How can that explain the terrible uptime for the ~4 years post acquisition before all the AI stuff you’re talking about started?
For example, here is a Hacker News story about GitHub being down on July 28th 2016: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12178449
Here's GitHub's historical uptime graph (on which this chart is based), saying there was no recorded downtime that day, or in fact that entire month: https://www.githubstatus.com/uptime?page=40
I am making an assumption that if Microsoft saw a lot of false positive outages they would fix that, but might drag their feet if there was an outage that didn't get properly recorded (assuming it's automatic to begin with, it might be that a human needs remember to update it).
See, I can just as easily make up a story that explains the chart.
[1] https://github.blog/engineering/infrastructure/introducing-t... [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20181211191456/https://www.githu...
Just dumping HARs from devtools from a status site that hallucinates 100% uptime when it has no data. For example, all GitHub services had 100% uptime in June 1996: https://www.githubstatus.com/uptime?page=200
The graph gives GitHub Actions 100% uptime before it launched to GA in November 2019. That factors into the average uptime for every month on the graph before that. It's fully horseshit.
I honestly can't explain the discrepancy between the graph in the article and the month over month stats on the same page, but the latter tracks both to my own subjective experience of GitHub and their own internal metrics.
https://www.githubstatus.com/uptime?page=3000
According to it, GitHub had 100% uptime from June to August 1996.
I think centralized code hosting is pretty much going to get killed by AI. Just like it's doing to social media.
That elephant didn’t even exist yet for the first few years of poor uptime shown in the graph in TFA… I don’t really disagree if we’re talking about the recent uptime issues, but how does that explain the years 2020-2023?
Private corporate codebases are a poor fit for GH because they don't benefit from public social graph effects. And the typical codebase isn't so large as to be technically challenging to deal with with OSS tools. I'd guess they make up a substantial share of revenue.
But once the reliability is called into question, self-hosted or smaller alternatives start to look good. Although there's some trickiness there if you want to be super cautious about making sure you can get to your code+infra in case of a vendor incident, especially if you're cloud based.
If all companies did this, there'd be no free tier on Github. You get the free tier because the SaaS customers are subsidising the free tier.
There's something called "rate limits" that engineers not working for GitHub have probably heard of; it's this crazy idea that you should limit the load on your infra in order to avoid downtime. GitHub is not the first free service to ever have to deal with bots.
Companies had been hosting their own CVS or later svn servers.
I've been sharing GPL projects since 1999. We didn't need peek and poke (Both of which I have also used further in history...), but we managed nevertheless.
Prior to github I shared software on sourceforge (and others). Prior to that I published stuff on Freshmeat.
Prior to that I downloaded games others shared (not open source) on Happy Puppy.
Prior to that I used usenet to find and download games, shareware, etc.
Prior to that I used ftp to (IIRC) ftp.sunsite.edu, ftp.nic.fi, and others.
Prior to that I got news of new releases using Gopher.
Finally, prior to that, I actuallyy did use peek and poke to write software :-/
If github went away, and centralised repos went away, we'd still have something...
GitHub's problems can technically be solved, but that doesn't mean they can be solved in a way where the economics still work out.
If AI use is 10x-ing the amount of infrastructure costs for GitHub but not 10x-ing the amount of money Microsoft brings in from GitHub then there is certainly no guarantee they will bother to solve these issues adequately.
And I'd be shocked if the revenue side of things isn't lagging way behind the extra usage post-AI-era, both because a lot of the new use is probably on the GitHub free tier, and because even on the paid tier most usage (other than CI/Actions, AFAIK) are on a fixed subscription cost per user regardless of how much you are slamming their servers and it is unclear how much they can raise that price without current enterprise users fleeing.
Twitter had a clearer goal that aligned with the financials... support more people stably, show more ads. Things are less clear with GitHub's business model where the free tier is a loss leader for the paid tier but the expansion in usage is likely to balloon the free tier usage at a far faster rate than the paid tier usage.
Also (and this part is admittedly far more speculative) if AI labs are to be believed this is still early days for AI usage and we'll still see massive usage growth over the next few years. If GitHub is already having existential trouble at the beginning of the curve, what hope do they have to scale up with their current business model if AI usage actually does ramp up exponentially?
I'd guess most of the costs incurred to GitHub outside of Actions as part of the enterprise flat-rate tier are a fraction of what enterprises are paying for AI in order to incur those costs in the first place.
If a company has to pay $5 extra to GitHub for every $100 of extra AI spend due to that AI use creating disproportionate load, I've got a hard time imaging that GitHub will be the thing that gets fled from.
