GitHub Seeks Funding At $2 Billion Valuation 80
itwbennett writes: GitHub, the most popular Git hosting site, is reportedly seeking $200 million in an upcoming private funding round that values the company as high as $2 billion. "GitHub is an interesting company," said analyst Frank Scavo, president of Computer Economics. "It is partly a hosting service for developers and partly a social media site." And it's a great place to recruit developers. But company-specific factors aside, there's also a lot of money in the market "looking for homes," said Rob Enderle, principal analyst with Enderle Group.
If Sourceforge is any example (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:If Sourceforge is any example (Score:4, Interesting)
Let's hope not, it's been a great service up until today at least.
SourceForge has gone so down that even their mirror hosts are evaluating whether they should provide them resources anymore. There's been a campaign aimed at SourceForge's mirrors to get them to cut their cooperation. It's been somewhat successful and got a lot of attention after people realized SourceForge had hijacked Firefox, too, among other big open-source projects.
Re:How the fuck is it "hijacking"? (Score:4, Insightful)
It's hijacking when you try to distribute your modified software as the original. Sourceforge is free to fork Firefox and call it SourceFox or whatever. But that's not what they are doing.
Re:How the fuck is it "hijacking"? (Score:5, Insightful)
Firefox may be open source software but the name "Firefox" and the logo are not.
So you can freely change and redistribute Firefox but if you want to call it Firefox, you need Mozilla's permission. Only if you decide to call it something else, like "Iceweasel", you are free to do whatever you want as long as you respect the copyleft.
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Sadly, the installer is not part of the F/OSS program and no license that I can think of makes injecting malware via the installer a license violation.
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The point being that it is perfectly legal for them to do so, and no one is saying 'SUE SOURCEFORGE FOR INFRINGMENET'.
They are saying 'BOYCOTT SOURCEFORGE FOR BEING DECEIPTFUL'. It's completely valid to call them out for being misleading about content they are manipulating for reasons that are not at all aligned with the enduser benefit.
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The problem is that Sourceforge, and other sites, are using OSS projects to spread malware.
Maybe GPLv4 will have a "third party sites can't inject malware into the download" clause. What Sourceforge is doing is far more harmful than 'Tivoization'
Seriously, an anti-Sourceforge/Download.com open source license is needed.
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I don't see what open source project hosting site Github has to do with malware distribution site Sourceforge.
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Sourceforge used to be a respectable open source project hosting website too.
Re:If Sourceforge is any example (Score:5, Insightful)
2 billion dollars of funding will bring the same sharks around.
Wtf does github need funding for exactly?
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You say that like it's a bad thing!
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It's a cash out. This is how web apps make money, by selling themselves to others. Will THEY then make any money? Who cares!
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It's git, changing the origin is not hard, and you should already be keeping a local mirror copy up-to-date. The most that they could keep hostage is the issue trackers and wiki, migrating those in times of anger is not the end of the world.
That's part of the appeal of github, they can't keep anything of value hostage.
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They want 200 million, they are claimed to be worth 2 billion. They are not, of course, trying to get 2b dollars.
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does it mean they will become like them after they're bought?
Github is not selling out: they're offering a 10% stake. Even if the entire offering is bought by one entity, that entity will not have the power to force github to do anything the existing structure doesn't want.
Possibly worth noting that Andreessen Horowitz already has a 13% stake, and he hasn't managed to make them Evil. Raising outside ownership to 23% isn't going to give the vultures control.
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You're not taking preferential shares into account. They often have nasty conditions attached. For example the venture capitalists may be able to liquidate the company without needing a majority.
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See sourceforge - this is how you make money, get a VC to fund your 'exciting and innovative game-changing' service and get pots of cash. Revenue totally optional, advertising irrelevant.
The trouble with businesses today is that some of them have a bricks-1.0 mindset that expects to receive revenue by selling stuff (even if its adverts and malware)! pffft.
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You do realize that VCs don't just give away money. There are revenue expectations that come along with it.
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they can expect as much as they like... but in these times, the money comes from pumping up expectations and selling overpriced shares to investors, and then selling the company to facebook or Google for way more than its worth!
