faitswulff · 6 years ago

My guess is that they're a Big Company that can land Big Contracts now and that subsidizes small teams.

aroch · 6 years ago

The cynical thought would be drive usage of Github specific features/integrations to increase lock-in

q3k · 6 years ago

Probably to lure in early startups away from GitLab, which has this pricing model (free private repos, pay for required reviews and SSO) for a while now.

cpascal · 6 years ago

I suspect Microsoft wants to capture as much developer mindshare as possible and then cross-sell Azure. Reducing/eliminating entry costs for commercial grade features helps to do that.

7777fps · 6 years ago

GitHub has significant vendor lock-in, so it makes sense to make it free to capture the market before a competitor gets traction.

[Speculation:]

Perhaps they've run the numbers and can figure out that they make enough money from enterprise clients and will make enough more money from the 'marketplace' being a channel for selling github integrations and addons to cover this cost of not trying to monetize through supporting teams.

It also moves a large base from 'customer' with needed support to free users which don't need the same level of support.

johannes1234321 · 6 years ago

For one they have a good budget from Microsoft, secondly GitLab is good competition and thirdly I would assume they see their revenues in project.amangment and CI/CD features (tie in build workers with Azure etc.) and there is more money to make than restricting users (which can be bypassed realticely easily, while more contributors means more build hosts, means larger azure bills)

bdcravens · 6 years ago

The fact that they're mirroring Gitlab's offering probably suggests that Gitlab is capturing market share from them. It's probably happening more now, as companies are taking very serious looks at their expenses.

jbergstroem · 6 years ago

I'll bite: They are shifting profits to CI and service landscape. I paid for 8 seats (previous: $64, now: $32) which gave me 10 000 included CI minutes (now: 3 000). I was just at that limit. Its surprisingly hard to find what the cost per minute is after that, but I guess I can check back in a month and see what my spending ends up at.

I'm sure they have enough info about onboarding and unit economics to see how it will pay off mid to long term.

I'll happily pay for use though, it makes sense and it makes the value addition of github core vs extra more clear.

Grue3 · 6 years ago

Extinguishing the competition. It's not even the first time. Remember Internet Explorer?

JamesCoyne · 6 years ago

Personally, I have been favoring Gitlab over Github because Gitlab allows private repos on the free tier.

333c · 6 years ago

Yep, GitLab has had this for ages, and GitHub has gone from no private repos on free plans to private repos with only a few collaborators to this.

toyg · 6 years ago

Gitlab, yes. I don't see Bitbucket as much of a player (unless you're in the Atlassian ecosystem and you like it, which seems... rare).

whalesalad · 6 years ago

I guarantee that this move had absolutely nothing to do with competitors and everything to do with Microsofts new rise to dominance. Coding is going to be the next blue-collar job, they are positioning themselves to do well when we reach that inflection point.

DylanDmitri · 6 years ago

Core business is Azure. Actions, hosting, pushing the C# stack.

98codes · 6 years ago

Along with the expected limit bumps on Action execution time and package storage.

frou_dh · 6 years ago

There's more, including most sections in a private repo's "Insights" tab still being greyed out. Full feature lists here: https://help.github.com/en/github/getting-started-with-githu...

markdog12 · 6 years ago

> whether GitHub sees this is a first-to-market play of some sort

Could be a response to GitLab, which had a similar offering for years, including unlimited free private repos.

sneak · 6 years ago

I feel like anyone who lived through the 90s could have expected "these kinds of results".

Git is open source and widely supported, which doesn't benefit Microsoft. By causing GitHub-specific features to be an essential part of a "modern" or "industry standard" git workflow, they can capture more marketshare/attention, and cause alternatives to be sidelined. This requires removing all friction to entering the proprietary ecosystem, including purchasing. This, along with the acquisition of NPM, is the "embrace" part.

The next will be an expansion of GitHub and NPM's featuresets in ways that are only accessible via branded, first party tools (i.e. not git/ssh/yarn). GitHub has already made some inroads there prior to the Microsoft acquisition with of course the ubiquitous PRs as well as GitHub Issues and Actions. I imagine the ability to check out GitHub wikis as git repos will probably eventually go away to further this.

The last part ("extinguish") is turning off support for non-firstparty tools like git-via-ssh, .patch URL support, issue collaboration via email, yarn, et c. By the time they do this, few people will notice, having acclimated to the entirely-proprietary ecosystem they've been incrementally subjected to.

