matthewjhughes · 7 years ago

I'm the author of this post. The article has been updated to clarify that I accidentally published it one day before the embargo lifted. GitHub will formally announce the news tomorrow.

budhajeewa · 7 years ago

Too bad HN doesn't allow following users. :-D

SlowRobotAhead · 7 years ago

"Oops" we got a big industry exclusive. Our bad guys!

r3bl · 7 years ago

Yup, this will mean that there's no reason for me to keep my subscription as well.

This will also make me a little more cautious as a consumer, since they're voluntarily removing the incentive for me to pay for their services upfront.

SketchySeaBeast · 7 years ago

> Well, if true -- I'll be canceling my subscription :D > Thank you Github / Microsoft!

What a weird way to thank a company. I get it, but still.

abledon · 7 years ago

thank you gitlab for providing market competition forcing github to consider this!

rch · 7 years ago

I've been transferring everything over to others for a while now, so this could be in response to a general trend in that direction.

CoolGuySteve · 7 years ago

This was the reason I chose gitlab over GitHub.

But now that I'm on gitlab, I'm finding I like it better mainly because of the docker-based continuous integration feature. Managing contributors and 2FA without all that "organization" cruft is handy too.

matthewjhughes · 7 years ago

Look at the URL. The datestamp is set to the 5th instead of the 8th, when the embargo for the news lifts. The only reason this post was published early was because a stupid typo when scheduling it.

pastor_elm · 7 years ago

never heard of them. I'm sure they're hungry for a big break.

Semaphor · 7 years ago

It's TNW, the Sun or BILD of tech news. Expected behavior.

amyjess · 7 years ago

I'm fairly sure that the bulk of GitHub's revenue comes from companies using GitHub as their primary SCM.

B2B revenue is huge compared to anything you'll get from the few hobbyists who are both able and willing to pay for this kind of service.

TheRealWatson · 7 years ago

I have zero insight on this but I also don't know anyone in my circle who pays individually for Github... When they need that, they use Bitbucket.

I know several people I worked for or did business with that paid for Organization accounts, from Team to Enterprise.

tomphoolery · 7 years ago

Yeah I'd imagine that GitHub Enterprise and org subscriptions are their primary source of income. User subscriptions never really made much sense to me.

cperciva · 7 years ago

Never mind loss leader; github can probably pay for itself by providing internal analytics to Microsoft which they can use for qualifying hires.

bepotts · 7 years ago

I always believed Microsoft saw GitHub as a potential "in" for millions of developers, rather than a product that could generate revenue.

This move doesn't worry me, as I'm sure Microsoft would look to do something easy to calm the nerves of people who worried about Microsoft's acquisition. The cynic in me sees this as sweetener for Microsoft's later moves to integrate GitHub with Microsoft's developer tools, which will infuriate me along with millions of other developers.

jamp897 · 7 years ago

Bitbucket’s killer feature is integration with JIRA and the rest of the Atlassian stack, so I doubt it’ll have much impact.

laughingpine · 7 years ago

Free private repos is exactly why I was using BitBucket. I will have to think it moving will justify the effort.

frou_dh · 7 years ago

In my case, Bitbucket will lose someone who was just using it as a dumb git storage backend, and did not engage with the Atlassian products at all. I assume that they won't be particularly bothered to see the likes of me drop off.

jopsen · 7 years ago

And that's probably why they did it :)

So others won't leave for gitlab.

fractalf · 7 years ago

+1 Gitlab is awesome! Cool community oriented developers and a ton of more features. I see no reason too use github when gitlab is just better. It's also offered as a self hosted service.

derimagia · 7 years ago

Github does have "Actions" which is their version of this which is in beta:

https://github.com/features/actions https://developer.github.com/actions/creating-github-actions...

tomphoolery · 7 years ago

I wish they'd port this over to Bitbucket Server sometime soon. Bamboo is a massive pile of garbage compared to most other CI offerings these days.

dtrailin · 7 years ago

Azure pipelines is basically the same thing and offers free build to for private repos.

kennethy · 7 years ago

Students are usually eligible for free private repos. https://education.github.com/pack

freehunter · 7 years ago

I actually switched from Github to Gitlab about two months ago just for this reason. I bootstrap my company from my own pocket and wanted to save a few dollars every month. Really wish I knew this was coming before I deleted the repos and migrated everything.

edit -- to everyone asking, I have no problems with Gitlab and I also have no strong preference Gitlab vs Github, they both perform the same role for me in exactly the same manner. I just wish I had those couple of days back that I spent migrating and editing my deploy scripts.

