GitHub has received a $250m infusion of venture-capital cash that values the code-sharing website at $2bn.
That means it's worth more than ZenDesk ($1.78bn), slightly less than the New York Times ($2.17bn), and more than stricken Yelp ($1.87bn).
The San Francisco-based upstart said its Series-B funding round was led by VC bigwigs Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Thrive Capital, and Institutional Venture Partners. The round is the second major fundraising push for GitHub. In 2012, the site raised $100m in venture funding. GitHub was founded in 2008, and today has about 300 total employees.
The site reports it hosts 25 million source code repositories, and has 10 million registered users and 33 million unique monthly visits.
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Git a load of this: GitHub now valued at $2 billion
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(Score: 3, Interesting) by GungnirSniper on Friday July 31 2015, @01:24AM
Dice Holdings Inc only has a market capitalization of 436 million dollars [yahoo.com], so SourceForge and Slashdot are probably not worth very much of that.
Tips for better submissions to help our site grow. [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 31 2015, @01:38AM
Why oh WHY won't everyone join the hipster sensation that is THE GIT HUB.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 31 2015, @02:06AM
Because most hipsters are too busy at the sensation that is THE GLORY HOLE.
(Score: 2) by captain normal on Friday July 31 2015, @02:57AM
Naw...they're all busy getting ready for Burningman.
When life isn't going right, go left.
(Score: 2, Touché) by Lunix Nutcase on Friday July 31 2015, @03:05AM
Will Bennett Haselton have enough time to optimize the ice lines before they arrive?
(Score: 3, Funny) by davester666 on Friday July 31 2015, @05:59AM
Why not? What makes you think Dice is worth more than negative $500 million dollars?
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 31 2015, @01:33AM
That usually means the VC that invested in the last round attached a shitload of conditions that allow them to buy out the founders for cheap, unless unrealistic financial targets are met.
(Score: 1) by Gertlex on Friday July 31 2015, @01:34AM
My reaction to this: Only!?
Not that I've thought about this much. My brain is probably confusing "this is a valuable thing" with "this is worth money/makes lots of money".
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday July 31 2015, @03:19AM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 31 2015, @01:35AM
Rabid penguin huggers would gleefully eat feces directly from the anus of Linus Torvalds.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Subsentient on Friday July 31 2015, @02:14AM
But don't you know? Linus shits the finest milk chocolate!
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." -Jiddu Krishnamurti
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 31 2015, @02:21AM
And you can have your choice of flavors. I like the Mint shit chocolate.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 31 2015, @05:15AM
Say all you want about Linus, but he sure knows how to suckseed.
(Score: 2) by Anne Nonymous on Friday July 31 2015, @01:40AM
When Soylent News reaches a valuation of $2 bln, I'm selling all my shares.
(Score: 2) by Lunix Nutcase on Friday July 31 2015, @02:09AM
Pfft. Hold out until it's at $40 bln like Uber.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by physicsmajor on Friday July 31 2015, @01:46AM
What is GitHub's business plan? Seems like it hosts nigh-everything for nigh-anyone these days. Free websites, files, etc. are amazing for small projects, but can it hope to actually make real money solely from corporate customers?
I'll be honest, I do use the service for open source distributed development without paying a dime. For international open source projects there has never been anything better, and I find myself taking it for granted. I definitely want GitHub to succeed, as GitHub's ease of use and success has (so far correlated) with the rise and/or polish of a large number of open source projects.
If this lasts, we're all good. If not... well, I know I'd start looking for alternatives if, for example, I started seeing Photoshop ads alongside image processing projects or had to watch a video to make a PR.
(Score: 3, Informative) by kadal on Friday July 31 2015, @02:05AM
They have an enterprise offering: https://enterprise.github.com/home [github.com] .
Probably works well given that most developers know and use github. This means they fit in pretty well when joining a company that uses github.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 31 2015, @02:19AM
There are only two kinds of coders today: GitHub users, and unemployable gutter trash.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 31 2015, @03:17AM
Still odd that their enterprise offering could be lucrative enough to justify that crazy valuation. It is pretty simple to setup a host with git, gitolite, and gitweb. I setup both this and (zillion years ago) svn (with the webdav bits for finer grained perms) for several groups at my work, and for both git and svn, each was just a quick task, not a project-- i.e., even if we trusted some one else to host our stuff, it wouldn't be worth very much to us to have it hosted.