The goal, as always: a Microsoft editor (VS Code or Atom), editing code in a Microsoft language (TypeScript/.NET/whatever), signed off via Microsoft review software (GitHub mobile), publishing to a Microsoft website (GitHub/npm), running CI on a Microsoft VM (GitHub Actions), pushing code to a Microsoft datacenter (Azure).

It's simply a moat to prevent open, unfettered competition in any intersection of the vertical. Any weak spots (such as GitHub signup friction) are to be subsidized as they will yield benefits when later used as a cohesive whole in an anticompetitive fashion.

snazz · 6 years ago

Me too! Microsoft has done a really great job of managing the acquisition without ruining GitHub. GitHub already had a great understanding of their audience and a pulse on the community prior to being bought, so I'm really glad that they haven't lost that now that they're a Microsoft subsidiary.

hinkley · 6 years ago

Speaking of, I just had a momentary panic because Backblaze’s hard disk report timeline is missing a link to the last update (from February) and I thought maybe they’d stopped doing them...

Who else is good at this? I’m somewhat fond of Digital Ocean’s docs.

rvz · 6 years ago

> this helps centralize everything to GitHub.

Oh dear. That doesn't really sound like a good idea in the long term.

So once you place all your projects/repositories on a third party git service like Github and it goes down, what can you do to push that critical change? Might be no big deal for personal projects but unacceptable for big business and open source orgs.

You might as well call the CEO of GitHub for support. A better way is to self-host...

tekknolagi · 6 years ago

Hi Nat. Big fan. I've been on GitHub for a long time now. There's a fair bit of friction in issue/PR management for people who have primarily CLI-centered workflows. I know that `hub` and friends exist, but will there be official, supported clients in the future?

Also: are there plans to open source more of GitHub? Post Microsoft acquisition, I have been increasingly concerned about vendor lock-in, EEE, and so forth.

thramp · 6 years ago

This is a great change! One request: I wish that SAML was not an enterprise feature. SAML ought be a basic security feature like 2FA—it's especially valuable for open source teams who might use a mixture of services, and an easily accessible and cheap SSO solution would go a long way in raising the security bar for all teams, not just open source teams.

cpascal · 6 years ago

This is completely unrelated to the announcement, but when will Enterprise Server ship support for GitHub Actions?

atonse · 6 years ago

I would request similar to the sibling post, that at least OpenID Connect or some such SSO could be a feature for us smaller companies that still want to practice good security by doing SSO.

etherio · 6 years ago

I'd like to thank you for this change but also in general all the amazing things Github is doing. I haven't finished high school yet but your Github Education pack is SO useful for me and I know I will never have time to use half of the stuff on it.

Thanks to everyone at Github making stuff like this possible and creating such a great epicenter for open source in general. Keep on being awesome!

Also I was wondering, Github is offering so many features for free, but does the company sustain itself through entreprise payments or some other stream? I was just curious. :)

CreepGin · 6 years ago

Thanks for doing this. Is this effective immediately now? I tried to downgrade to free just now but it's giving me a giant list of features I'd lose if I continue. Also any change to Data pack pricing for LFS Data?

Due to the on-going Pandemic, I've been trying to cut business costs left and right. Github Team was one of those I wanted to cut but it's also so important that I couldn't decide easily. So thanks again for the change. Much appreciated!

amsully · 6 years ago

Hi! Any perspective of extending SOC2 Report access to the Teams level? Small companies in regulated environments aren't able to jump to enterprise ($$$) so need to look elsewhere to get a SOC2 compliant version control system at a decent price. Love the Github product so it was tough when we had to make the decision to move off of it.

grinich · 6 years ago

Just want to say that I am _so_ happy and continue to be impressed but what you've done since joining GitHub. Feels like a big shift from even a couple years ago.

On behalf of our tiny team at WorkOS, thanks! :)

jka · 6 years ago

Hi Nat - this is a really bold move, and shows how competitive the market for developer tooling is.