GordonS · 7 years ago

Yep, although one of the products this competes with is Azure DevOps - which also offers unlimited git repos... and is of course also owned by Microsoft!

I'm wondering what the future holds for both GitHub and Azure DevOps. I actually use both, and have done for several years, and they're both great products - I'd hate for either of them to go away.

StavrosK · 7 years ago

My move to Gitlab was basically "come for the free repos, stay for the rest of the amazing features". I will not be moving off it, and my new repos will keep being on Gitlab.

jarsin · 7 years ago

I switched to gitlab for the 10g free space per repo. Wont be switching back to github until they beat that.

pweissbrod · 7 years ago

Does gitlab have free integrated PR code review tools?

dogweather · 7 years ago

Maybe not so smart when devs realize that the free private "repos" have features removed that have been standard. The marketing avoids this fact. You need to scroll down to the "Comparison" section to see it. https://github.com/pricing#feature-comparison

jopsen · 7 years ago

Maybe, maybe not...

Open source is just as much a culture. I don't mind fewer repositories without a LICENSE.

I suspect people who wanted free private hosting used gitlab or bitbucket.

gtaylor · 7 years ago

I can only speak for myself, but I had simply put all of my private stuff over in GitLab instead. For folks like me, this will result in no external change. Just a question of where I stash stuff.

davesque · 7 years ago

But doesn't that kind of assume there was previously no free way to host private repos?

andybak · 7 years ago

Hadn't thought of that. It's genuinely a worrying potential side effect.

iambateman · 7 years ago

You could be correct, but the “social network” boost to reputation potential is strong enough now that I suspect a lot of people will still choose to post public content where reasonable, while us cheapskates won’t have to look to another platform for private code hosting.

asdfman123 · 7 years ago

I feel like most people either want their code public (they want to share their projects with the world) or they want it private (they don't want the rest of the world to see their embarrassing toy projects).

I think the projects that could go either way -- that are public just because it's cheaper than private -- probably aren't that common or that important.

agumonkey · 7 years ago

Plausible, or maybe more people will try things privately and when they get some interesting results they'll turn it public. I know I had a little amount of shame in not throwing lots of stuff publicly..

HereBeBeasties · 7 years ago

On the flip side, the amount of Hello World projects masquerading as useful things in their README.md in search results until you actually click through and look at them properly will hopefully drop off a cliff.

phendrenad2 · 7 years ago

Agreed. I can't tell you how many times I've been at my wit's end trying to figure out how to do something, and stack overflow had failed me, and in my desperation I start searching github for strings like "GL_ARRAY_BUFFER", and scroll through dozens of pages of results, and lo and behold, someone's half-finished toy application contains exactly the line of code I was looking for.

pard68 · 7 years ago

I have had unlimitee private repos on GitHub for over three years (job perm) and have made use of them twice ever. One for my vimwiki and the other was created and then touched.

Hopefully others will be like me and simply opt to not use it.

anonytrary · 7 years ago

I doubt it. I don't see how more developer agency is a bad thing. If anything, more people will start using Github earlier on in their development cycle and Github will be the obvious platform of choice for when those projects are ready to go public. On the contrary, I think we'll probably see less trash and more quality projects on Github.

Besides, I wouldn't want to live in a world where people want to do X (private repos) but are forced to do Y (public repos) because X is not feasible. Now X is feasible and the landscape will more accurately reflect developer intentions.

paxys · 7 years ago

I imagine they'll eventually remove individual plans entirely. Microsoft probably doesn't care about the tiny revenue from random developers paying them and would rather focus on enterprise plans.

yono38 · 7 years ago

Yes - we do it at our company

Kadin · 7 years ago

Yup. At least at the business tier you can. Push to gh-pages and it deploys to the site, but site visitors never see the ingredients that go into the sausage.

therg · 7 years ago

Nope, not on the free tier via a private repo.

gedy · 7 years ago

Looks like no longer:

`Upgrade to GitHub Pro or make this repository public to enable Pages.`

ianwalter · 7 years ago

GitHub Actions is going to be GitHub CI for me: https://github.com/features/actions

snorremd · 7 years ago

Maybe Github Actions qualify? https://github.com/features/actions I must say it looks almost like Gitlab's pipeline system, but somewhat more flexible. If Github's free plan allows you to use pipelines I might just have to test it to compare.

kreetx · 7 years ago

Seriously? Can you elaborate?

