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Building a Coder's Paradise Is Not Profitable: GitHub Lost $66M In Nine Months Of 2016 (bloomberg.com)

Posted by msmash on from the it's-not-easy dept.

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.

6 of 227 comments (clear)

  1. Never saw the point of github by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    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.

    1. Re: Never saw the point of github by whipslash · · Score: 4, Informative

      SourceForge and Slashdot have been owned jointly for many years

    2. Re:Never saw the point of github by TheRaven64 · · Score: 5, Informative
      Lots of things (though a lot of them can be replicated by running GOGS or GitLab on your own machine):

      The most valuable thing is a single sign-on service. I leave a lot more bug reports for open source projects if they're on GitHub: their issue tracker isn't the best, but it doesn't require me to create a new account. The same thing if I want to submit patches: I don't need to subscribe to mailing lists or similar, I just clone the repo, send a pull request, and it's done.

      Every GitHub project has an issue tracker, a web site, and a wiki, all hosted by GitHub. The issue tracker is integrated with the commit log, so I can close issues by simply putting 'Fixes #42' in the commit message and have things automatically cross referenced. The wiki is a git repo, so I don't have to use crappy wiki editing tools, I can clone the repo and edit the files in my favourite text editor. The web site can either be static HTML that you generate and put in a git repo, or it can use Jekyll to generate the HTML from other markup languages on the GitHub servers.

      The pull request mechanism is the thing that GitHub is most well known for. It's closely related to the discussion and code review interface that is the core of the GitHub site. If someone sends a pull request, I can review their code, comment on it, discuss high-level design choices in a thread that's attached to the pull request, and merge it, all from the web interface.

      GitHub exposes a bunch of web APIs that other services use (for example, you can get notifications whenever there's a push to a particular repo). For example, I can set up Coverity scans or use Travis-CI to run the test suite on every commit. Even better, things like Travis integrate with pull requests, so even before I start to review code, I can see if it passes tests. This is even better if the pull request comes with new tests: I can see that they pass, without even doing a checkout.

      GitHub provides private repos, so once you are familiar with the interface, you can use it for internal projects.

      GitHub will generate tarballs from any commit (and they are quick to download). We use this in the FreeBSD ports collection for a load of things. If I want to package something that's on GitHub, it's two lines to specify that it's from GitHub and what commit hash I want and the build system can grab a tarball of that revision and turn it into a package.

      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
    3. Re: Never saw the point of github by whipslash · · Score: 5, Informative

      We eliminated all adware when we acquired SourceForge. Can't speak for the previous owners

    4. Re: Never saw the point of github by whipslash · · Score: 3, Informative

      We acquired SourceForge and Slashdot both in January of this year

  2. Before or after? by ckatko · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.