Does GitHub anticipate that this pricing change will affect the proportion of code that's provided under free / open source licensing on your platform, and if so can you share any information regarding the direction GitHub would like to lead the community in?

pixelmonkey · 6 years ago

Hey Nat -- quick Q, with this change, is there any need for individual developers to pay for "Pro" accounts? Or did the benefits of a "Pro" account just get covered by the "Free" plan?

pubby · 6 years ago

Hey Nat glad to see you here. A few days ago one of the biggest team collaborative games (Space Station 13) got banned on GitHub without a public explanation from GitHub staff, but some suspect it was because the code contained bad words and slurs. Do you know if this is why the project was banned, and will these new private team repos be subject to the same terms/rules?

JMTQp8lwXL · 6 years ago

I'd like to share feedback on GitHub Actions. Tried it out, and the learning curve was too much. I want to use stuff I already know -- e.g., write a Dockerfile, and then GH could run it on PR builds. The "workflow" concept didn't land for me, and I hope you consider a more generalized, open-source approach to running arbitrary scripts in response to PRs being opened, merges to master, etc.

sstephenson · 6 years ago

When will GitHub terminate its contract with ICE?

anonymoushn · 6 years ago

Hi Nat, will GitHub ever support git diff algorithms other than the default?

KenoFischer · 6 years ago

While we have your here, any plans for more fine-grained IAM for GitHub Apps? It's already a lot better than legacy apps, but it's still pretty broad. Ideally every API call/resource could be specified individually in an IAM policy, so we can only request the minimum permissions possible in our GitHub Apps.

oxalorg · 6 years ago

Hey Nat, thank you so much for this! We're a small team from India and we love Github but were always conflicted due to the pricing.

The new flat price of $4/user seems perfect for us. I've already moved one private repo to our org account.

Thanks again ^_^

oefrha · 6 years ago

First of all, thank you, this is great news.

That said, the news made me wonder what exactly I’m still paying for with my personal Pro account. I went to the pricing page https://github.com/pricing and it seems Pro isn’t even listed anymore? And the Billings page https://github.com/settings/billing says “Pages, Wikis, protected branches and more for Pro developers” without any further explanation or link to docs explaining the differences. I can only assume that Pro has the same set of features as the $4/user/mo Team plan, but the messaging is certainly pretty confusing, don’t you think?

(I sure hope this isn’t a sign of neglect for individual developers, who are still the backbone of open source activities.)

KenoFischer · 6 years ago

Hmm, looks like GitHub pages are a paid feature? One of our private repos hosts our (public) website. Even with the price cut, the Team plan is still almost $100/month more expensive than the grandfathered in legacy plan we currently have that includes GitHub pages.

polskibus · 6 years ago

Any plans for free on prem version, like Gitlab?

tomphoolery · 6 years ago

This is amazing for us folks towing the line between open-source and proprietary, enabling an open core while allowing access to our closed-source products without having to leave GitHub. Right now, we mirror our GitHub repos to a private Bitbucket server so that our clients can make PRs and such, but now we can just add their GitHub accounts to our team!

We do have a paid plan, right now. Is there any way to continue having that paid plan on the team (paying per user for the extra features) while also adding users who don't share the extra features? We'd like to open up our org to all of our clients who use our private repos, but we don't want them to e.g. have access to all the private k8s cluster configs.

est31 · 6 years ago

Hi, any reason to still have a restriction on number of free bot accounts one may have (currently one)? There are limitations in products built on GitHub that require you to create multiple accounts if you don't want to share tokens between repositories (bad idea security wise): https://github.com/rust-lang/crates.io/issues/849#issuecomme...

GordonS · 6 years ago

Hi Nat, with Microsoft now owning Github, I'm really curious to know what the future holds for both Azure DevOps and Github?

I'm a user of both - Github for OSS, and Azure DevOps for private work. IMO, these areas are where they are best suited - pipelines in particular are really powerful in Azure DevOps, and user/permission management, AAD integration and integration with build agents are all excellent.

I really like Azure DevOps, but all this has me worried about it's future - do you know if it's going to continue to exist and be developed in tandem with Github?

harikb · 6 years ago

Slightly off topic, but I would like to request that you open Github for Education [1] for pandemic-related home-schoolers. Currently it requires verification as an accredited school & credentials. Any help is appreciated.

[1] https://education.github.com/schools

DagAgren · 6 years ago

Are you still providing services to people who put children in cages?

gigatexal · 6 years ago

Biz question for you: do you think given enough of a run way i.e time you could have gotten to that enterprise run rate without Microsoft or have customers come to you now that you have Microsoft's backing -- i.e has that made sales easier?

wikibob · 6 years ago

Hi Nat, What's the plans for integrating Microsoft's VFS for Git into GitHub?

https://github.com/microsoft/VFSForGit

freyfogle · 6 years ago

I currently pay for a Github Silver plan annually ($600). When I try to downgrade to Free I get a message (in red) "You will no longer be able to access your private repositories or create new private repositories."

