Simpler reaction: Github:FI is already priced at a rounding error for the kinds of companies from which most of the revenue in this space will originate.
1) We are so small that we don't even think twice and buy some private repos on GitHub. (i.e. no market there)
2) We are so big that we can't possibly even fathom the idea of having our code on someone else's server so GitHub.com is out of the question. Sadly GitHub:Fi is per/user and because we are really big that means we have lots of devs so it is too expensive in most cases. (i.e. enterprise sale yuck)
3) For medium sized companies that either have some devs (more then 5) or a ton of repos or large repos they want an alternative to github. Many are slapping up gitolite which while good is a far cry from github.
Like I mentioned I already have found companies that want this solution and they are using GitHaven. The real question is if this market is too small or should I just move on to another project, open source GitHaven and let everyone (who wants to) slap it up as a frontend to their existing gitolite installs?
You can try to avoid these schemes, but you have to do it and not go out of business.
The problem with Github:Fi is the value proposition is extremely weak when it comes to meeting enterprise needs.
- They have an issue tracker that doesn't support custom fields. This is critical for companies with 500+ developers and/or very diverse product lines.
- They have a wiki but you can get confluence for $12,000 for the entire company which is more feature rich. It has decent searching.
- They have blogging but this is of no value in the enterprise world. The majority of employees really don't have the time or care about blogging internally.
- They have Gist which offers no real value for the same reason why blogging isn't that big of a deal.
When it's all over, their only strong value proposition for the enterprise world is their intuitive push and pull interface. But the problem with this is they are competing directly with free solutions like:
- gitorious
- gitolite + internal web interface
- gerrit
I'm obviously speculating here, but based on how their pricing model changed:
old: 1000 per user (initial purchase) + 200 something a year per user subscription cost
new: 250 per user if less than 25 users and 200 per user if more than 25 users
I think they realized they over estimated their value proposition initially. If Github wants to seriously break into the enterprise world, they are either going to have to lower their per seat cost and/or strengthen their value proposition.
How many of these companies do you think have developers using git in the first place (As opposed to subversion or [wait while I assume a look of sufficient disgust] visual source safe)?
For private repositories gitolite is really awesome, but I think there should be a company about it. What I mean is that github or some other company should offer hosted gitolite instances, in the following form:
You pay something like price_of_small_linode_instace+price_of_service, to get:
A virtual machine with gitolite up and running, with a good web interface and online documentation. I think that the web interface part is the piece this company should not opensource. With this web interface you can create repositories and users, and modify the gitolite settings in general.
A backup service, in some other different VM and network, so that if something goes wrong with your gitolite VM you can ask a free (and automated) restore, possibly with hour granularity for the latest 24 hours, and less granularity for bigger periods and so forth.
Note that this gives the user virtually infinite repositories... if they don't upload movies to their instance, as there is a lot of space even in a small linode instance for git repositories.
This way this is a "pure product" as there is no need to repair or install manually virtual machines, and the company can focus into evolving the offering, developing a better version of gitolite, of the web interface, and so forth.
p.s. I mentioned linode but can well be ec2 or whatever is better suited for this stuff.