By this article's logic, virtually every Linux desktop environment "stole" from Microsoft for over 10 years, and have spent the past 10 years "stealing" from Apple instead. Hacker News is stealing from a million different old Perl-based forum sites. Sure, you kinda sorta have a point... but it would be very hypocritical for anyone here to care much about that point.<p>I'm also not sure that I buy the main premise of the article, that GitHub's and BitBucket's "communities" warrant comparison. Of course they don't.<p>GitHub's pricing model offers you open collaboration for free, and charges you for private repos. Thus it is ideal for open source development, and open community.<p>BitBucket's pricing model offers you unlimited private repos for free, but charges you by the number of collaborators. It also integrates well with JIRA, a very popular task/bug tracking system in small to midsize shops. In sum, it's not really trying to be an open source "community"... it's trying to compete for the in-house business of small to midsize shops.<p>If you're trying to draw collaborators to your open source project, then BitBucket is a poor host. Likewise, if your company has one or two dozen developers and a large number of repos, then GitHub makes no sense as a paid host.<p>All of my personal projects are on GitHub, and my company is all on BitBucket. I'm not so much interested in their "innovation vs. creative bankruptcy" as I am in the choices they've made with structuring their pricing models.
To be honest I never understood the value proposal of Github. Ok, you get git repository hosting, and list of projects, and that's pretty much about it, with the ability to browse code online without cloning. Besides, that, I personally find most of the features useless. For example issue tracker is unusable, concept of forks is just a small convinience that doesn't add any real value. And about the most praised feature, like pull request, I find it just annoying and too much work. As a potential committer, it's much easier to me to clone the original repo and send a format-patch set then to bother creating my fork, cloning the fork, creating branch, pushing branch and writing an issue. As a maintainer, I also find it more convenient to just deal with format-patch set or an url to repo/branch than to deal with Github pull request system. And Linus tends to agree with me on this ;)<p>That all being said, I still use Github for OS projects for visibility, I just don't accept pull requests, and Bitbucket for private projects because of unlimited free private repos. And I find them both useful, just not groundbraeking.
The only reason why I switched to BitBucket is "free unlimited private repository". GitHub is great, I used to love it as a student, it also was a great asset when applying for jobs. But now, I'm in a company that unfortunately do not allow me to do OpenSource anymore, and bitbucket was a great solution. If GitHub was to offer a few free private repos (other than if you are a student), I believe that bitbucket would be in a bad position...
My company uses BitBucket because of the unlimited private repositories. We are a small company with just a handful of developers, but our existing Subversion repository contains over 200 projects. Most are not really active, as in being developed. But the majority do get the occasional bugfix. Even Github's largest enterprise plan is too small to convert out Subversion repositories, because on Github you pay for the amount of private repositories. With Bitbucket we can use their cheapest $10 plan because they carge by developer, not by repository.
If I recall correctly, the author of the article linked here apologized for its tone and removed it from his blog. It seems a bit of a disservice to repost it here without mentioning that context.
I like BitBucket because I like & use Hg. After playing around with both Git & Hg & comparing their merits, I decided, it was Hg for me. What's with all the hate on the author's part?
I'm in a weird position (although I assume I'm not the only one) that's using both services and paying Github for their first level.<p>There's something to be said about having all my projects in one place, which is why everything is on GH and I'm starting to duplicate private repos to BB.<p>Competition is fierce in the space right now, but I'd feel better if BB was charging some tiny amount for a year of unlimited private repos (like $5 or $10). I think I'd feel much more comfortable they weren't going to retire it.
If you use "Search Term" vs. "Website" you get different results, but for what it's worth: <a href="http://www.google.com.au/trends/explore#q=GitHub%2C%20BitBucket%2C%20Launchpad%2C%20SourceForge%2C%20CodePlex&cmpt=q" rel="nofollow">http://www.google.com.au/trends/explore#q=GitHub%2C%20BitBuc...</a>
Fun comparison. It seems that Bitbucket was ahead of GitHub, seeing that Github's current look resembles that of Bitbucket 3 years ago.<p>For comparison's sake it would have been fun to see screenshots of today's products next to the old ones as well.
There's an advantage for the end user if the layout of the sites is similar - Intuitive browsing.<p>Imagine if each email service provider re-invented the layout of mailbox !
Git is a product that's really replicable in any space. I for one, use gh when projects are hosted there and bb when they are there. Git makes it trivial to move things around quickly if cost becomes an issue. Also, i generally find working with git through a browser to be tenacious. I find sourcetree to be far more powerful than GH's client but still think all the thanks goes to Mr. Torvald. what a guy.
I'm surprised that somebody cares enough to post this kind of article on HN. By the way I feel really sad about BitBucket being so much less popular than Github, while having important advantages (hg + closed repos) over it. I mean I'd rather use mercurial, but I'm using git because repo on github is still so much better for PR purposes. But c'est la vie, so whatever.
As a freelance developer, GitHub is useless for me as a git hosting service, because with the number of repositories I need to keep up as remotes I would be paying a ridiculous monthly fee.<p>I like BitBucket's model of unlimited private repos and charging by the number of people accessing them instead.
I hope not everyone at GitHub is so afraid of BitBucket that they need to slander it with an article. Don't they know whining gets you nowhere?<p>I personally didn't see any striking resemblance between any of the pages. Most have obvious content which needs to be displayed (seriously, this guy is complaining about the source code tree being shown the same way? SERIOUSLY? How else do you expect them to display it?).<p>Probably doesn't help that I enjoy the layout of BitBucket more, but this article has been the kick in the shins I needed to get off of GitHub for good. There's obviously something that BitBucket is doing correctly to warrant this amount of attention from the employees of Github, might as well jump ship before it sinks.