How do I downgrade without losing all my private repos.

Thank you!

itamarst · 6 years ago

Why do you still have a contract with ICE?

thinkingemote · 6 years ago

> every developer on earth

This now includes Iran, Syria, and Crimea. Bravo

carapace · 6 years ago

> Existing customers will have their bills automatically reduced going forward.

That is a class act right there.

Now, if you would open source github...

I kid. I have zero hope that that will ever happen.

It has always been bizarre (IMO) that arguably the most popular open source dev forge, er, hub, is closed and proprietary. But what can you do?

Remember when all those FOSS devs sent an open letter to github whining about that and begging for attention? https://github.com/dear-github/dear-github (Ironically, they "signed" it by filling out a Google docs spreadsheet! As opposed to, say, patching a file.)

Utterly bizarre.

And now they have done it again, apparently because GitHub serves ICE: https://github.com/drop-ice/dear-github-2.0

They "call upon GitHub to: Immediately cancel your contract with ICE ; Commit yourself to a higher ethical standard with all of your business dealings ..." [in writing]. But they stop short of threatening to leave if GitHub doesn't comply with their demands.

Leaving aside the politics of ICE, and the strangeness of talking to "GitHub" like it's a single person, it seems to me that without taking some action (like moving to e.g. Srht or self-hosting a DVCS hub) that this is just posturing.

Anyway, congratulations on sucking more air out of the room of FOSS development. In the words of the aforementioned, undersigned, concerned peasants, excuse me! users, of GitHub:

> We still believe in GitHub as a platform, as a place to help the open source community make the world a genuinely better place. Please, step up and join us.

znpy · 6 years ago

Will there ever be an OSS version of GitHub, a la Gitlab?

aschatten · 6 years ago

This great news, I appreciate the free stuff, but on the other hand free stuff can be tricky as the company must make money. So I hope that your enterprise model will work.

mato · 6 years ago

Hi Nat. Just to clarify, do these pricing changes imply that users without a paid plan will no longer receive any e-mail support from GitHub?

Speaking as a long-time user, over the last 10(?) years I've only ever needed to reach out to support@ twice or so, both times with fairly obscure issues that were promptly dealt with -- thank you.

It'd be a shame if the implied change to "community support only" for free accounts means that free users no longer have any direct way to contact support.

Lucasoato · 6 years ago

Hi Nat, first of all thanks from every developer in the world. I think this is going to be a great step forward for people who don't need enterprise features (yet). One question: is this service going to be available in countries that are currently hit by US sanctions? (eg. Iran) Thanks again

jpomykala · 6 years ago

Hey how about introducing a function to create a branches from issues

vertis · 6 years ago

Hi nat, I came here prepared to ask about how this would play out for annual billing customers since I only just set it up in March. On searching, I can't actually find where you charged me, so I suspect you might have pre-empted this.

So instead of a question, this is more thank you. I'm a tiny bootstrapped startup and was only using 3 of the 5 previously minimum seats. I'm a prime beneficiary of this change, and look forward (fingers crossed) to being one of the enterprise customers that pays for everyone else :D

For others, can you elaborate on how this will work for current annual billing customers, I found some vague references but no detail.

Thank you

ss3000 · 6 years ago

Can you explain what happened to Atom development?

I've seen numerous posts noting the sharp decline in contribution soon after the acquisition was announced.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22601451

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21142934

Without an official explanation, given the timing, it'd be reasonable to assume you pulled development resources away from it, the exact thing you actually went on Reddit to claim you wouldn't do:

https://www.reddit.com/r/AMA/comments/8pc8mf/im_nat_friedman...

P.S. I've observed that these kinds of posts tend to turn into a place where people shit on Atom in favor of _insert preferred other editor here_. Feel free to do that here too, but just note that I'm not going to be obliged to engage since it's completely orthogonal to the topic at hand. I think any remaining Atom users at this point are likely already painfully aware that Atom has long since lost the war in developer mindshare, but don't let that stop you from pouring salt on the wound.

tomerbd · 6 years ago

Introducing pomodoro technique into the tasks would be great.

