"GitHub hit one of the great gushers of the last decade (and let's face it, they mainly hit it for reasons that had little do with, um, their actions)"

Really? If they didn't do anything why would you even be paying them your $100 to begin with. They essentially built a social network around version control with an amazing user experience. Do you remember Sourceforge? Which would you rather use?

It isn't fair to discount the value of GitHub or the effort they put into building a great product just because it costs more than you want to pay.

The author appears to have awoken from this binary worldview. He didn't realize that there were other services out there beyond github and sourceforge. Kind of like people who don't know that there are browsers other than Internet Explorer or Chrome.

In the case of source hosting, bitbucket turns out to be pretty great! So it's natural that someone who's just discovered it will be pretty enthusiastic about jumping over to it.

What's baffled me over the years is how bad bitbucket is about marketing themselves. It's been improved somewhat by the Atlassian purchase, but still, they are totally underperforming their potential.

Part of the issue is that they historically were a mercurial hosting shop, so it's not like they were a direct replacement for Github. It was only in the last year or so that they added git support.

It's almost precisely a year since they introduced Git support. That's cool.

Part of the history to remember is that Mercurial and Git started at about the same time and on almost equal footing. GitHub was frequently cited at the time as a reason to use git. As in, "yeah git has kind of a crappy interface, but look at how big that community is!" The GitHub team really grabbed the momentum and never let it go. Now git is so common that supporting it is basically mandatory.

But it didn't have to end up that way. In a counterfactual history where the positions were reversed and HgHub and Gitbucket were founded, I think that HgHub would have dominated through a better focus on acquiring a community.

Github may have been part of the reason, but the support of Linus/kernel devs plus the very active mailing list probably had a lot to do too. I knew people that were git fanatics prior to github. Git was also the vcs of choice for Ruby / Rails developers.

This article is a great troll that purposefully ignores the work behind GitHub, the value it provides, and how it changed the code hosting landscape.

I regret feeding the troll.

This is called competition.

Because of that work, Github changed the code hosting space, and they enjoyed their time(when they offered more). Now there is virtually no difference between github and bitbucket. Competition is always good, and it drives value to consumer.

Indeed competition is good, and I'm sure github is watching their potential competitors and customer actions like a hawk (despite their huge presence, github is definitely not stodgy and slow-moving).

Github charges as they do because they have so much mindshare—for now, at least, github is the place to be, and the default choice for many—that they can charge that much, even if it's painful for some. That's probably only going to change if their paying customers start moving elsewhere in significant numbers.

Of course there are very poor startups etc that want private repos, but cannot afford github, and that clearly represents a niche and an opportunity for their competitors. That's a good thing, and will tend to keep github honest. Github's appeal will in turn motivate their competitors to improve and innovate. Win-win!

That said, the article title (I'm not going to give them a pageview) is nothing but trolly flamebait, and never should have made it to HN. [EDIT: I notice they've tried to tone down the title since the original posting...]

Except for the huge differences in features, userbase and number of relevant projects which have moved primarily to using github.

This is the plan I want github to offer:

For 5(or 7) bucks, unlimited private repos, with no(or 1) collaboration

I moved to bitbucket to get exactly that, but for free.

I love GitHub, the quality of their product, and what they've done for the open source community. But I've always thought a decentralized version control system deserves some kind of decentralized social network. Wouldn't it be cool to see an implementation of GitHub (following, pull requests, issues, all the rest) on top of, say, tent.io?