I hope Github survives Bubble 2.0.
(Score: 2) by NCommander on Friday July 31 2015, @03:39AM
Honestly, github has features that gitweb doesn't. The inline atom editor, a fairly decent code review system (which unlike germit isn't hard to handle), intergrated merging, forking and branching. We switching site development from a selfhosted gforge instance to github mostly because github rocks.
The nice thing about git is if github does ever go poof, its not like its hard to move to repo somewhere else.
Still always moving
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Friday July 31 2015, @08:44AM
The nice thing about git is if github does ever go poof, its not like its hard to move to repo somewhere else.
True, but how hard is it to move the bug tracker, wiki, and code review history somewhere else?
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2) by NCommander on Friday July 31 2015, @09:00AM
Code revision is in the git repo since the actual merges (+ commit messages) are there, and we don't use the github wiki for documentation, we use the actual POD files in docs/* for that. As for the bug tracker, its not the end of the world if we loose it.
I realize its not perfect, but unless we host our own infrastructure (which would be a massive reduction in functionality), the situation isn't going to be much better elsewhere.
Still always moving
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Friday July 31 2015, @11:06AM
Code revision is in the git repo since the actual merges (+ commit messages) are there
I use GitHub for a few things and I've not seen the code review history in my repos, it seems separate. How do you access it (as in, the per-line comments for the reviews, which are often the useful things in determining why a feature was implemented a particular way) without GitHub?
sudo mod me up
(Score: 3, Informative) by NCommander on Friday July 31 2015, @11:59AM
I'm not familiar with that functionality then; I'm not sure any of us actually use it.That being said I encourage people to both comment their code *and* use descriptive commit messages. Generally if you're doing something unintivitive, or designing something, leave comments. Do you know how many C codebases i've had to dig through that are poorly labeled at best requiring a few hours to understand that could have been averted if someone spent a few minutes writing some decent commenting.
Still always moving
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 31 2015, @07:30PM
Here is an example: https://github.com/nixxquality/WebMConverter/commit/c1ac0baac06fa7175677a4a1bf65860a84708d67 [github.com] those comments are attached to that commit, which means they only show up when looking at the commit in the interface. That can be handy because you can do a commit for a possible bug fix or the like and users can comment directly on it as to what they like or don't. It also doesn't clog up the repo history with commits of "what about this?" "What about that?" that get squashed or rebased away but they do stay attached to that commit.
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Saturday August 01 2015, @09:44AM
sudo mod me up
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 31 2015, @03:17AM
Corporate valuations (when dealing with the Internet) are a lot like old wine. You wouldn't drink the shit, but if there's enough dust on a very old bottle, it's worth a fortune.
Value != cost != price. Never mix the three up.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 31 2015, @03:40AM
Get money from VC and spend it.
(Score: 3, Informative) by TheRaven on Friday July 31 2015, @08:41AM
Their free offering is basically marketing and free training on their commercial offering. For small companies, their hosted service is pretty attractive. Developers can use git or svn for checkouts and have integrated bug trackers and wiki and, if they've used the version for open source, no learning curve. Their notification stuff is also pretty nice for when you have a lot of projects that you're not closely involved with, as it makes it easy to get emails for relevant things but drink from a fire hose.
For more security-conscious companies, they also provide a turn-key VM, so you can run it in your own infrastructure (or someone else's cloud), with Xen and HyperV supported. They also offer some nice-looking (I've not used it) IDE integration.
Unlike a lot of dot-com businesses, they actually have a product that is quite nice. I'm not sure it's significantly nicer than GOGS [gogs.io], but it's very easy to deploy and the shallow learning curve may be worth it.
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2) by PizzaRollPlinkett on Friday July 31 2015, @11:04AM
They realized that managers today know only two things: outsource stuff and purge workers. They know that managers will outsource anything and everything they can. Corporations these days are just shells of managers who manage outsourcing.