Keats · 6 years ago

Can making Github Actions share code between them be a super high priority? Copy/pasting all the setup for a project on each action is repetitive and any time you need to make a change, you need to make it in 6-7 places in our case.

TheRealPomax · 6 years ago

Forgive the skeptic in me: from the outside, it looks like MS is pushing GH to copy features that people use GitLab for right now - how much of this is "we're going to move into GL's space" vs. "this is our own thing"?

(because I'm sure MS wouldn't mind if GL's IPO went less than swimmingly because GH duplicated a number of their selling points "for free" ("for now"))

wackget · 6 years ago

Are you aware that GitHub users still can't sort their repositories into folders?

Because that's definitely one reason why some developers still don't use GitHub.

Take a look at this request which has been open for years and remains unfulfilled:

https://github.com/dear-github/dear-github/issues/74

Is there a reason that such incredibly basic functionality doesn't exist on GitHub but does on all your competitors' offerings?

rmkrmk · 6 years ago

It seems to, on the upgrade page for a personal account it still says "Pro" but for $4/m

leecb · 6 years ago

If you have a personal paid account ("Pro"), the pricing page now says "Continue with Team". It looks like "Pro" has been renamed to "Team".

leesalminen · 6 years ago

I think an acquisition of Gitlab would be the only way for me to migrate back to GH from GL. I've been a happy user of Gitlab for years now and have no yearning desire to return to Github.

toyg · 6 years ago

Gitlab need only wait before GH starts adding Azure-first and Azure-only features, as they are wont to do. At that point they can just offer "the same but for any other cloud provider". Amazon, Google, or IBM, might even throw them a bone.

jedieaston · 6 years ago

The same safeguards that are in place on Azure (which is used by 99% of Fortune 500s for either Office 365 or cloud stuff), which is to say, ethics, and the fact that if they tried it once most of those companies would reduce their spend with Microsoft immediately. Not to mention the government contracts.

ketralnis · 6 years ago

Or maybe different people have different needs and HN isn't a single cohesive hive mind

rvz · 6 years ago

Microsoft/GitHub is doing something clever this time. They know where the developers are and know that the new consumers are developers, hence 'devsumers'.

So how does Microsoft make them happy? Give 'em free stuff: Free repositories, student pack, ebooks, courses, cloud credits, etc and they come running back to GitHub. There's Sign in with GitHub which makes it easy to claim all the freebies, unlike the rest of the alternatives.

This is why the majority of developers will stay and some would realise that it will all go down and will leave Github and self-host their own git server instead.

jdminhbg · 6 years ago

I'm not sure it's great news for those of us who are smaller users of Github. You would expect Github to concentrate even harder on enterprise users now that we're not paying anymore.

I'm not complaining; MS should point GH at where the money is and there is competition you can switch to. I'm just not excited to save a few bucks a month given what will likely change.

cjdu · 6 years ago

Agreed. I cannot believe that GCP and AWS are so asleep at the wheel either. If I were them I would literally be throwing money at some of the GitHub folks to have them fix AWS or GCP.

And it was should have been rather obvious when GitHub released the beta of Actions a few years ago. Actions remains the most important thing GitHub has done, ever, in my opinion. It might take a few more years for people to fully realize what this could be. Hope GitHub doesn't screw it up!

jedberg · 6 years ago

So far Microsoft isn’t taking customers away from AWS. They’re just expanding the total market.

But I do wonder if AWS will try to buy gitlab.

troughway · 6 years ago

Blazor is slow to start but I think long-term will be a game changer.

anderspitman · 6 years ago

As a counterpoint, alternative options like Gitlab and Gitea seem to be doing pretty well.

I think the person who solves project discovery across all these services is going to make a killing.

adverbly · 6 years ago

> Great news for everyone

Not true.

The new Team plan will be a downgrade in specs from the old teams plan. For example it only includes 3000 Github Action minutes. The old plan included 10000. The next plan up would be > 2 * old price.

Source: https://github.com/pricing vs http://web.archive.org/web/20200406010552/https://github.com...

markphip · 6 years ago

Why would protected branches go away?

j88439h84 · 6 years ago

I hope GitHub allows protected branches in private repos. They're really important for everyone, not just enterprises.

closeparen · 6 years ago

It's not clear to me whether this is possible under any configuration, but: can you enforce a two-person rule? I'd like all users to be able to merge accepted PRs, but no one should be able to push directly to master (unless an admin specifically elevates permissions to do that).

