So it's not really free.
How does this compare with Gitlab and Bitbucket offerings for small teams?
I know Bitbucket has a one-time payment option for their self-hosted version of $10 for 10 users. Pretty hard to beat that, unless you're adamant you need it hosted for you.
Random screenshot I was able to find on their help page. Seems to be that the pricing for github enterprise is around $21/month/user.
https://help.github.com/assets/images/help/organizations/sta...
the entire enterprise feature set seems uncharacteristically less polished in some places, the UX is confusing throughout and things you'd think you could do in the enterprise dashboard being elsewhere in the organization settings
That requirement is a pretty substantial difference.
(disclosure: I work for MS)
Running your own infrastructure doesn’t cost nothing.
Is there a feeling that B2C isn’t a “real” business? Or maybe because B2B startups are more likely to be acquired by larger companies, thus absorbing Microsoft’s stack?
We are focused on B2B companies (for now) because those are the companies we can best support.
Microsoft has a vast partner network, enterprise field sales team, and marketplace, where mostly B2B customers interact.
We decided to leverage that network for startups in order to push sales their way (hence the $1BN in sales pipeline we are pushing in 2020 to startups), in addition to the other technology benefits (Azure, Dynamics, Office 365, Power Platform, Github, etc).
Eventually we will come up with a focused solution for B2C businesses, but for now, we realize our limitations and are focused on where we can best be helpful!
Info in BIO if you have any questions!!
I’m not entirely sure what “validated equivalent” entails, but I take it to mean they’re interested in VC-funded companies, not bootstrapp{ed,ing}, angel-funded, or crowd-funded companies
Your acquisition hypothesis seems quite likely to me; it would be naïve to believe that Microsoft would offer such value out of the kindness of their hearts.
I don’t want to sound bitter: If one has a business that qualifies and is okay with adopting a Microsoft stack, it seems like a great value. However, let’s not give MSFT too many PR creds for being a selfless charitable organization who is ‘looking out for the little girl’ in business, because they’re simply not. They’re a for-profit corporation.
Validated equivalent means that you don't necessarily need to be a company on the fundraising path in order to make it into the program.
So if a self-funded company comes to us and shows they have sales traction, then we can take them to our field sales team, make a target list of companies, and get them intro'd to the right accounts to close deals.
No, this is not out of the goodness of our hearts (although I do know my team has good hearts also :).
The point of the program is to get companies on Azure (a strong platform from a technical perspective), and the best way to keep companies on Azure is to provide value via technology and sales.
If you're closing more deals with us, you will have to consume more Azure in order to service those deals.
Win, meet win.
P.S: On the side, I run a community for profit-driven entrepreneurs who have not raised venture: http://inflectioncommunity.com
The funding thing is a bit restrictive (speaking as a currently-bootstrapping founder), but I understand that it would be very challenging filtering out scammers and not-serious users otherwise. It's easy to put up a nice-looking website and then spend the (pretty generous) credits on unrelated work.
I don't think anything here is especially nefarious, given how public they are about the restrictions and goals. Think of it as closer to an accelerator than a charity, if it helps frame the program better in your mind.
I even created a community for these types of companies http://inflectioncommunity.com
Maybe that wasn't clear from the language, but the thought is that we can only really introduce you to sales leads once you've figured out product market fit.
If you don't have product market fit and a sales rep starts introducing you to leads, it's not going to end well for anyone.
It's not really about scammers (I can't remember an internal conversation that centered around people scamming the program), more about making sure it's going to be useful partnership.
On GitLab, you can decide to download all your data anytime and put it into a selfhosted GitLab instance.
Why would I want to give that up and put my balls into the hands of Microsoft?
Also, while I have you, could you please stop creating accounts for every few comments you post? We ban accounts that do that. This is in the site guidelines too: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for others to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
People disagreeing with you and/or opposing the free offerings of a company known for embrace/extend/extinguish does not mean they're astroturfing.
It's ok, you just work there. No need to get angry.
GitHub's CLI is a move to get people off the open source solution by obfuscation.
The "hub" project they have (which I haven't heard of anyone using) is like that yes.
The CLI is not https://github.com/cli/cli From their own docs: "While both tools bring GitHub to the terminal, hub behaves as a proxy to git and gh is a standalone tool."
"Open source" is often used to appear more "friendly" to outsiders. Something can be open source and still be used to lock people into a particular environment. Case in point: Chromium, Android, etc.
The FAQs for Microsoft for Startups [1] list the following requirements:
- You must be engaged in development of a software-based product or service that will form a core piece of you current or intended business - this software must be owned, not licensed.
- You cannot have received more than $10,000 of free Azure in the past.
- Your headquarters must reside in the countries covered by our Azure global infrastructure.
- You must be a privately held company.
- You must operate a public website on your own domain.
- Your contact email address domain must match your public website.
- Your funding information must be verifiable.
The FAQs also add that:
> The qualified offer is designed to help companies that are focused on growth, so it’s less applicable for consultancies and small businesses. If you are a small business or consultancy you can get started with a free trial.
[1]: https://startups.microsoft.com/en-us/benefits/#faq
Note also that Microsoft’s new offer is for GitHub Enterprise Cloud, not self-hosted GitHub Enterprise. GitLab is probably your best bet for a self-hosted GitHub alternative. [2]
This offering is specifically for Enterprise Cloud, which they host.
For OSS, I really like Github, and honestly even moreso since the Microsoft purchase, since there has been some actual progress.
For non-OSS though, I favour Azure DevOps over Github (despite the silly name) - they have a very generous free plan that includes pricing repos and build time on Windows, Linux and MacOS build agents. The CI/CD side of it really is fantastic - I've used Travis, Appveyor, GitLab and Jenkins, but Azure DevOps is just so much more capable.
With Microsoft buying Github, I'm actually kind of worried about what is going going to happen with Azure DevOps - it really is a great platform, and I hope Microsoft don't end up replacing it with Github...
This looks like it is free as in price, but not free forever and not free of red tape.
I do have a huge amount of frustration with GL's open core system where it seems they use a dartboard for deciding what level to make open source, or ultra-enterprise $$$$, and their issue tracker is the definition of chaos, but nothing's perfect, I guess.
A lot of words to say that I agree with you: short of your team/company already being locked into the GH world, I can't imagine going back to GH
If some start up is working on some novel ML algorithms, that has some nice demos out in the public showcasing their work, I wonder if these bigger companies would take a peek at the source code and use some ideas from the algos for their ml products. This would prevent start-up from expanding into other areas.
Does that happen when you use AWS or Azure? Enterprise is a completely different ball game, be it Microsoft, Google or Amazon.
The amount of value they will get by peeking will be insignificant as compared to the reputation loss they will suffer from enterprise customers.
I also like the Azure Portal web panel. Powershell in the browser is fun to play with on simulations of clusters.
