From a quick look, SourceForge pushed out about 19TB of FileZilla bandwidth in the last 30 days in terms of binary downloads. I'm not sure any projects on GitHub are pushing that kind of bandwidth for binary downloads yet. Or are they?
In terms of PortableApps.com, I don't think we'd be a good fit for GitHub since we're a project that's a conglomeration of apps made portable (for USB and cloud use). I think we're around 90TB of bandwidth for downloads in the last month for our open source apps via SourceForge (some of our open source apps the publishers self-host like Inkscape and LibreOffice so we don't push those through our SourceForge project).
I generally don't trust anything that sells 'unmetered' bandwidth as it nearly always ends in disaster. Their metered accounts seem to be 10TB for $95 which is about what we're paying for freeware downloads now (we can't host those on SourceForge, of course).
PortableApps.com on sourceforge reports they had 943799 downloads last month. Popular files include Firefox portable (20mb) and chrome portable (2mb). Assuming the average download is half way between those (10mb) you're looking at about 480,000 GB of downloads a year. If you store that on S3 you'll be looking at about $46,800 of bandwidth charges a year.
Quite true. The total is quite a bit higher as some popular apps like GIMP (136,000 downloads in the last month) are 64MB and July and August are our slowest months. Additionally, apps like Inkscape are hosted on their own SourceForge project and LibreOffice is hosted by The Document Foundation (not included in the above numbers). Then there's all the freeware we host elsewhere that doesn't show in the SourceForge stats (which we pay the bandwidth on). All told, I think we're easily exceeding a petabyte a year. I used to actually keep those stats, maybe I should look into it again.
I'm not entirely sure what you mean by "only vaguely." The fact that passionate developers are building developer tools has a lot to do with why we've been successful.
Chris, the CEO, has spoken at length about this topic. He and I built another site prior to GitHub where there was very little correlation between our interests and the product we were building. Not surprisingly, our hearts weren't in it and we threw in the towel.
All of this said, just because you're working on something you're passionate about doesn't immediately mean you're bound for success; it just helps tremendously.
I say only vaguely because what you want to use may or may not have any correlation with what people want to buy, and it is extremely risky to assume that correlation exists.
just because you're working on something you're passionate about doesn't immediately mean you're bound for success; it just helps tremendously.
It helps immensely (in fact, if you don't have that, you are doing it wrong, IMO :), as long as you don't let your passion get in the way of figuring out what your customer wants.
Like I said, dev tools are a special breed that have more wiggle room for this, but as my experience shows, it is not immune from failure (in fact, developers are notoriously cheap because there are so many good, free dev tools out there, but I bet developers aren't your primary customer, but rather their managers).
My response can be summed up in one sentence: with all startup advice, beware survivor bias!
Not for nothing, but full fare economy can often be more expensive than discounted biz tickets. Having an actual conversation telling the VC to cool it might have ended up saving you more money.
So you're positing that it's in a significant % of cases possible to fly business at less cost than economy? If so, you'll need to back it up, because it's a very bold claim to make.
full fare economy will mean fully refundable and changeable with no fees etc. discounted business/first class will be just like discounted economy - not refundable, and not changeable w/o fees - the latter can definitely be cheaper if you don't mind the constraints.
That is certainly not the case at GitHub. We don't care where or when you work as long as the work gets done. If you're being guilted into staying later, then the hours aren't actually flexible.
This is poor advice. We've met dozens of VC's since GitHub launched to 1) meet interesting people 2) learn as much as possible 3) figure out who we like if we ever decide to go that route. Folks like Satish Dharmaraj at Redpoint have loads of information gleaned from successful ventures and I'd have a drink with him any day.
We're trying to fundamentally change how people write, collaborate, and discover code and the sooner people stop thinking of us as just a repo depository, the better, because we've never been about that.
Ask yourself what kind of markup we'd have to charge on storage space and still be able to grow our business when most of the repos we host are less than 1 MB.
We charge what we do because it makes money. Money that allows us to continue hiring really talented people that are all focused on building an even better service.
Doing things like including private repos with our free plan would eat into our margins and only satisfy the people that are likely to never convert to a paid plan. Frankly, I think being able to use all of the tools we provide for the price of a pint of Guinness every month is a damn good deal.
I laughed at the article, but you have a really good point. If you have 30 projects and only want a place to put your code, you're far better off just using a private server, which you undoubtedly already have. If you have a development culture that is well-modeled by how GitHub approaches collaboration, that's where you'll see a lot of added value over a private server.
I think the tough part is that GitHub's innovations in collaboration are primarily a huge win for open source. GitHub makes discovery of these projects so much easier, connects disparate people across communities (and countries!), and provides a unified technical stack and process "stack" for those people to contribute (same bug trackers, same "send me a pull request" approach, same wiki). That's something that's a pretty big deal for OSS.
Most of those issues aren't as big a deal for a business in my experience - most businesses either don't have such problems (discovery) or have their own solutions (process). But hey - you guys have got customers, you're hiring like crazy, and I love your stack personally; I'm certainly not judging! Just offering my perspective on why some folks might not buy in to the collaboration stuff from a business point of view.
It's just extremely frustrating to not be a Github customer because the pricing model is completely unworkable.
The little company I work at would love to host our repos on Github and pay for a plan appropriate for our level of use. But according to Github pricing, we're "Platinum" solely because of our repo count, even though our level of traffic and space usage is tiny.
It's hard to say that it's "wrong", because clearly things are working well for Github, but those of us who have been intentionally left out don't have to be happy about it.
Just like there are diminishing returns coding for many hours without resting, trying to build a business without having a social life will ultimately have damaging effects. Knowing how to communicate is half the battle and you're not going to learn how to do that sitting in front of a screen all day.
I think we've all read the stories of founders not sleeping for days and ruining their personal lives in the process and I just don't see how any of that is necessary.
San Francisco's distractions should be seen as a benefit, not a hindrance.