As far as the free tier goes, it seems like there should be a path to making prohibitively-cost-incurring usage models high-friction. (e.g. limit the free Actions minutes that you get to a certain number per month.) As long as the limits are roughly proportional to the actual costs incurred, there's not too much risk of people fleeing to a competing service, because the only way a competing service would be able to undercut the costs is by taking steep losses themselves, which isn't much of a business model in order to attract people's code repositories.
But getting this infrastructure right is crucial for a future where most of the code is AI generated. GitHub puts microsoft in a good position to experiment and learn how to optimize GitHub (enterprise) for the future.
Nate b Jones on youtube, https://youtu.be/FDkvRl1RlT0?si=AEYlUchm_oalMSzf, argues that Atlassian might be an interesting acquisition for Anthropic, as it provide most of the context AI at enterprises need. When executed well, GitHub enterprise, can offer microsoft the same value: the context AI needs in the future.
That's not the problem. The revenue model they have is based on a certain amount of usage from the people who do not pay (you, for example), and a certain amount of usage from the people who do pay (enterprises).
If you 100x you usage, then they need 100x the infra, which means they need 100x the revenue.
At that sort of usage enterprises would rather self-host, and github would be left with only the free users, who are almost all like you now - hammering their servers but not paying for it.
If you self-host, for $5/m you can have your own VPS, but doesn't really solve the problem as much as you'd think - those are all vCPUs and shared, so you can't hammer them all the time either because then the provider has to increase their infra as well so fewer accounts share a single CPU.
Either way, if you want to generate code with AI at the speed that an agent can, you'll have to pay for it one way or another.
Things that have “usage based billing” (like action monites) grow closer to 2x YoY.
When there's a dollar amount attached, people don't 10x, because it's not worth it. They splurge when it's cheap, and unlimited.
Just what sort of nonsense is this? Neither of them are going to operate at a loss.
Why are you so convinced that they'd be happy to continue spending money on you and getting none in return?
If that is the future, then source code hosting will be the least of our worries. The entire industry will collapse because the software will stop working.
Are you paying them in proportion to the resources they expend on you?
There's this thing called "sustainability", and every company needs to have it. Github cannot continue on the current trajectory where every AI-bro wants to run an agent that generates 1000s of lines of code per hour, dozens of commits per hour... and provide that for free to a few dozens of millions of users who won't pay.
That being said, Microsoft does have an opportunity here - AI-bros are willing to pay $200/m to burn tokens so Github should offer a plan for Copilot, say $400/m, that includes a repo.
If they don't ban AI agents on free tiers, they are going to be out of business soon.
GitHub action, co pilot. Oh and that ugly AI search I'm unable to disable. Migration to azure.
Yes Microsoft managed to ruin the network effect. Outages? The straw that broke the camel's back.
The next year they removed the limitation on collaborators on private repos for free users.
In the last 4 years they’ve significantly improved their project management tools. I think a lot of teams can make do with GitHub Projects, they’re pretty decent.
Who knows if any of these are directly because of Microsoft or not. But there has naturally been material improvements to GitHub in the years after being bought by Microsoft.
It's more like any positive actions they have had are being outright dismissed or forgotten. They removed several restrictions that Github had over private accounts, as well as github actions. Aside from the downtimes, the Github of today is fantastic compared to pre-acquisition Github.
It provides huge value for anyone running an opensource AI generated project.
While I'm 99% sure it is not true, it makes me sleep better at night. And giggle a little when it goes down.
"Yes, it (AI) will kill open source—at least as we know it. I’m convinced that GitHub and GitLab will eventually stop offering their services for free if the flood of low-quality, "vibe-coded" projects—complete with lengthy but shallow documentation—continues to grow at the current rate."
C'mon.
Microsoft investors
Around 8 years ago I was working for a company that they also acquired, and they also forced us to move to Azure. Performance was terrible and our system wasn’t just working there as it should. A few years later our service was dead and all customers moved to one of their office products.
- Microsoft committed to AI. - AI slop is increasing the costs for maintaining/running GitHub. - GitHub is sinking.
This is interconnected. I can think of numerous other ways how this would be handled. But Microsoft went the AI slop way already. There is no way back for them.
Either way, paid customers should not be affected.
97% of code coming in is AI slop. It's owned by an evil, rent seeking corp. Reliability is a flaming dumpster fire. And everything you commit there will be used to train more AI.
Github _is_ sinking.