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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.
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...
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.
SourceForge and Slashdot have been owned jointly for many years
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 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?
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
Redesign coming soon as well.
Awesome! That never goes badly!
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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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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.
I was a /. and SF fan for a long time. Thought they deserved better