Is "silly rich" now defined as "bloated with VC money"? That's a bit like contending that you're silly rich because you've got a $1M credit card limit (though the comparison is admittedly imperfect because debt and equity aren't the same).
To me, "silly rich" would suggest they're immensely profitable, which is rather unlikely since they probably wouldn't seek more investment if they were.
The article says they made $1000 on their first day. And they've been around for 5 years (pretty sure the article has the timing wrong, I was putting stuff on GitHub in 2008) without taking any funding, which is pretty hard if you're not profitable.
My guess: they're gearing up for an IPO. Maybe not for a couple years, but they see their market size as being big enough to go public, and they want a prominent financial backer in their corner when they do. That's the usual reason why profitable companies take investment. Microsoft famously eschewed all venture funding until a mezzanine round right before they went public, which was a.) so they could vet their investment bank and develop a relationship with them before it really mattered and b.) so said investment bank would have an incentive to hype up the stock and get the highest possible price at IPO time.
The amount of dilution the current shareholders will have to swallow for $100M in investment is an extremely high price to pay to get into bed with an investment bank.
That is awesome and disgusting. On a tangent, it reminds me of the 'US Govt making money from federal reserve profits' talking point. Yeah sure, just as one would gain reward points by growing a credit card balance... you're not the one making the real profit (Goldman Sachs).
only true if money they had actually represents real work that somebody created then transferred as money to them.
The current status quo is that a bank creates money out of thin air, which they can then profit off. This money they create _might_ represent value, but only after the loanee does some work for the debt. Therefore, all interest payment on such created money are essentially a "tax" the banks leeches off the people who did the real work.
Correct, but that's been the case for a very long time. Banknotes and fractional reserve lending have been around the block many times, even under a 'gold standard'. It's a banker's world; we just live in it.
"Gold is money. Everything else is credit". - J.P. Morgan
Money is simply a manipulation of language backed up by force. The paper coerces sharing (whether fairly or unfairly) of resources (whether labor or physical resources like trees and oil) in a way that does not spontaneously happen without the paper.
A simple example would be without money you barter which is also a manipulation of language expressed through physical items. You need this I need that so we exchange. With money the equation becomes you need something, and you can buy it with money, here is some money, now give me what I want. The intermediary form of this was gold, because people can agree that gold is reliable. We replace that with simple language backed up by force, a dollar. A piece of paper that initially will stand in for gold to establish its value, but eventually will stand in for itself. Eventually we replace this with something like Bitcoin, no coercion simply an agreement in language justified through a market.
Anyone with money would suffice (and pretty much anyone would be willing to provide the service for a song considering there is no risk to them even if they mess up, FB anyone) when floating a stock. Instead banks get to do their retarded song and dance that no one needs or wants and they collect millions for that which enriches their managers for nothing.
Interest rates is why there is always more debt in the system than money, and why capitalism as a whole can be more likened to cancer than anything else. But don't take my word for it, wait until the host dies.
What's really silly is debating exactly what "silly rich" means.
How about discussing this?
> A big chunk of the $100 million has been earmarked
> for... [opening] its collaboration tools up beyond the
> software kingdom. The company has already seen
> designers, legal teams, and public relations pros using
> its technology. "It has not been optimized for those
> things yet, but it works for them," says Preston-Werner.
I agree but I think the author may have been pointing out the it was a sudden move, since GitHub had turned down VC money in the past. More pointing out the sudden change from their past record of turning down VC's
I disagree. I think enough people are willing to pay for a service that makes their lives easier, and developers especially so. GitHub does exactly that, and their pricing is at a good point where it isn't prohibitive for people just starting out.
Unlimited repo's for teams of less than 5 compared to GitHubs pricing model for private repositories is a strong challenge.
Throw in that BitBucket is Atlassian backed and they can afford to subsidise BitBucket to sell their other tools (though I would observe that BitBucket does not do heavy sales tactics at all).
I actually prefer bitbucket to github day to day (I have about a dozen repo's with them) and they have excellent support for mercurial as well.
It's all speculations at that point but if the only reason to go to BitBucket is price then Atlassian is creating a community of poor/cheap people. The scenario for up-sell seems quite compromised in that regard.
Another thing is that if you're using open source products then they're likely on github. I agree that both platforms have a general feature parity but if you're going to interact with these projects often enough then it's better to stay on a single platform and avoid the context switch. Personally this only is already worth the $50-100 that our company is paying.
