M.-A. Lemburg <mal@...> writes:
On 30.12.2015 20:03, Stefan Krah wrote:
I don't care if they have been profitable by selling private repos on a small/medium scale, the direction they're heading in is quite clear:
Get people (esp. young ones) to work for free on OSS projects using gamification, cute icons, "social" coding, and a fake hero-of-work ethos fueled by "longest streak" statistics. When these people are ready to enter the job market, they can <euphemism>be brought in contact with</euphemism> employers.
FWIW: This business model is already being used by other companies scraping Github repos, analyzing checkins and then matching what they find against recruitment offers (basically automated head hunting).
The same could be done with any other DVCS repo system, but Github is currently the most popular one out there. Ohloh, now renamed to Open Hub, has been doing such analysis for quite a while (with a different focus, though):
https://www.openhub.net/p/python/contributors
That's simply a consequence of having repos out in the open and not really specific to Github.
GitHub takes this to a new limit: When you create an account, you are being told (gamification-style) how to get dark green squares in your statistics, how to promote yourself using a picture, how to use a single account for private and public repos, how to keep the single account *even when switching companies*! If you happen to work for a company that's on GitHub *and* contribute to volunteer projects there, they basically have a major part of your life on their servers. I don't think OpenHub can match that in any way. I'm not anti-corporate: If Microsoft would make us an offer to manage our infrastructure, I'd rather have a Microsoft account for Python development that a GitHub account. Stefan Krah