GitHub lost $66M in nine months of 2016

Re:GitHub lost $66M in nine months of 2016 by AceJohnny2 on Thursday December 15, 2016 @05:17PM (#13189069)

People keep bringing that up, but that's missing the bigger picture: GitHub is more than just a git host, it's also a "social hub" where people can fork repos and offer changes back (pull requests), a passable bugtracker (issues), even wiki, and even web host (github.io).

Many people have warned that using these added-value features makes you dependent on GitHub (Linus Torvalds has a kernel mirror on GitHub, but for this reason refuses to use its other features). Migrating all that metadata is hard (is it even possible?).

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Re:GitHub lost $66M in nine months of 2016 by icebraining on Thursday December 15, 2016 @06:28PM (#13189694)

Joey Hess' github-backup backs up everything github knows about a repository (including branches, tags, other forks, issues, comments, wikis, milestones, pull requests, watchers, and stars) to the repository.

I'm sure most of these could be re-imported into an alternative service through its API, even if with some loss of fidelity.

https://github.com/joeyh/github-backup

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Re:GitHub lost $66M in nine months of 2016 by AceJohnny2 on Thursday December 15, 2016 @06:56PM (#13189886)

That's awesome. I need to send JoeyH more money.

(for others: he's also the creator of git-annex, an out-of-band file storage extension to git, and for a long time was the maintainer of critical parts of Debian's ecosystem. He likes to live in a yurt: http://joeyh.name/yurt/)

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Re:GitHub lost $66M in nine months of 2016 by icebraining on Thursday December 15, 2016 @07:08PM (#13189953)

https://www.patreon.com/joeyh

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Re:GitHub lost $66M in nine months of 2016 by flukus on Thursday December 15, 2016 @11:56PM (#13191179)

The other problem is that "cloud services" have taught people not to back up their data.

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Re:GitHub lost $66M in nine months of 2016 by ProAm on Thursday December 15, 2016 @05:22PM (#13189134)

The problem is social hubs add very little real value and are easily replaceable, especially among technically astute people.

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Re:GitHub lost $66M in nine months of 2016 by matt4077 on Thursday December 15, 2016 @06:28PM (#13189686)

I think Github is a prime example of how much a "social hub" can add. In the 6 years or so before GH, do you think I ever send a patch upstream? Now, collaborating is almost easier than not doing it, and it's an awesome community.

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Re:GitHub lost $66M in nine months of 2016 by TeMPOraL on Thursday December 15, 2016 @05:27PM (#13189184)

Oh, but they do add a lot of real value. In fact, they're extremely efficient at making this value - so efficient that they don't get to monetize anything but a small fraction of it.

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Re:GitHub lost $66M in nine months of 2016 by ForHackernews on Thursday December 15, 2016 @05:20PM (#13189097)

There are plenty of replacements. Bitbucket, gitlab, etc.

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Re:GitHub lost $66M in nine months of 2016 by sidlls on Thursday December 15, 2016 @06:01PM (#13189498)

I actually prefer bitbucket because I don't have to pay for private repos.

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Re:GitHub lost $66M in nine months of 2016 by Perihelion on Thursday December 15, 2016 @08:05PM (#13190246)

You can have private repos for free on GitLab.com too.

Disclaimer: I work at GitLab.

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Re:GitHub lost $66M in nine months of 2016 by sidlls on Friday December 16, 2016 @12:47PM (#13195130)

I was completely unaware of that. Thanks for the heads up. I use gitlab at work, and now I might try it for my personal projects.

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