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Three and a half years after his return, Chris Wanstrath will step down as CEO of popular developer platform GitHub after leading the search to find his own replacement.
Wanstrath will continue as chief executive until the new leader is found, at which time he'll move into an executive chairman role, he told employees at an all-hands meeting on Thursday [August 17]. Staff had convened at GitHub's San Francisco headquarters to celebrate the company passing $200 million in annualized revenue and reaching new user highs for its popular code repository site valued by investors at $2 billion.
The decision to step down was one that Wanstrath has been considering for months, he told Forbes in an interview. The beginning of 2017 marked the ten-year anniversary of the first commit of code getting pushed to GitHub (the company was formally founded in February 2008). Around that time, Wanstrath began speaking with investors, advisers and friends about the long-term future of the company. "GitHub has a great brand and we have a great community," Wanstrath says. "We could find someone really seasoned to take the CEO role and lead us for the next ten years, and we wouldn't need to lose me."
Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkonrad/2017/08/17/github-ceo-chris-wanstrath-to-step-down/?c=0#33c9269eadd3 [Javascript essential]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 20 2017, @04:53PM (9 children)
I'm not a dev so maybe like jon snow I know nothing but do people really pay for a hosted revision control system instead of setting up their own? and if so why?
(Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Sunday August 20 2017, @05:08PM (6 children)
Github is free for small operations. And it gives you wide exposure. And using it doesn't mean you can't use your own repo as well (or as many as you like.)
If you're a commercial operation, like many things, it's nice to have someone else manage details. The more details are handled off site, the less expertise you have to have on-site.
That's basically it.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 20 2017, @05:15PM (5 children)
This is what I don't get, why would you not want expertise in house?, for something that is presumably critical to your business. I get it for small projects or non companies but if they are valued at 2billion presumably they have significant revenue from places that have real money why not just drop a few racks scattered across the planet to avoid single points of failure and be done instead of a third party managed unknown
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 20 2017, @05:49PM (4 children)
If this confuses you that much, just wait until you hear about outsourcing, or firing in-house devs and hiring contractors, or disbanding the entire Q&A department, or open-floor offices, or...
Reducing costs in any way possible to increase short-term profits at the expense of the long-term ones is all the rage these days.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 20 2017, @07:12PM
I bailed on all IT by 2004, I didn't understand web 1.0 never mind 2.0 or the SV VC parasite system
(Score: 4, Funny) by chromas on Sunday August 20 2017, @07:32PM (2 children)
T–tell him about The Cloud™.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 21 2017, @01:35AM (1 child)
Right because you are not competent enough to run your own servers, I have hear of this chod sorry cloud that you speak of but in my limited understanding I still don't get why you would want to give the key's to the kingdom to random 3rd parties
(Score: 2) by chromas on Monday August 21 2017, @09:48AM
Doesn't matter; cut costs. If something happens, not my problem. Let someone else deal with it. In the mean time, profits are up, baby!
(Score: 2) by tibman on Sunday August 20 2017, @07:12PM (1 child)
It's free but it's also not just source control. Your code repo also gets a bug tracker, wiki, and other stuff. Being on github also increases exposure if you want that. Makes it easy for someone to look at your stuff and even contribute. I've poked through rehash a bunch of times: https://github.com/SoylentNews/rehash [github.com]
If you want private repositories that costs something like 7$ a month? GitHub is what SourceForge was originally trying to be, imo.
SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Monday August 21 2017, @04:23PM
Exactly. Plus a huge existing body of members/users that are already invested in using it.
It wouldn't surprise me in the least if a lot of companies actually did maintain in-house source control, but also used Github to host their "public input" branch. Why give company servers that level of exposure?
Though once you're doing that... well why bother maintaining an internal VCS at all? Just keep internal backups in case anything goes really wrong, and factor in the expected X hours of downtime into your cost analysis. Assuming you're actually using the decentralized power of git, having the central server be down isn't actually much of a problem.
I'd hesitate to use "private" repositories for any code I *really* wanted to keep secret, but it you're working on open source software I don't see any downside.