Rebelgecko · 7 years ago

They banned you for a negative comment on HN?

guessmyname · 7 years ago

> Everything Github does is great!

> (I say this -- because last time I said something negative they banned me).

> https://imgur.com/a/WvC3qpM

I have the impression that they banned your GitHub account because of your username [1].

[1] https://github.com/ransom1538

jmuhlich · 7 years ago

Honest question: how do you make github search work for you? It often fails to find stuff that I know exists in a given repo. Nothing fancy, even single-word full symbol names.

jcolella · 7 years ago

I cannot agree more with this. I love being able to search and see how libraries are being used in real life projects. It definitely helps.

Vekz · 7 years ago

I have also experienced this phenomenon. Finding some brilliant hack used in a randos personal project to work around a bug or deficiency in a popular library.

Finding a library with no documentation then Searching GitHub to see personal projects where the owner has already reverse engineered and integrated.

I always admired Github for incentivizing public repositories to promote collaboration and open source. Would hate to see that fade away.

jenscow · 7 years ago

Perhaps that's how they're killing OSS?

EnderMB · 7 years ago

This is the killer feature of GitHub for me. When learning a new language, being able to sense-check your code against what someone has done in the past has helped me understand how and why some things work the way they do.

yarrel · 7 years ago

GitHub is just a (blood-)funnel for Azure now.

niij · 7 years ago

There's enterprises and teams paying. This announcement is only for individual plans.

dx87 · 7 years ago

The author accidentally scheduled it to be published on the 5th instead of the 8th, and wordpress automatically publishes things if the date they are scheduled to be published is in the past.

whoisjuan · 7 years ago

That's probably the date it was saved / authored.

cturhan · 7 years ago

Haha, same here.

sgc · 7 years ago

At most you could have 21? You are de facto a collaborator I would presume.

drakenot · 7 years ago

I had assumed it was 3 collaborators per repo.

jmkni · 7 years ago

Also, if you fork a private repo, I wonder if that’s 3 new collaborators? Could you have essentially unlimited collaborators by forking for each person and having them submit pull requests?

sailingparrot · 7 years ago

They don't have to be the same. Any "team" working on a private repo cannot be bigger than 3 collaborators.

siminuk · 7 years ago

Hi! I work at GitHub.

Private repositories on free accounts are limited to three collaborators per repository, not including the owner.

So, in your example, if you have 10 private repos, you can have 30 collaborators, without counting you - the owner. (3 collaborators * 10 repos)

whoisjuan · 7 years ago

Same here.

tonyedgecombe · 7 years ago

How will users be monetised now?

Selling Azure services.

jswrenn · 7 years ago

Github's team pricing is per-user and non-negligible: https://github.com/pricing

gmueckl · 7 years ago

Random, entirely baseless speculation: they want all to put all your code to do machine learning on. Seems like ML based code checking and refactoring tools are slowly becoming a thing. Imagine an assistant that tells you something like "what you are writing right now might be bad code because 80% of similar instances were later modified based on bug reports and this is how that would look like for your code"

sftwds · 7 years ago

Teams with more than 3 people will still need to buy a subscription:

>Private repositories on free accounts are limited to three collaborators apiece. So, while this might work for a small project (like, for example, a team competing in a hackathon), it isn’t particularly well-suited for actual commercial usage.

jbourne · 7 years ago

As mentioned in the article, this only applies to repositories with a handful of collaborators and as such organisations with private repos will still need to pay a subscription.

GitHub enterprise will also continue to provide a revenue stream.

gknoy · 7 years ago

My guess is that Enterprise licensing is a much larger pool of revenue than individual users.

dragonwriter · 7 years ago

The private repositories are limited to three collaborators. I think most people who would pay for private repos rather than simply use them as a factor in selecting among free hosts are going to need more collaborators than that before long (if not immediately).

Meanwhile, if people that just don't want to share their solo tinkerings focus on Gitlab or Bitbucket free plans for the private repos, then when they are ready to move up, GitHub is in a worse position to try to monetize them than if they were already in the GH ecosystem.

ufmace · 7 years ago

They're now owned by Microsoft. Critical difference between Microsoft and Google - Microsoft makes all of their money from direct sales and enterprise contracts for their primary products, including Windows, Windows Server, SQL Server, ActiveDirectory, Office, etc, while Google makes their money from selling ads to you with as much targeting information as possible. So this is now a loss leader for Microsoft, primarily to draw your attention to their primary products, and any money it makes or loses is on too small of a scale for Microsoft to care probably.