The only way I can think of is to have a bot be the only one with commit access, and to interact with the bot to do merging. But that seems pretty roundabout.

hinkley · 6 years ago

Elsewhere in the thread they say that their big customers earn them enough to keep the lights on.

I’m much happier with a sliding scale model than ad or spyware based models. The problem there is that my experiences have been that a lot of expensive scaling work that you might otherwise have deferred gets done for your biggest customers, and we don’t often get the revenue right to absorb that hit. More than once our biggest customers have ended up having the lowest margins, if you de-fuzz the math.

alecbenzer · 6 years ago

Looks like it's one of these:

  .alt-mono-font {
      font-family: SFMono-Regular,Consolas,Liberation Mono,Menlo,Courier,monospace;
  }

aembleton · 6 years ago

Depends on your system and what fonts you have installed. The font-family is `SFMono-Regular,Consolas,Liberation Mono,Menlo,Courier,monospace;`

In Firefox:

- Right click on the element, select `Inspect Element`

- Click on the Font tab on the right hand side and it will tell you which font is being used.

alecbenzer · 6 years ago

When has GOOG made something expensive once the competition died?

I guess for that matter... also when has MSFT? I buy they have, but not aware of any examples of the top of my head.

lucb1e · 6 years ago

That's odd, it's the opposite for me. I did like GitHub, but then setup a Gitea and made sure to figure out how to move things over (even if I haven't done it since they haven't really given me a reason) after Microsoft acquired it. Now I watch every move with a weary eye, though truth be told so far it's going fine (mostly by being hands-off, of course).

I do assume a lot of this is their own money, but with the financial security that Microsoft offers you just can't do much wrong. Even without actual money actually moving, it might still be MS funding that makes the difference.

muglug · 6 years ago

GitHub absolutely does compete for on-prem installation.

Source: we use an on-prem installation at Vimeo

wlll · 6 years ago

Github Enterprise is on-premises:

https://github.com/enterprise

That only really leaves the fact that its OSS that differentiates Gitlab in your list. Not comparing the two, just making sure you're aware.

taytus · 6 years ago

> "PS - No affiliation with anyone."

Sure, that's why the throwaway account.

sytse · 6 years ago

Thanks for the kind words!

For developers everywhere competition is great. We recently made 18 new features free and open source https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2020/03/30/new-features-to-cor... and today Github with an improved free plan and their team plan came down to the exact same price as our most affordable plan. BTW Maybe an idea to rename their lowest tier from team, may we suggest bronze? :)

Since you mentioned contrasting here is a quick take on the features that you lose if you go from a GitHub Pro account to a Free account, I got the list from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22867974 :

    Protected branches in private repos => Free on GItLab
    Draft PRs in private repos => Free on GItLab
    GitHub Pages in private repos (using 1) => => Free on GItLab
    Wikis in private repos => Free on GItLab
    Code owners in private repos => Bronze on GItLab
    Multiple issue assignees in private repos => Bronze on GItLab
    Multiple PR assignees in private repos => Bronze on GItLab
    Code review automatic assignment in private repos => ?
    Scheduled reminders in private repos => TODOs are free on GitLab
    Standard support => Bronze on GitLab

samanthalee233 · 6 years ago

GitLab community advocate here, wanted to see if you're interested in participating in our #GitChallenge - If you send us your review of GitLab vs GitHub (whether positive/negative/neutral), we'll send you some swag. Here's some more info if you're interested! https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2020/04/14/github-free-for-tea...

reilly3000 · 6 years ago

https://help.github.com/en/actions/hosting-your-own-runners/...

samanthalee233 · 6 years ago

Thanks for sharing this feedback, we're doing a #GitChallenge right now (I'm a community advocate at GitLab) asking community members to send us reviews of GitLab vs GitHub (whether positive/negative/neutral) https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2020/04/14/github-free-for-tea...

Ayesh · 6 years ago

Bitbucket offered free repos before Gitlab, but Gitlab did an amazing job making it affordable and as good as githubs offerings.

It's always pleasantly surprisingly to go to Gitlab and see how much they continue to improve.

