As Peter Thiel would say, because they have a monopoly, they have money to spend on things (e.g., improving their product) other than competing themselves out of business.
All that being said, where is the market gap that AWS seeks to fill, other than hosting of large-sized files (scientific / big data applications, etc.), and perhaps the user management, which I feel is a bit outmoded and cumbersome?
1. I think it's fair to say GitHub has a monopoly on paid Git hosting
I don't know... depends on how precisely you want to define "monopoly". Bitbucket are certainly popular in some circles. We use them here at Mammoth Data, as their pricing model is more economical for what we do.
But I will agree about Github. They had time to build lock-in and didn't.
To be fair, GitHub is really part of an oligopoly, comprised of themselves, BitBucket, and GitLab, but the winner of a majority of market share in this situation is typically referred to as a monopoly, in the same sense that Google is referred to as a monopoly, despite the existence of Bing, Yahoo!, and other search engines.
For context, according to Compete, GitHub had 24 times as many unique visits as BitBucket last month. GitLab has about half to one third the traffic of BitBucket.
Regardless, I agree that more competition is good.
GitHub doesn't explicitly states that they will disable pushing once the repository size crosses a threshold, but I don't think that they will allow multi-gigabyte repositories either.
In reality this has been very much a non-issue. Users we contact are generally okay with not bloating repos, and we point out Releases / Git LFS as alternative places to store binaries / large assets.
$1 per user/month, with plenty of free storage (10GB) each. 2k git requests/month sounds a bit low though if you're doing anything automated. There is a good free tier.
I think if it was not for the convoluted Revlog [1] format (which makes it impossible to do a clean-room reimplementation of Mercurial Core), we could see a bit more of adoption by having third-party libraries to interface with Hg repositories. It _might_ have been one of the reasons Git, not Mercurial, was added to TFS [2].
1: https://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/RevlogNG
2: https://hglabhq.com/blog/2014/1/17/mercurial-support-in-tfs-...
It's actually discouraging to see so many developers choose to work with something so problematic as Git, to be blunt.
It seems only natural to me that they should branch out. (heh... branch)
And then again, Hg repositories on _Git_ Hub?
https://help.github.com/articles/support-for-subversion-clie...
I tried using Mercurial on Kiln for private, personal projects. When I wanted some of those to graduate to public, GitHub projects it was a pain in the ass. So I switched to Git for all Kiln projects. And Kiln even has either/or magic.
Damn.
Also, given Amazon's awful reputation for building UIs that people actually want to use, I doubt they could build something to compete with GitHub anyway.
Really, I think the benefits of amazon git hosting is that they'll be more resistant to failure than github is currently.
Also I'd imagine companies with existing IAM account management structure and large teams would find this product somewhat attractive.
I haven't actually done the math yet, but it looks like it may be more economical for large numbers of private repos. For Open Source projects, there's probably no reason to use this, but for companies and other organizations who want Git hosting for private code, it might make sense. And the IAM integration actually could be useful if you're already a heavy user of Amazon AWS services.
edit: and look, we have a new user who just created an account to say they were "eagerly waiting for this!" on the other thread:
"Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site. If you think a story is spam or off-topic, flag it by clicking on its "flag" link. (Not all users will see this; there is a karma threshold.) If you think a comment is egregious, click on its timestamp to go to its page, then click "flag" at the top."
If you have an issue with the content, commenting on it is not the solution. In fact, by commenting like you did, you are doing the wrong thing. You are becoming the problem you want to avoid.
Please use the tools available to you. Thanks!