There's plenty you can criticize Microsoft about for sure, but they aren't trying to gather boatloads of info about you, just keep you buying Microsoft software.

Now that I think about it like that, maybe Google is infact becoming more evil than Microsoft.

klodolph · 7 years ago

> Generally when previously paid stuff becomes free, it's because the paid service is no longer a product - it's now a tool to attract users. How will users be monetised now?

Does anyone remember how Microsoft purchased GitHub in 2018? This is part of Microsoft's strategy now. Microsoft cares about developers using their platforms. Getting people hooked early on their ecosystem is part of that strategy. GitHub is now a part of that ecosystem. My prediction is that Visual Studio is going to get tied closer and closer to GitHub, that a lot of people are going to learn how pull requests work because of Visual Studio integration with GitHub.

Microsoft then turns around and sells GitHub + Visual Studio to software development firms, along with Windows Server and SQL Server licenses, MSDN subscriptions, etc. Managers won't hesitate to buy it because all of their employees already know how to use GitHub and love it.

globetrotter33m · 7 years ago

Think of it as marketing expense to attract people that went to Bitbucket and Gitlab. A % of these users will convert to a paid plan. No need to get concerned here.

jmurzy · 7 years ago

Are people really ashamed of their code? How are they even able to assess the quality of their code especially when they are just getting started? It feels sort of a Catch-22. Also, how does making private repos free help here?

I think a more encouraging move would be to have people with all experiences share as much of their progress as possible so that people who are getting started can find inspiration and learn to overcome their "imposter" feelings.

Joeri · 7 years ago

Microsoft has both linkedin and github, meaning they have the social graph of the government, business and the technology spheres. That social graph is arguably even more valuable in terms of revenue opportunities than facebook's. Direct revenue of linkedin and github might as well be irrelevant.

throwaway74104 · 7 years ago

And Microsoft is in good relationship with the government and agencies. Guess how valuable is that data for them :)

And guess what they want... "Private code to know what people are working on."

nsriv · 7 years ago

I'm sure they apologized to Github, even if they didn't apologize to you for reading it.

minimaxir · 7 years ago

That was just posted (in response to this embargo break)

dang · 7 years ago

Thanks, we changed to that from https://thenextweb.com/dd/2019/01/05/github-now-gives-free-u....

winter_squirrel · 7 years ago

Is that really comparable? Github's competitors were already offering free private repo so it's only natural that they try and keep up with the market.

jahewson · 7 years ago

The lawsuit wasn’t because it was free. The lawsuit was because IE (a web browser with a weak market position) was bundled with Windows (an OS with a dominant, almost monopoly position).

ProAm · 7 years ago

You think with all the telemetry MS put in Windows 10, there is not going to be any sort of customer reconnaissance going on in free GitHub? There will be a lot of data mining going on.

maxander · 7 years ago

All true, but why mot data mine too, while they’re at it?

If you’re not the customer you’re a product... but it doesn’t follow that, if you are the customer, you’re not also a product.

drewrv · 7 years ago

> GitHub is in the strange position of being both a successful enterprise product AND a social network. What other product exists with that kind of crossover?

LinkedIn comes to mind, which was also aquired by Microsoft.

moritzplassnig · 7 years ago

When GitHub's financials got leaked in 2016, GitHub's personal accounts accounted for 12.5% of their revenue. GitHub Enterprise was 50%, their organization (= business) accounts were the remaining 37.5% [1]. It's fair to say that the personal accounts are irrelevant from a revenue perspective.

[1] https://medium.com/@moritzplassnig/github-is-doing-much-bett... (disclaimer: I wrote the article but the data is by Bloomberg)

mpweiher · 7 years ago

Well, MS corporate culture very much believes it is doing you a favor by mining all your data in order to “serve you better”

fharding · 7 years ago

> Getting young engineers on the platform for free will pay off handsomely when they join a team and automatically assume Github is their code storage tool of choice.

Github student pack was already a thing. https://education.github.com/pack

ihuman · 7 years ago

> Github is a growing social network for developers

But in a social network I am the product

sgt · 7 years ago

>>GitHub is in the strange position of being both a successful enterprise product AND a social network.

That's interesting to think about. Who knows, maybe GitHub will become the next LinkedIn for developers? Or for everyone? LinkedIn is nearly unusable these days, in my opinion.

smartmic · 7 years ago

It is no surprise but sound business reason that private repos will be available for free.

