Allow me to vent my rage by quoting Wil Shipley again:
Don’t announce until it can be downloaded. Don’t let it be downloaded until it can be bought.
Seriously. Here's the P.R., right here on the front page of news.yc, ground zero of the elite-hacker P.R. machine, and the site isn't ready. Momentum: halted. Opportunity: wasted.
Sure, maybe a bit of momentum halted, but when they open for public interest will definitely still be there. Seeing the large influx of new git users lately, and GitHub being one of the two main repository hosting facilities and the large number of people craving for an invite. They will manage just alright.
Well, we'll never know what they lost, will they? It's not like we can turn back the clock and launch it a second time. When upside potential dies, it dies with a whimper, not a bang.
I agree that this product seems very nice, and that it might be cool enough that it will do just fine. On the other hand, as you point out, they have competition already. More will be coming. They could easily get lost in a sea of competitors within the next six months. Every geek on this site probably imagines that they could build a site like gitweb in their spare time. I know I do. And it's not like the cost of moving a project from gitweb to a competitor is going to be that high: you do one "git pull" and ask your clients to update their URLs. Maybe you clone a couple of wiki pages.
The biggest problem with free private beta is that, when they finally announce some prices, they probably will get another round of P.R... in the form of unreasonable people complaining that the prices are too high and talking up the alternatives. Even if their prices turn out to be incredibly reasonable, they will be higher than they are now... and folks don't like having things that were free taken away from them, no matter how polite and logical the sales pitch is. It sets off the inner bait-and-switch detector, which is a very highly developed mental organ in a consumer-oriented society like ours, and it just makes you unhappy. Unhappy customers are never a good thing. And this problem defies logic: Just look at all the people who complain about paying $20 a month for a Slicehost VPS because it's so much more expensive than the $6.95 oversold shared hosting plan at VapidHoster.com.
It's a particularly hard sell to convince people that a wrapper around a free-software tool is worth money... and it gets even harder when you consider that 100% of the customers are the kind of hard-core Unix programmers for whom the gitosis docs are light bedtime reading. Launching without a price tag and then trying to paste one on later just makes that whole argument more difficult.
What github offers is community and project maintenance around git. This is not something git gives you on its own, nor is it trivial to simulate with free tools. I've recently put a project up and had people who follow me ask about the project and offer code, just because I put it up. They're building a focused, targeted community with opt-in listens (like twitter's very successful model) for code. It's a fantastic idea.
Running github is not free, and writing it has been an uncompensated investment for its maintainers. I am sure they hope to make at least enough money to pay for the bandwidth and hardware. It's doubtful people will begrudge them that.
I suppose that "MySpace" was meant as a good thing, contrary to what I initially thought, ad-filled with black text on a black background and sparkly animated gifs.
You forgot the neon green marquee text in alternating caps and lowercase proclaiming the person is "misunderstood/forged in fire" or some other emo crap.
Allow me to vent my rage by quoting Wil Shipley again:
Don’t announce until it can be downloaded. Don’t let it be downloaded until it can be bought.
Seriously. Here's the P.R., right here on the front page of news.yc, ground zero of the elite-hacker P.R. machine, and the site isn't ready. Momentum: halted. Opportunity: wasted.