for my code that I don't want publicly attached to my name, but still want available (and github features) without keeping a local server running. If there was a hack and my code got out, so what?
Large corporations will maintain their own servers, but I think most small business and individual developers feel the same as I do.
And they can also self-host, all the benefits of collaboration without worrying that your stuff is dependent on others.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
This is what happens when you hire a bunch of staff and then start caring about social justice instead of providing a quality service/product. Their change to and enforcement of their new Code of Conduct was the impetus for me to leave GitHub permanently. It's the business of a project owner -- not the repository hoster -- to police each community and draft/apply rules as needed.
This is the same company that closed accounts and repos with joke or otherwise tongue-in-cheek names. No warning, no hope of regaining the lost data.
GitHub is a liability I cannot tolerate. But they're not the only fuck-ups in the tech space.