For some background, check this HN classic: "Commoditize your complements" (https://www.gwern.net/Complement#2)

emmelaich · 7 years ago

> private, single contributor repos tend to be pretty small.

Free is pretty cheap though. Is there going to be a size limit? If not I can see people uploading all sorts of "interesting" data to github.

partiallypro · 7 years ago

Besides, Microsoft had already been offering free unlimited private repos through VSOnline for years. It's not a change for them, they are just extending it to their Github acquisition.

nkkollaw · 7 years ago

> private, single contributor repos tend to be pretty small. it costs Github very little to service a single account.

I mean, it costs them peanuts to run them, but a lot of people will cancel their premium accounts (including me).

fipple · 7 years ago

Microsoft isn't even trying to directly make money off GitHub Enterprise. What they're doing is plugging GitHub into a giant ecosystem of Azure-related services that they sell to large corporations for millions of dollars per year per customer. They could give away GitHub for free entirely, and might, if there's a one-click "deploy to Azure" and similar functionality that brings people into the Microsoft shop.

tracker1 · 7 years ago

Personally, I think Azure DevOps is the logical progression from Github at a professional/business level. I'd be surprised if their business operations didn't merge in that direction.

archon810 · 7 years ago

> private, single contributor repos tend to be pretty small. it costs Github very little to service a single account.

Small but important correction, Github is letting up to 3 contributors use these free private repos.

"For the first time, developers can use GitHub for their private projects with up to three collaborators per repository for free."

SquishyPanda23 · 7 years ago

I'm generally pretty skeptical of these sorts of arguments. People gave similar arguments about why Facebook wouldn't turn against its users or Amazon would always have some of the lowest prices you could find.

Among other things, a private repo is a file system with full history. Anything that can be used as a file system will likely get abused.

More generally, this kind of argument basically says "this company will likely ignore this revenue stream forever", which doesn't sound very likely in the long run.

This might also be an attack on GitLab, which I believe has had unlimited free private repos for a while.

mikeash · 7 years ago

GitHub already had a business model where they give a lot of stuff away for free and make it up on a premium offering. This just shifts the line between the two very slightly. I don’t see this creating any new concerns.

mcs_ · 7 years ago

I'm confused about this definition of social network. GitHub is a place where we work. I have thousand of commits and 1 actual friend. Am I the only one or are we changing the meaning of social?

mitgraduate · 7 years ago

This came at the right time.

I was looking into LambCI but it only supports github.

I was using bitbucket for private repos.

Checkout: https://github.com/lambci/lambci/blob/master/README.md

It only supports github.

For my hobby projects i can't afford to host gitlab CI/Jenkins or pay for premium CI services.

Now, i can run my tests on Lambda,yay!

siruncledrew · 7 years ago

Even if Github doesn’t end up being a typical “social network”, this still allows Microsoft to push out the competition (Gitlab, Bitbucket) and become the de facto developer workbench in the industry. MS already released a hit with VSCode and won back a lot of street cred with developers who moved over from Atom/Sublime/etc. Having free private repos just makes sense in order to seal the deal with consumers, and migrate them over to the MS developer ecosystem. It’s very Google-esque. Github was already the ‘Chrome’ of the code repo world, and now it has a chance to pull further ahead. This is what MS wants, because now there is even less reason for users to look to migrate if what they used to have to pay for is now free.

profalseidol · 7 years ago

Developers developer developers developers!

thaumasiotes · 7 years ago

> GitHub is in the strange position of being both a successful enterprise product AND a social network. What other product exists with that kind of crossover?

...Facebook? WeChat?

Those aren't exactly little-known products.

ForHackernews · 7 years ago

I really hate all the "social network" features of github, and I will eventually delete my non-work github account if they keep pushing in that direction. Adding "emoji reactions" was a really bad sign IMHO.

judge2020 · 7 years ago

If it helps. Github is currently in beta for their own CI/CD platform: https://github.com/features/actions

st0le · 7 years ago

The change goes live tomorrow. They messed up with the announcement.

grepthisab · 7 years ago

Looks like this was announced prematurely, and it will actually be rolling out tomorrow.

http-teapot · 7 years ago

Nat Friedman (GitHub's CEO) says in the next couple of hours: https://twitter.com/natfriedman/status/1082346291290468352

kylemh · 7 years ago

The announcement went out a day early. Roll-out is tomorrow.

edit: just kidding, it's shipped

dragonwriter · 7 years ago

Tomorrow, as the article says it was published a day early due to an error.

tinyhouse · 7 years ago

They just updated it a few minutes ago! By the time the blog post was out it was still asking for a credit card. Now it doesn't. They really rushed things out because of that TNW mistake!

