I totally agree with you. And to add to your point, the impact of having a dominance in the market of "personal project repos" extends far beyond individual developers paying money on their personal accounts and/or becoming paying customers when they start their own companies.
If you think about mid-sized software companies (~10-100 devs), if 80% of your developers have a strong preference for Github over Gitlab or Bitbucket, then that company is likely going to stick with Github or decide to move to Github eventually. I think this is where Github captures much more than that 12% revenue that they are giving up right now.
Re:Announcing unlimited free private repos
by TheCoelacanth on Tuesday January 08, 2019 @01:38PM
(#18858115)
Also, if the VP of Eng. or whoever is making the decision thinks of Github as the default git SaaS because it's what they have used since college, there's a good chance they will just go with Github without even evaluating alternatives.
Re:Announcing unlimited free private repos
by beatgammit on Monday January 07, 2019 @08:19PM
(#18852086)
Sure, but that 12% isn't irrelevant, it's an investment. They're investing 12% of lost revenue in future growth.
Now, if personal accounts were far less (e.g. 1% of revenue), I could see the argument that they're irrelevant.
Maybe I'm just complaining about vocabulary, and perhaps your clarification was what the OP intended.
Re:Announcing unlimited free private repos
by justincormack on Tuesday January 08, 2019 @09:03AM
(#18855531)
That was in 2016 it is likely to be a lot lower now, as enterprise grew.
Re:Announcing unlimited free private repos
by pritianka on Monday January 07, 2019 @07:03PM
(#18851635)
Glad you appreciate the GitLab experience! I agree with you that loving the product is what it is about. I am happy everyone gets free repos across the board now (whether at GitLab, GitHub, or BitBucket) since repos are basically commoditized at this point. In my opinion (shaped by our CEO Sid's perspective), all roads lead to compute.
Re:Announcing unlimited free private repos
by seem_2211 on Monday January 07, 2019 @05:56PM
(#18851134)
Yep, there's a reason companies like Autodesk and Microsoft et al give students thousands of dollars of software for free while they're students.
Re:Announcing unlimited free private repos
by peteretep on Monday January 07, 2019 @08:04PM
(#18851983)
+1 on that
I moved all my personal repos to Bitbucket a while ago, as it was free, and have referred them several paying customers from my clients.
Re:Announcing unlimited free private repos
by chaostheory on Monday January 07, 2019 @07:34PM
(#18851802)
I can say the same, except in my case it was moving from Github to Bitbucket. If Github, did this a while back I would have been locked in for life (by choice)
You only see the short term.
I was on Github during my university, all my projects were there, my team mate were on there too, it was pretty great. When my student account expired, I decided to move everything to Gitlab. I didn't want to move but I won't pay 7$ a month to host my old school projects and some personal stuff. Now that I did move everything, I actually enjoy Gitlab quite a bit.
What do you think I'm going to use if I start a commercial project? In the past I would have chosen Github, but now that I'm comfortable with Gitlab and see all its benefits, it's probably the one I would choose.
Cutting that 12% may lose 12% in the short term, but in a few years, it's going to gain you much more than 12%.