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The massive over-valuation is looking bad. Investors will require growth and monetization, and their current premium accounts aren't going to cut it. It really isn't a good sign because no matter how well intentioned the staff are and how good they are to work with so far, shareholders demanding value will screw it up.
Sad times. What happened to realistic valuations and growing a long term, responsible business? This just seems like wanting to hype the platform up as much as possible and then cash out at th
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Because in a bubble, lifestyle businesses are a waste of capital. If it's more important to have the word "founder" on your business card than it is to make money, the founder should sell the business at a bubble valuation and use the money to start another.
Which of these compan
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Enderle? (Score:5, Interesting)
That Enderle guy is still around? He has been so discredited that it's amazing. One thing is for certain, whatever his opinion, the opposite will be true.
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Github runs Linux man! That means Darl will be entitled to all the brazillions that github gets from the funding, and Rob can finally get paid. Good thing too, 'cause there's not as much money in drunken keynotes as there used to be.
"Valuation" (Score:1)
A better word: Fantasy... An even better word: Fraud! This is how bubbles are made.
$2b / 9m users (Score:5, Insightful)
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The enterprise plans aren't cheap, and private github repos are pretty popular with startups (of which there's a bazillion of them now).
Of course they aren't going to get 222/user per year. If they did, their valuation would be 5-10 billion, not 2. No company makes their entire valuation in revenue every year.
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The enterprise plans aren't cheap, and private github repos are pretty popular with startups (of which there's a bazillion of them now).
Of course they aren't going to get 222/user per year. If they did, their valuation would be 5-10 billion, not 2. No company makes their entire valuation in revenue every year.
Firstly, I never claimed $222/year. Secondly, almost every commercial (i.e. have money to spend) dev team can have their own private enterprise git repo on a number of different VPS's out there for chump change. A few years ago it was different, it was expensive to host your own server. Now it's cheap. Host multiple ones in different sites and you also get redundancy and backup, probably for a lot less than the enterprise github plans.
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The time your devops will take to setup that stuff, unless they're way underpaid, is almost not worth it. Github also has brand recognition.
Regardless of whats worth it or not, a TON TON TON of companies are using private github repos or github enterprise. Maybe it doesn't make sense, people still do it.
Company i work for does it. And its not that we don't do VPS. We spend more money in hosting and VPS than we do on payroll (a few hundred employees, mostly engineers). Even if you just go and dump git on a h
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While this is true, the value in github isn't in the git hosting alone. It's in the workflow it enables--PR submission, collaborative review, merging, and being able to hook the PRs into CI systems to test them prior to merging. These are unmatched by anything else. You could install gitlab as an alternative, but setting up all this stuff by hand and maintaining it can be a significant investment you might want to avoid.
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AC because I've modded here.
Utter bullshit. Take a look at Atlassian products. There are more companies that do the same thing better or worse than github. The biggest challenge github had to overcome was doing what they do aat the scale they do it at, not the PR or CI intergation systems.
Merging and hooks to CI are at the core of git.
There are Chef/Puppet/Ansible/Salt/etc cookbooks/manifests on github that will allow to stand up similar infrastructure in minutes.
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Gitlab's Omni-installer makes it very easy for a standard installation of a private Git server. It's very simple and works great for basic installations.
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Bbbbbut... cash grab. Instant billionaire. Laugh all the way to the bank.
It's the new business model.
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oblig:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6IQ_FOCE6I
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I doubt the valuation is based purely on user count. Maybe moreso critical mass - unless they do something monumentally stupid, I can't see any situation in the near future that replaces GitHub as the go-to. I said the same thing about facebook during its IPO, and apparently I was wrong as hell.
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So each user is worth $222? Please... this has all the characteristics of a bubble.
You're thinking of this the wrong way. Look, Google spent over $3 billion to buy Nest. So, a better way to value GitHub is in terms of fancy thermostats. Here's a back-of-the-envelope calculation: assuming Nest has more customers than GitHub - which is probably quite generous, if not downright wrong - then each user is worth 2/3 of a thermostat sale. Put in those terms, it sounds fairly reasonable.