Like many others here I'm also pretty happy about it. $7/month is not a lot of money but I also moved some personal private repos to BitBucket to avoid the fees. I will probably go back now.

ninkendo · 7 years ago

I just downgraded from pro and the form said I'll be keeping my private repos, so it works for me.

robinhood · 7 years ago

The CEO just said that "Give it a couple hours. We had to announce a day early due to a press leak.".

https://twitter.com/natfriedman/status/1082346814802518016

philliphaydon · 7 years ago

Vsts has 30 free hours (1800 minutes) on hosted build agents for windows OS X and linux.

bg0 · 7 years ago

Can you link where you see this? I can't seem to find it

0x0 · 7 years ago

Also, the best part about gitlab CI - it's super easy to install gitlab-runner on your own and enjoy unlimited build minutes, even on the free plan. Plus you get to set up your buildbot environment just the way you like - even with access to LAN-only resources in case you need them.

lmcarreiro · 7 years ago

Me too, but I hope Microsoft add CI features inside GitHub in the future.

jeremyjh · 7 years ago

Circle CI is a great choice for free builds of your private Github project.

_wmd · 7 years ago

Azure Pipelines free offering is superior to Travis by every imaginable metric - UI latency, build latency, featureset, sane, carefully thought about YAML syntax, etc.

tobilg · 7 years ago

Bonus: You also get free private repos in organizations, a feature that GitHub still doesn’t have with today‘s announcement.

insited · 7 years ago

Free private repos are important for experimental development.

karakanb · 7 years ago

Github is a great UI that we all are familiar with and there is a huge community around it, which is great for OSS, but I have to say, I trust Gitlab more than I trust Github.

I am a happy user of Gitlab for 3 years now, I have been using it for all of my private stuff and using it actively for around 10 projects at the moment, and I have seen the product change over time both visually and functionally. There are multiple things that I don't like about it, such as the way it handles registry images, but overall my experience for these 3 years has been terrific.

First and foremost, Gitlab CI is the best experience I have ever had, and I can compare it with Travis and Codeship; Gitlab is way ahead of every platform in terms of convenience and its free-tier limits. They have their own shared runners, which means you can run as many parallel jobs as there are runners available at the moment, so no concurrency limit there. They also allow you to run the free stuff for 2000 minutes per month, which is more then enough for most of the side projects. Also, you can use your own runners with the free tier as well, which means just pick a 5$ VM from DO, install the gitlab-runner using the package manager of the OS, such as apt or yum, and register its address on Gitlab UI. The whole runner stuff takes around 10-15 minutes to setup, and you are good to go. You can have as many runners as you like and you can run as many jobs as you like on them as well. There are also options to setup gitlab-runner in such way that it spans new VMs for jobs, which means you don't even need to have full-time runners, they can be created on demand. Also, CI is completely configured via a `.gitlab-ci.yml` file, which is version controlled and has a clear syntax, I have found it the easiest to use among the other options. It syncs with issues, merge requests and the project tree, which means you can reach to the corresponding pipeline from the MR; it also allows you to generate artifacts and store them for a certain amount of time available for download. Overall, I am a huge fan of Gitlab CI, I couldn't have imagined it would be this convenient to use the same product for Git-hosting and continuous integration, it is a real pleasure.

They also have their own Docker registry, which is pretty convenient to use with CI builds. I use it to push my images with commit hashes as tags to this registry from CI. Unfortunately, there is a lot of room for improvement for registry interface, currently it is pretty basic, meaning it only lists the image tags. If you are pushing the images per commit basis, you are gonna have a lot of images and cleaning up the repository is impossible from the interface, which is sad. I really hope they improve the registry integration. They also have some Kubernetes and monitoring integration which allows you to monitor your cluster and deployments from Gitlab interface directly, but I haven't used it yet, so no comments there.

Apart from the feature set, the most important reason I choose Gitlab over Github is clear communication they maintain. Downtimes happen, engineering teams can have bad times, but they are always open about these problems. They inform everyone from a Twitter account, they are responsive to everyone, and you can see them being very clear and direct about the problems they are having. I expect downtimes to happen, Git-hosting is not a crucial system for me that I cannot live with an hour of downtime, maybe it is because of the scale of the projects I am working with, but having an open conversation about issues like this is the actual value for me. As long as they keep this level of communication, I am fine with occasional downtimes. Not that they have downtimes all the time, but it is true that I have seen more downtimes on Gitlab than on Github.

