> Sounds like the only customers being lost were those using github for no-commit users. Is that really a huge segment? If so they just need a special account status to fix this.
I would think this is a large segment, or at least Github would like it to be. Any software company that sells its software directly, and so has a sales team, a support team, marketing and so on will need to make all of those people users in Github if they're going to raise GH issues, see the code, prototype something for a client, help with branding, or anything else. If you're using Github the way they want you to (issue tracking, wiki, all of the things Github adds over vanilla Git that are "sticky"/hard to transfer to a competing service) you don't want to restrict access to just your developers. You want your whole company to be using it.
In any software company I've worked for, those non-developer users number 3-4x the actual number of developers. And I've never worked for a company that would consider restricting which users could raise issues with the product.
I agree that having a non-commit account status that didn't count toward the per-user pricing would fix this, for that particular (I think common?) case.
All of those languages are already covered by IntelliJ Ultimate. So your net cost in this new scheme is roughly the same as before, except if you don't renew your IDE stops working.
That is an interesting choice. I'm sure there reasoning was a bit more involved than that statement, but there's a gap between an enterprise SSDs and consumer grade laptop drives, and plenty of use cases that fit in that gap. Anandtech, for example, recently transitioned from enterprise-grade spinning disks to SSDs for their site, but using Intel mainstream SSDs:
> "we instead decided to go with mainstream SSDs to lower the risk of a random mechanical failure. We didn't need the endurance of an enterprise drive in these machines since they weren't being written to all that frequently, but we needed reliable drives. Although quite old by today's standards, we settled on 160GB Intel X25-M G2s but partitioned the drives down to 120GB in order to ensure they'd have a very long lifespan." (http://anandtech.com/show/6824/inside-anandtech-2013-allssd-...)
In the comments, Anand mentions that he went with the X25-M since the upgrade was last year; if he were doing it now, it would be the Intel 710 or S3700. Also worth noting that reliability, not speed, was their primary motivator.
I wonder if there's a way that Linode could open up that as an option to subscribers? The disks have a shorter lifespan with high writes, but that's measurable, and could be worked into the cost.
I would think this is a large segment, or at least Github would like it to be. Any software company that sells its software directly, and so has a sales team, a support team, marketing and so on will need to make all of those people users in Github if they're going to raise GH issues, see the code, prototype something for a client, help with branding, or anything else. If you're using Github the way they want you to (issue tracking, wiki, all of the things Github adds over vanilla Git that are "sticky"/hard to transfer to a competing service) you don't want to restrict access to just your developers. You want your whole company to be using it.
In any software company I've worked for, those non-developer users number 3-4x the actual number of developers. And I've never worked for a company that would consider restricting which users could raise issues with the product.
I agree that having a non-commit account status that didn't count toward the per-user pricing would fix this, for that particular (I think common?) case.