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While I agree it's probably an overvaluation, I should point out that valuations also take into account the likely future growth of a service. Github is the dominant repository site, and still growing. Other repositories are being out-competed and shrinking or shutting down. If you put a valuation of $100 per user (more reasonable) with an expectation that they will double in size in the next few years then the valuation is understandable.
Git (Score:2, Funny)
while the gittin's good...
Who? (Score:4, Insightful)
Rob Enderle, principal analyst with Enderle Group.
This fucking clown? This guy who sided for years and years with SCO? This guy who gets things more wrong than even Dvorak, and at the same time is sincerely not trying to troll (unlike Dvorak) thereby exhibiting his utter incompetency?
Since when does his fucking opinion fucking matter? How the fuck does one get a gig doing what he does and get even NPR to pay cash money for idiotic punditry?
>group
OF ONE FUCKING PERSON. Self-importance, bloviation, and inaccuracy all rolled up into one neat douchebag.
WHY DOES SLASHDOT, OF ALL PLACES, LEND THIS GUY ANY SORT OF CREDIBILITY BY BLOGGING HIS CRAP HERE?
Oh, I know, Dice.
Hnnnnggggghhh...
--
BMO
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Rob Enderle, principal analyst with Enderle Group.
A highly speculative article on a pump-and-dump marketing site used as the basis of a highly speculative article on formerly popular social click-bait for technology site, Slashdot, said, um, basically, nothing of substance.:-
[weasel-speak]
A (un-named) spokeswoman for GitHub (allegedly)declined to comment. A representative for Andreessen Horowitz didn’t immediately respond to a phone call and e-mail seeking comment.
[/weasel-speak]
Emphasis and bracketed comments mine.
tl;dr Merrill Lynch own a chun
He got one thing right (Score:2)
"... a lot of money in the market looking for homes"
Yeah. That's what happens when interest rates are zero.
Analyst/consultant type smells money...
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"... a lot of money in the market looking for homes"
Yeah. That's what happens when interest rates are zero.
Analyst/consultant type smells money...
And one of the reasons that interest rates are so low currently is because banks are full with people's money, since they are trusted more than various "financial analysts/consultants" who mis-advised them recently - not so productive for the economy to have money buried in bank accounts instead of being invested directly to businesses, nor "healthy" for society to mis-trust its "money experts", but when i read about GitHub's "2 billions valuation"... i can only think: bubbles! [youtube.com]
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"... a lot of money in the market looking for homes"
Yeah. That's what happens when interest rates are zero.
Well, that and the fact that everybody has a dream of spending half their life working overtime, and the other half of their life not working at all but living as if they had the same kind of income. Everybody wants investment growth and is investing a LOT of money, and that tends to create bubbles. I suspect that when all those people start trying to live off of all that saved money the results won't be pretty. Suddenly we move from labor surplus to labor shortage, but we still have that surplus of mone
GitHub is brilliant (Score:2)
However 2Billion is a big stretch.
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I am surprised (Score:4, Interesting)
I am surprised that github still does not have a job board on the site, not only is it a MAJOR money income, it is also quite useful for the devs themselves. It is one of the few win-win monetization situations as long as the user can opt-out of seeing the job ads. Pretty much any job ad that asks you to send your github profile would be advertising there.
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A job board/partnership would be pretty reasonable imo.
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I never liked the concept that developers either have to volunteer help people (at stackoverflow) or donate time (at github) in order to be considered a valuable employee. I mean, for someone with no work history, but beyond entry level??
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It is kind of unfair really, some jobs allow you to contribute to opensource, others do not. Those who can work on open source projects at the job will have more notable github accounts, that does not necessarily mean they are better than the guy who does not have a github account. It is unfair, but the hiring manager position is understandable, it is one thing to hear about a project and another to see the code.
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They do: https://jobs.github.com/ [github.com]
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Huh, I was not aware of that. They should put those job ads when you are checking out repositories cross-reference the job positing with the repository files for better matches (and of course put a "disable job ads" option on your profile)
Sorry (Score:2)
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The "git flow" is a godsend to anyone who has more than one feature/bugfix in flight at a time.
BTW, does svn have a feature like rebase that stops me at exactly WHICH commit conflicted so I can figure out why, or is it like cvs where I run an update and it gives me a report listing all the files that conflicted and "fuck you, that's why".