I would only argue one point in this: Github is not a developer's paradise. It's good. In fact, it's really good. But it has one huge weakness, something which all DVCS repositories seem to have followed: they charge per repository.
This is a terrible pricing model. It should, if anything, be based on per-GB of storage regardless of repositories. Otherwise it gets hideously expensive for people to, say, have many small repositories.
It just doesn't make sense that, say, the Linux kernel, and a 500 line personal Ruby project are equal units as far as Github is concerned.
Bitbucket charges by "private users". You can host as many open source projects as you want--many forks of the Linux kernel, for example--for free. However, if you want a private repository, you can only give read/write access to 5 people with the free account. https://bitbucket.org/plans
That's why I use it for all my projects--I have a Plan 9 kernel fork, an Inferno OS fork, and a bunch of smaller projects for a total of 13 repos, on the free plan.
Even though I prefer mercurial to git, Bitbucket could get a lot of converts if they started supporting git. Bitbucket is not the serious competition that I'd like to see Github get. For developers that prefer Hg to Git, Bitbucket has to compete with Google Code, Codeplex, and others...
fwiw, github doesn't really care about disk space for free plans as long as it's not being abused.
i was hosting the source code for my android rom on bitbucket because i would have had to pay for a big github account (over 1gb of code in 166 repos). i emailed github's support team and they said it wouldn't be a problem, so i moved everything to github.
For Git projects, the per-repo pricing of Github is insane. They don't even have a public pricing plan for the number of repos I'd need for my personal (and private) coding.
100% Agree. I have 5 different GitHub accounts to cover all of my repositories, and I'm constantly having to shuffle active projects in and out of GitHub. I've emailed them asking for different pricing, and "they don't support that".
It's the only thing that has me looking for alternatives.
I think this is intended as a "tax" on closed source software. While it's annoying, I pay the extra $10 per month to get a few extras and don't worry about it.
The major downside is that the policy leads people to use git incorrectly by not using submodules where they are appropriate.
GitHub wants to encourage people to make their repositories public, it's their "social" feature, so I can see why they do it, but as an end-user I agree with you that per-Gb or per-user, with as many private repos as you want, would be a better model.
My company using Github for hosting many small repositories (typical web agency model) but they can be surprisingly accommodating when it comes to hard limits to plans, and it’s still fairly cheap compared to administering our own solution.
This is a terrible pricing model. It should, if anything, be based on per-GB of storage regardless of repositories. Otherwise it gets hideously expensive for people to, say, have many small repositories.
It just doesn't make sense that, say, the Linux kernel, and a 500 line personal Ruby project are equal units as far as Github is concerned.