It’s fascinating to see the way Atlassian’s BitBucket will kick GitHub in the butt but it will be even more fascinating to see how they will continue to do so until GitHub either adapts or dies.
Bitbucket was previously an independent startup that got acquired by Atlassian. Initially it only offered support for Mercurial projects but a year after the acquisition they officially announced support for Git (probably in the plans for the acquisition already). This wouldn’t be a big deal per se if not for the fact that they introduced a different price model that poses serious competition for GitHub. In GitHub you pay per private repositories while in BitBucket you pay per number of users and have unlimited private repositories. A company with 5 persons will have a free account with unlimited private repositories while on GitHub the same company would pay $25/month for 10 private repos or $50/month for 20.
Since GitHub is widely the dominant force in the Git source code hosting, and growing in revenue a brutal 300% annually since 2008, one would think there is no big reason for them to adapt to anyone.
But earlier this year BitBucket used the GitHub API to allow their users to link their Bitbucket account to their GitHub account. And a few months later suddenly you can import all your GitHub repositories with one click from your linked account. So they used GitHub’s openness to their advantage, almost as if GitHub had built this big bridge for all their users to go away.
Don’t take me wrong, I like GitHub and I like open, but how is this not something for GitHub to be worried about? And why haven’t they changed their pricing plans already?
