I wonder if anyone at Elastic has talked with anyone at Github as, it seems to me, if Elastic gets any significant traction, this does nothing to help github (though perhaps I'm overlooking something) and leads into a 'Tragedy of the Commons' scenario wherein everyone is depleting a shared public resource for their own personal gain knowing full well that it isn't sustainable long term.

Have you ever tried to sign up for a Github account? Last I checked they made you perform a bunch of scary crypto stuff on your local machine before they'd let you in. I gave up at that step, as it would have required downloading and installing a bunch of random software to pull off. No idea why they would make people do that (and it's why I still don't have a github account), but...

To limit your service to only accept customers who have navigated that minefield? Sounds like the ultimate form of adding friction to your signup process.

> Last I checked they made you perform a bunch of scary crypto stuff on your local machine before they'd let you in.

Generating an SSH key is 'scary crypto stuff' ? One would hope anyone using git, and really any developer would have already done this many times before.

> I gave up at that step, as it would have required downloading and installing a bunch of random software to pull off.

You mean install a single program, git, which is sort of a perquisite for using, well, git? The windows installer includes the programs needed to create an ssh key and macos / almost any *nix distro will already have them installed.

I think its pretty clear that elastic.io is targeted at developers and I can't possibly imagine a developer having any issue signing up for github, installing git and generating an ssh key. If such developers exist they are likely very new to development and thus probably aren't a good match for a beta signup anyway.

Do you really have no idea why they would make people do that, though? Maybe it's so that your source code can be securely protected so that only you can access it and modify it?

If it wasn't a joke of some kind I'd like to make a note to never trust any sensitive data of any kind to his products.

Considering generation of an SSH key 'scary' is a pretty strong indication to me that there is no tangible level of security being implemented.

For example, I'm a ruby developer, so yes most of the open source development I do involves Github. But even I know about (and use) projects like zip-ruby [1] on Bitbucket or redmine [2] on svn.

[1] https://bitbucket.org/winebarrel/zip-ruby/wiki/Home

[2] http://www.redmine.org/

But you must be kidding about GitHub signup? There's nothing to install locally for a GitHub signup.

Also, saying the "crypto stuff is scary, I won't do it" is similar to the old "math is hard, lets go shopping."

I suppose that makes the service more like an API where the service generates the code to run on it rather than the user.

Edit: OK, I was able to read all of the captions via "View Source"

GREAT! Now get rid of the silly github requirement (and don't return to the even more silly twitter requirement) and give your users the option of storing it in github or retrieve their data some other way.

I can't even begin fathom the decision process that concluded in requiring github.

Users own all their data, they can revise their answers, and other users can fork them; just like small Git repositories, and just the use-case that gists generally solve. Compare: http://timcameronryan.askedtheinter.net/q/1318314 with https://gist.github.com/1318314