Overall, the reason I'd not migrate my private projects to Github is not Gitlab having free private repositories, but their huge feature set and level of communication. I see Github as a giant corporation, and Gitlab as some guys like myself, I feel closer to them and I'll be their user & customer as longs as I feel that way. I have no association with Gitlab at all, I am just a happy user and I wanted to explain why I like Gitlab, I think a lot of people would choose Gitlab over Github if publicity is not a concern.

013a · 7 years ago

Github Actions is in private beta. From the little time I've spent with it, it could fundamentally change the way you interact with CI; its pretty different compared to normal CI products like Travis, Circle, etc.

Primarily, each pipeline stage can directly reference other public Github repos, with no additional code on your part. This taps in to that community that only exists on Github; for example, to build a project in Language-of-Choice, you just need to find a public implementation of the build pipeline stage for that language, then reference the URL in the action you build.

Its also very docker native, actually to the point of being totally unobvious that everything starts with a docker container. The documentation and hints about how to use it are still pretty sparse since its in beta.

Pricing still hasn't been announced. We'll see. But it feels very promising, especially if a community developers around it focused on providing pipeline stages.

GrzegorzWidla · 7 years ago

I'm late to this but Azure DevOps has plenty of free build time and resources and they are linkable to your GitHub repo. I imagine it'll get even easier and more integrated in few updates.

aarongray · 7 years ago

Code storage is a free market and GitHub is not a monopoly.

markmark · 7 years ago

It's tough when your competition can give away their product and fund it through their bottomless pockets and money they make on other products.

I used to work for a great company in the developer tooling area, one of the big players came directly after us, ramped up a team, started copying our features and gave the product away for free. We were still doing well when I left, but it'll be interesting to see how it goes over the next few years.

TheRealDunkirk · 7 years ago

So, it's a loss leader.

Seems like we've been here before.

All the breathless hyperbole AGAINST "EEE," and yet, we're watching Microsoft destroy another market.

But they "love" Linux, and open source.

holtalanm · 7 years ago

yeah. I'm dropping Bitbucket in favor of this for my private projects. BitBucket's UI is so un-intuitive that I (most of the time) dread actually having to log into the web UIs for it.

I'm also just much more comfortable with GitHub since I use it daily in my day job.

jws · 7 years ago

I use BitBucket for my solo private repositories specifically because it was free. They are a trivial load to the provider in both storage and transactions.

Repositories which I make public I put on GitHub since that seems to be where people will find them and are more likely to contribute.

Had this policy been in place when I started using git I never would have found and used Bitbucket, but I don't feel anything is gained by moving my private BitBuckets to GitHub.

Update: I see another reply talking about the web interfaces. If I used them that might be a factor, but for my private stuff the only web functions I use are for creating the repositories, and both platforms get that done easily enough.

madamelic · 7 years ago

>does this make you consider switching back at all? If so, why?

Complete opposite. I'm going to stop using it as much as I can.

This is quite annoying. I'd much rather they take my pittance than monetize me any other way.

rifung · 7 years ago

> For those of you using GitLab, BitBucket, or <insert-other-git-host-competitor-here>, does this make you consider switching back at all? If so, why?

Absolutely, though I don't think it's really "switching back". I always preferred to use GitHub but had to use BitBucket for private repos. Now I don't need to bother with BitBucket.

craftyguy · 7 years ago

> does this make you consider switching back at all

No. I'm old enough to remember the way Microsoft operated for most of their history, and do not trust them.

philwelch · 7 years ago

Nope.

Github was always the go-to option and there was no reason to really even consider alternatives at first. People said "Bitbucket has free private repos!" for years and that was interesting but not compelling. Few users left Github because their competitors had free private repos.

Github got acquired, and that acquisition basically erased any and all user trust in Github as a company because they no longer control their own destiny. Instead we have to trust Microsoft. And that was a big enough shock for people to actually consider all of the competitors instead of just defaulting to Github like they did before.

To some extent, I suspect people paid for private repos from Github because they believed in supporting Github as a company and $7/mo isn't that much. Nobody believes in supporting Microsoft as a company. Microsoft charging for private repos is like Disney having a Patreon account.

Macha · 7 years ago

If I was still on Bitbucket, this would have been enough for me to switch back.

