GitHub Desktop is now available

Re: GitHub Desktop is now available by atonse on Wednesday August 12, 2015 @12:35PM (#10048787)

I consider these kinds of companies 2nd Generation Open Source companies ... whereas the first generation of open source companies had an open source product and made their money off maintenance, the 2nd gen often have a bunch of components that are developed open source, but sell a closed source glue/package of all those components.

Companies like CoreOS, Mesosphere, all fall under this umbrella, where you could technically glue all their open source components together to form their main product, but it would take you quite a bit of time to support.

Github is sort of like this. They contribute a ton to open source, and are built mostly out of open source components (that ARE open source). But their website is really just a glue to all their infrastructure, and that's closed source.

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Re: GitHub Desktop is now available by joesmo on Wednesday August 12, 2015 @01:06PM (#10049026)

That's a really great summary. It's an interesting alternative way for companies to produce a fair amount of open source contributions and still make money. I can definitely see this with other companies including ones that specialize in continuous integration and other services that developers are interested in.

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