You can see that I am biased but something I would also like to point out: on more than one occasion github has prompted me to open-source things. When you reach your repo limit you're faced with a choice that you don't have with unlimited repos. There's a case where you don't want to think about it and just want to keep working as usual but for me space constraint is what keeps my home tidy.
I see your points but I'd note that "it's better to stay on a single platform" is actually perhaps not as good as it appears (all your eggs in one basket - for example when github went down the other weekend a lot of PHP developers where stuck without composer update for example).
The context switch is fairly minimal, underneath it is just git with a pretty web-ui.
The scenario for up-sell is absolutely fine, if you have less than 5 developers it's free, if you have more than that you start to pay based on number of developers, this is both more rational (you are paying for users not number/size of repo's) and easier to quantify.
In my opinion GitHub's cleverest move was making it free for open source repo's thereby building a good community of influential developers around their product from day one, this does give them a significant lead but it's not insurmountable (I'm old enough to remember when the first thing you did when you wanted the source code for an open project was head straight over to sourceforge) particularly as moving most (small) projects from github to bitbucket (or another competitor) is one git push.
The scenario for up-sell seems quite compromised in that regard.
Perhaps, but it's also likely that consumers are not Atlassian's primary target audience. They make most of their money selling JIRA, Confluence, Bamboo etc to companies and large enterprises.
Getting individual developer's hooked on free access to Bitbucket for personal projects is a great way to get those developers to agitate for using Bitbucket within their company.
If you have an active open source presence then you're already using github a lot of the time, personally I don't like switching tools a lot and I guess a lot of people feel similar. Personal preference aside.
If they'd offer a couple of private repos I'd jump over to GitHub in a heartbeat. I use BitBucket for private stuff, and then port over to GitHub when I want to make the code public.
At work we use BitBucket because of the unlimited private repos, and we've got a fairly good setup built on it. Every office I know either keeps their repo hosted, or uses BitBucket. I've only known one office that uses GitHub, and due to the nature of their work they keep their stuff public.
It's not even up for debate anywhere I work. BitBucket, or a private hosted repo is the only choice to make.
There are no incentives to switch open source projects to BitBucket, but there are incentives to switch to BitBucket small team/personal private projects.
Edit: Also open source projects will not start to pay github, but private projects might grow and will start paying for BitBucket
Since I'm talking about where I prefer to host my projects I think in this case it is about my personal preferences.
Obviously GitHub is the major git hosting solution for open source projects and yes I have a github account and yes I visit the site as much as I do bitbucket but mostly to pull repo's, check issues and read documentation.
When you're talking about private repos for commercial customers, paying is a feature, not a bug. A paid relationship is fundamentally different in that it creates obligations on both parties. When something is free, the person receiving the free service has few rights or remedies.
BitBucket killed any inclination in me to pay github a penny. And I will stick with them when my team grows because everything is there anyway and the pricing is better. Github tools are really not there to justify the huge sticker price.
You're forgetting about corporate accounts. They pay through the nose for something no other tool does right now (at least not as well). Nothing else I've used in the corporate space works as well as Github, especially for code reviews. It's also more expensive than anything else, too. The only problem we saw was it didn't handle large repos very well. And by large, I mean 20+gb. Don't look at me like that, storing every asset in a large 3d game in github made sense at the time!
I was pretty critical when I saw this on reddit 4 years ago. I'm not really a fan of git and didn't understand what the point of this site was that we couldn't get from sourceforge. The same has been said many times about Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest. I still don't really understand most of them, but I guess that's why I'm not a millionaire.
I posted this quote here because I thought it didn't need explanation as a criticism of the blog post. But perhaps I need to point it out...
"He".
We should not, implicitly or explicitly, promote the idea that to be a coder you are a man. Even if it is the case that more men are in CS than not, it is not causal to success in CS. However, creating fake self-doubt and questioning on issues that are not material to success in CS is causal to people dropping CS.
"He" is commonly used as a gender neutral way of referring to a person of unknown gender. It has also become common to use "she" as gender neutral so as to not be exclusive.
I don't think that in this case the author is making any comment (explicitly or implicitly) about who is or should be coding.
To me, "silly rich" would suggest they're immensely profitable, which is rather unlikely since they probably wouldn't seek more investment if they were.