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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.
GitHub should worry about actually building their core product rather than spending all their time on social justice crusades.
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.
It's a very convenient place to put your code to share with others, since everybody knows about it, has an account, and trusts it not to screw over the developer too hard. Sourceforge is not trustworthy and running my own is a pain in the ass. Just throw it up on github, publish the URL, and everybody gets to use it. If they do start screwing people over, they will move just like people moved away from sourceforge.
The more people I meet, the better I like my dog.
Why do you need 600 employees for Github? You need a tenth of that, including engineering, marketing, sales and support.
For those who don't know, my company acquired SourceForge along with Slashdot and have been improving it. Redesign coming soon as well. http://arstechnica.com/informa...
SourceForge doesn't do that anymore though
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.
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.
SourceForge and Slashdot have been owned jointly for many years
Wow, yes. This. Craigslist has no more than 50 employees.. Craigslist. Let that sink in. A service with a much higher profile, used by a lot more people.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
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.
Ah, turn a great decentralized info storage system into a centralized system controlled by one company.
You make that sound like a bad thing. My company uses Github, and a reliable centralized system with a standard interface works great. Of course, we have our own local clones, so we are not "controlled" by github.
Anyway, I can't imagine why they would need 600 employees. I always assumed that they were three guys working out of a loft in SF.
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!
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
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.
What does github actually do...
Absolutely nothing you can't do yourself by renting a cheap virtual server.
Do you also complain to your grocer that other people were already selling vegetables for thousands of years and you could grow your own if you wanted?
We eliminated all adware when we acquired SourceForge. Can't speak for the previous owners
We acquired SourceForge and Slashdot both in January of this year
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
Redesign coming soon as well.
Awesome! That never goes badly!
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
GitHub is popular among coders, but people in other industries, for instance, don't necessarily know about it. Perhaps a bad example, but Google search engine is popular among a wider group. People in entertainment, business, technology and other industries know about it, and likely use it all the time. Many might not like the iPhone, or may not be able to afford it, but they are aware of its existence. Same can't be said for GitHub. Even many in tech industry might not really know much about GitHub.
This is one of those cases where VC's are killing github. They should never have gone anywhere near VC money.
There are all kinds of companies that should seek and acquire VC money. But a company that's comfortably running a small, scalable service pulling in reasonable revenues... VCs will demand far more growth and market penetration than may be reasonable to expect... so you build a massive enterprise sales organization, burn cash like nothing else, and end up running a perfectly good, small company with solid revenues into the ground hoping to make billions instead of tens or hundreds of millions.
Lots of companies should go this route. Github was never one of them.
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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
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.
We still have over 1 million users per day and 500,000 projects hosted at SourceForge. Would rather do right by them than just start a new brand.
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.
I was a /. and SF fan for a long time. Thought they deserved better
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.
As a long time Slashdot user, longer even than my UID suggests, I'm glad to see someone take an interest in improving the site.
I imagine you're going to get a lot of snark & flak, along with a few feature requests and the odd helpful suggestion.
About the only thing on my wishlist is comment editing. I think that feature is long overdue here.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body