Comment by rixrax
8 years ago
GitHub is a venture backed company with some $350M raised according to Crunchbase[1]. As such, your options are pretty much limited to IPO, being acquired, generating crazy profits and buying out investors to stay private, or go bankrupt. Since it appears they had hard time turning profitable[2], I’m hardly surprised that GH May be ending the way of Microsoft.
I think it’s worthwile question to everyone who is lamenting here about the future fate of GitHub if they put their money where their mouth is? Or through some magical reality expected to forever have a free, really great and well taken care of service? (I’ve had paid private account since forever).
GitLab btw has meger $45M raised[3]. I urge all the ‘let’s move to GItLab or other’ people give that a hard thought and how that will eventually expire.
TANSTAAFL
[1] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/github [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13188574 [3] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/gitlab-com
> I urge all the ‘let’s move to GItLab or other’ people give that a hard thought and how that will eventually expire.
Either they eventually fail/become evil, or they don't. If they do, just move somewhere else. If they don't, good.
(Benefits of non-proprietary software and standards like git.)
And therefore I will vote with my $$$ and stay on GitHub until there is a real reason to do otherwise (and at that point enjoy the benefits of standards like git).
Alas, like several others have pointed out, this doesn’t scale to GitHubs other services like GH Pages, or their Wiki, issue tracker, etc.
GitLab took external investments will have a liquidity event at some point. That means an acquisition or an IPO. Right now we're aiming for an IPO https://about.gitlab.com/strategy/#goals as we have since 2015 when we took the first external investment.
Out of topic, but how often do you have the ear of CEO: sytse, one specific wish for Gitlab that I have: please enable 'one-click' automatic LetsEncryptNow certificate creation for GitLab Pages with custom domain names (just like GitHub is doing it today) instead of me having to go out of my way to go get a X.509 from a CA for my TLS/SSL enabled site[1].
[1] https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/pages/getting_starte...
EDIT: typos
So you largely have the same problems GitHub had. I’ve seen you say this exact same thing multiple times in the past day, but what exactly is different?
EDIT: When I say “seen the same thing said multiple times” I’m referring to multiple linkages of the relevant page in the handbook by others, and in the CEO’s own recent blog post about the acquisition.
If anyone is concerned about migrating to Gitlab for that reason, well, I believe Atlassian is fully bootstrapped and profitable. I personally use Gitlab for my private projects but just thought I'd mention.
> I think it’s worthwile question to everyone who is lamenting here about the future fate of GitHub if they put their money where their mouth is?
I imagine most HN readers are paying customers either directly or indirectly(their company/startup).
As a private customer, I wouldn’t object to an increase in the price if that meant they stay independent. If they get acquired by MS I am definitely stopping my subscription.