So, yes, git is open source and anyone could set up their own repository. But managers want to outsource. I commend github for finding the pulse of today's businesses. I think the valuation is realistic. Github provides a service that managers will pay for, because that's what managers do these days.
Tech companies that are highly valued these days seem to be the ones which have figured out how to print money. Github (and any "cloud" company) gets money from corporations who want to outsource. LinkedIn has figured out how to get almost unlimited money from desperate recruiters who will pay them to send e-mails. (To us, that sounds stupid, but to a recruiter, it doesn't, and they apparently have money to spend.) Apple has figured out that enough people will pay a premium for quality that they're sitting on so much cash they can't spend it all even after building a monumentally lavish headquarters.
(E-mail me if you want a pizza roll!)
(Score: 2) by tibman on Friday July 31 2015, @02:14PM
In order to have a private repository hosted you have to pay 7$ monthly. I do it and i'm sure plenty of others do too.
SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by goodie on Friday July 31 2015, @03:50AM
And I don't mean no disrespect here by what I am about to write. So feel free to beat me/correct me if I am mistaken. To me, it feels as though GitHub is yet another "cloud" service. I have barely used it mind you... But, from what I gather, the idea is to have one's own Git repo on a public server. Now I understand that for forks, project sharing etc. this is a fantastic thing, don't get me wrong. What I wonder is how (and why) organizations would want to use GitHub rather than run a Git repo in-house? Are there specific advantages to doing that? I am not trying to troll. My little experience with Git and GitHub makes me wonder is all. Now what's great here is that we can look at GitHub as a way for people to share code, much like people share pics etc. on social networks. I understand that it's not exactly the same thing considering forks etc. but there are similarities (follow project/user etc.).
Anyway I'd be glad to hear what people have to say about this. The reason for my post is that I wonder what is the $2bn worth for? User info like social networks? Code? Hardware for hosting ;) ?
(Score: 4, Informative) by bradley13 on Friday July 31 2015, @06:21AM
I use a mix of GitHub, GitLab and in-house repos, depending on the project.
"Why use a cloud service instead of in-house?" So that you don't have to administer the thing yourself. Someone else keeps it running, handles updates, adds features, etc.. The same reason you would use any cloud service. This is especially valuable to small organizations, where one of the developers spends their time taking care of such things. For large companies, it means that the developers don't have to deal with the (usually slow, old-fashioned, bureaucratic) IT department, whenever they need a new server or a new feature.
Personally, I think this round of venture capital is the death of Gitlab. With that kind of money in play, there will be huge pressure to monetize the site - far beyond the kind of revenue it is actually capable of generating. That means spreadsheet monkeys and marketeers will be brought into figure out how to increase profits. In a few years, GitLab will be the next SourceForge.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 31 2015, @03:33PM
I concur.
Only a few that sold out have managed to stay in business, even less so are those that remained in the same form.
When someone external decides that monetizing the data is the next step, your windows 10 ID will be used to show you ads on github--or whatever ID. That's not a knock against windows, considering so many things now value your data. The fact remains it is not unreasonable to believe github will be squeezed to death, and as the brain drain commences, it will collapse under the weight of its new advertising revenue stream.
Sometimes, a local server works best. Backing it up, patching, securing... this is not hard, and it's not new. It's becoming a lost art, though, but I hope it will see a resurgence because I for one prefer to work without being forced to see ads because my employer is too cheap to pay the premium for what they force me to use.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 31 2015, @07:24AM
my reason is because I can't sync with collaborators (or home and office) otherwise. you try convincing the university that it's ok to have ssh access from outside their idiotic vpn that doesn't work properly anyway...
(Score: 2) by goodie on Saturday August 01 2015, @01:55AM
Interesting. In my university, I think that it's the main reason why people latched on stuff like Dropbox in the blink of an eye. It's quick, painless, and does not require the involvement of anybody else (e.g., IT dept).
(Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Friday July 31 2015, @08:48AM
Git a load of this: GitHub now valued at $2 billion
You have git to be kidding me.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk