How can that explain the terrible uptime for the ~4 years post acquisition before all the AI stuff you’re talking about started?
For example, here is a Hacker News story about GitHub being down on July 28th 2016: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12178449
Here's GitHub's historical uptime graph (on which this chart is based), saying there was no recorded downtime that day, or in fact that entire month: https://www.githubstatus.com/uptime?page=40
I honestly can't explain the discrepancy between the graph in the article and the month over month stats on the same page, but the latter tracks both to my own subjective experience of GitHub and their own internal metrics.
https://www.githubstatus.com/uptime?page=3000
According to it, GitHub had 100% uptime from June to August 1996.
I think centralized code hosting is pretty much going to get killed by AI. Just like it's doing to social media.
That elephant didn’t even exist yet for the first few years of poor uptime shown in the graph in TFA… I don’t really disagree if we’re talking about the recent uptime issues, but how does that explain the years 2020-2023?
Private corporate codebases are a poor fit for GH because they don't benefit from public social graph effects. And the typical codebase isn't so large as to be technically challenging to deal with with OSS tools. I'd guess they make up a substantial share of revenue.
But once the reliability is called into question, self-hosted or smaller alternatives start to look good. Although there's some trickiness there if you want to be super cautious about making sure you can get to your code+infra in case of a vendor incident, especially if you're cloud based.
If all companies did this, there'd be no free tier on Github. You get the free tier because the SaaS customers are subsidising the free tier.
There's something called "rate limits" that engineers not working for GitHub have probably heard of; it's this crazy idea that you should limit the load on your infra in order to avoid downtime. GitHub is not the first free service to ever have to deal with bots.
Are you paying them in proportion to the resources they expend on you?
There's this thing called "sustainability", and every company needs to have it. Github cannot continue on the current trajectory where every AI-bro wants to run an agent that generates 1000s of lines of code per hour, dozens of commits per hour... and provide that for free to a few dozens of millions of users who won't pay.
That being said, Microsoft does have an opportunity here - AI-bros are willing to pay $200/m to burn tokens so Github should offer a plan for Copilot, say $400/m, that includes a repo.
If they don't ban AI agents on free tiers, they are going to be out of business soon.
GitHub action, co pilot. Oh and that ugly AI search I'm unable to disable. Migration to azure.
Yes Microsoft managed to ruin the network effect. Outages? The straw that broke the camel's back.
The next year they removed the limitation on collaborators on private repos for free users.
In the last 4 years they’ve significantly improved their project management tools. I think a lot of teams can make do with GitHub Projects, they’re pretty decent.
Who knows if any of these are directly because of Microsoft or not. But there has naturally been material improvements to GitHub in the years after being bought by Microsoft.
It's more like any positive actions they have had are being outright dismissed or forgotten. They removed several restrictions that Github had over private accounts, as well as github actions. Aside from the downtimes, the Github of today is fantastic compared to pre-acquisition Github.
It provides huge value for anyone running an opensource AI generated project.
While I'm 99% sure it is not true, it makes me sleep better at night. And giggle a little when it goes down.
Around 8 years ago I was working for a company that they also acquired, and they also forced us to move to Azure. Performance was terrible and our system wasn’t just working there as it should. A few years later our service was dead and all customers moved to one of their office products.
"Yes, it (AI) will kill open source—at least as we know it. I’m convinced that GitHub and GitLab will eventually stop offering their services for free if the flood of low-quality, "vibe-coded" projects—complete with lengthy but shallow documentation—continues to grow at the current rate."
C'mon.
- Microsoft committed to AI. - AI slop is increasing the costs for maintaining/running GitHub. - GitHub is sinking.
This is interconnected. I can think of numerous other ways how this would be handled. But Microsoft went the AI slop way already. There is no way back for them.
Microsoft investors