Since moving to Gitlab, I couldn't go back to having to run Jenkins for private projects after using Gitlab CI (with a self-hosted runner). Also even on the free tier, even for one-man projects, the issue tracker features are better than github.

baroffoos · 7 years ago

Gitlab is vastly better in so many different ways that this doesn't even come close to making me want to switch back.

hdfx · 7 years ago

Typically I use Bitbucket during initial phase, when the project is still in active development. Once I'm happy with the code after a while, I move it to GitHub.

But I don't want the BB version to become outdated so I end up maintaining 2 repos. Having private repos directly on GitHub will optimise my worflow. Definitely a good move.

wilsonnb3 · 7 years ago

GitHub integration in visual studio is quite good, I might switch back from gitlab because of that. I just didn’t think it was worth 8 dollars a month before.

napsterbr · 7 years ago

Not agreeing or anything, but it seems a pretty standard TOS clause.

siminuk · 7 years ago

Hi! I work at GitHub.

All the details are listed on the official pricing page in the feature comparison section: https://github.com/pricing and in the docs: https://help.github.com/articles/github-s-billing-plans/#bil...

pier25 · 7 years ago

What I see is only:

> If you downgrade, you’ll lose access to advanced code review tools in your private repositories.

digianarchist · 7 years ago

Git is a Distributed Version Control System. Just add another remote...

tracker1 · 7 years ago

Given github + so + linkedin, it may make total sense for them. Not sure if I want MS in that position. They aren't the MS of old, I'm just not sure I want them that involved in the developer jobs market, more than they already are.

adtac · 7 years ago

Or, you know, they're different people.

timdorr · 7 years ago

Yes, they indicate paying customers.

timdorr · 7 years ago

Not as far as I can tell. As it comes with a loss of Pages and wikis for private repos.

ncallaway · 7 years ago

I don't believe they are. It's pretty easy to go downgrade if you want to, though.

nouney · 7 years ago

No they don't.

adrianmonk · 7 years ago

Another difference is that, with GitHub's announcement, there are multiple ways to interpret it because there are different things that the modifier "unlimited" could apply to. It could mean:

1. Unlimited number of repos, each of which is limited (by user, as it turns out).

2. Limited number of repos, each of which is unlimited.

3. Unlimited number of unlimited repos.

When there are multiple ways to interpret and you find out someone has picked one of them, it doesn't feel like they are being disingenuous.

Whereas with cell data plans, there's only one thing they could reasonably mean is unlimited: the data. So they've changed what "unlimited" means. It is limited, but there aren't overage charges.

clhodapp · 7 years ago

I think that with GitHub the "unlimited" is understood to mean "in repo count". You can create as many repos as you want and still get the same quality of service. You are not punished for creating more repos, you just have some limitations on (all) the repos you can create.

With cell phone data, "unlimited" is understood to mean "in quantity". However, once you reach a not-all-that-hard-to-hit threshold in that same metric, your quality of service degrades severely. I don't think anyone would have any issue if a carrier sold an "unlimited data" plan that provided that degraded quality of service from the start and didn't throttle based on actual usage. They would just factor the tradeoff into their purchasing decision and choose a plan appropriately. The problem is that the carriers advertise both the higher speed and the unlimited-ness when you can't actually have both at the same time.

mroche · 7 years ago

This is what I do for anything I make that I think would be easier to find on GitHub. And vice versa for my own build tools so I can accumulate the projects I use from GH under one group on GitLab.

dogweather · 7 years ago

Is there a difference in the features between GitLab's free public vs. private repos? On GitHub, there is, but the blog post glosses over that.

stevekemp · 7 years ago

BitBucket has a terrible UI, historically suffers from outages, and is owned by Atlassian which is yet another downside.

arcturus17 · 7 years ago

And yet despite that GitHub remained much bigger than these two. It's a big deal because this might dig the moat further.

jakebasile · 7 years ago

The press release barely mentions it but it's true. The free private repos are cut down, including bizarre hold-backs like wikis. GitHub's wikis aren't great, but why hold them back? It's kind of mind boggling.

inapis · 7 years ago

Few people, if any, have the time and willingness to do such stuff.

dsumenkovic · 7 years ago

Hey Vinay, there's also a notable difference, at GitLab you don't have a limit to 3 user per private project.

nathanyukai · 7 years ago

I don't think so, If it's a public repository that means the owner have more confidence and willing to collaborate, which is a good thing. Also, free private repository -> more developers -> more repositories