Old_Thrashbarg · 6 years ago

Ask for a refund of all the charges, people don't realize that a lot of companies do that these days. You should be upset if they refuse (assuming you genuinely weren't using their premium features).

lucb1e · 6 years ago

Same. I liked that GitHub really nudged you to be open unless you were willing to pay to keep it closed (well, sure, you can go ahead and setup your own server or find a competitor you like, but in the base form, if you want to be part of the ecosystem, be open) and am wondering just how many student projects are now staying behind locked doors because GitHub wants to catch bigger fish.

Not saying they're a philanthropic organisation that should promote open source to the kids or anything, just agreeing about an almost certain side effect.

kintalo · 6 years ago

No, it looks like protected branches are not part of the "Free" tier. It's introduced in the Teams pricing and up.

Guvante · 6 years ago

It depends how many users you had. https://github.com/features/actions#pricing-details shows that if you have 12 members you can buy the difference in Linux Github Actions and still get ahead. The price on Mac is prohibitive though and yeah you definitely lose out there as I don't think many people on that plan have 120 people.

roryokane · 6 years ago

I agree that’s a potential concern, but you’re worrying about it a year too late. Individual developers have been able to make repos private on the free plan since January 2019: https://github.blog/2019-01-07-new-year-new-github/. This announcement only affects the cost of private repos for teams of collaborators.

vesinisa · 6 years ago

Ugh.. did you notice that they also changed what the Free plan includes? Many of the premium features, including unlimited private repos for an org, are now included in the free plan.

I am actually going through the list and thinking my company might be able to do with the free plan from now on.

dang · 6 years ago

Normally we'd change the title to be less confusing, but in this case it's a bit tricky, for reasons I've explained here: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

danpalmer · 6 years ago

They’re refunding pro-rata.

notokay · 6 years ago

Embrace, extend, and extinguish.

Microsoft is still a company, that called linux a cancer. No trust at all.

ectospheno · 6 years ago

Your proposed solution handles neither the rogue employee nor the exploit scenario. It does incur a lot of additional cost in maintenance.

xapata · 6 years ago

How would that solve the "leaking employee" case?

johnmarcus · 6 years ago

Ha! sso.tax, what a great site. As an IT person I always thought this same thing with SSO - even if you have an identity provider, it's often under utilized because nearly everything else needs to go to enterprise pricing for SAML auth. I wouldn't mind paying $1-2 more per user/platform, but as sso.tax tallies, the price jump is often much more.

chacham15 · 6 years ago

IMO the biggest difference between the two is self-hosting which makes sense for the price difference.

Even setting that aside, SSO is a feature which is very meaningful to businesses and relatively meaningless to individuals. Because of that its often used to differentiate between the customers. This differentiation results in individuals getting a discount at the expense of the businesses; which to me makes sense.

efrafa · 6 years ago

I get where you are comming from, but from sales perspective, charging extra for SSO makes total sense.

oars · 6 years ago

On sso.tax, it states that "Single sign-on (SSO) is a mechanism for outsourcing the authentication for your website (or other product) to a third party identity provider, such as Google, Facebook, Okta, PingFederate, etc."

Isn't this the definition of Federation, rather than SSO?

colechristensen · 6 years ago

Maybe GitLab is starting to seem like more and more competition so they're having to add more free features to compete for users.

saagarjha · 6 years ago

I don't think this was really supposed to be an AMA.

Old_Thrashbarg · 6 years ago

All the places Microsoft has shipped awesome products and won the market didn't have as strong monopoly (or duopoly) effects as in the mobile space. I don't think we'll see a MS phone any time soon unfortunately.

vorpalhex · 6 years ago

Continue selling Jira plans.

acdha · 6 years ago

They lost that battle a decade ago. I would previously have suggested some kind of enterprise devops offering pairing with their other services but Microsoft will probably get there faster and better.

Kliment · 6 years ago

Linkedin was always a predatory organization, and now they are empowered to do what they actually wanted to do without the risk of going bankrupt if they miscalculate. Github is also empowered to do what they actually wanted to do without the risk of going bankrupt if they miscalculate. This is what you end up. You can't fundamentally change an organization by acquisition without destroying it. For example, Skype was destroyed like that. Github and Linkedin were not, and you are seeing them acting with fewer constraints. Linkedin is using their newfound power for evil, Github much less so.

ahuang1018 · 6 years ago

https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2020/04/14/github-free-for-tea...

gilbertbw · 6 years ago

You have to go in and reduce your seat count on the billing page