Off topic: People who use Mother Teresa as the canonical example of selfless altruism need to read something about Mother Teresa so they don't look so silly.
Just a reminder, if you want a private Git repo, you can always use BitBucket, which provides you free private repos. And, it's also an excellent service in it's own right.
In my opinion, and for almost any other remotely similar service, it's not about paying for privacy, it's about paying for convenience. You don't go home to get a beer, when you are going out, you pay extra money for the convenience of not having to carry around beer, an instead be able to buy it on the spot, in any wanted quanitity.
First, I applaud the "rugged individualist" style of netizenship that the OP is advocating. Hear hear.
But (and you knew that "but" was coming) github is particularly useful and not amenable to the kind of gaming that Facebook and Google have indulged in. Git is truly distributed, and if github ever tried to block or manipulate repos there are full copies all over the place. It would be very easy (and dare I say such action would come swiftly) to react to any such wayward behavior on the part of github, mainly because of the nature of git.
So: definitely host your own git repo, but if you use github for collaborating on public open source projects, you really aren't running any kind of risk that github will ever hinder your access or control in anyway.
I pay github for the same reason I pay heroku. It just works and I don't have to do anything. That is why they exist. Sure you can set up your own git server, but what do you do when it goes down?
yet another article that values our time at $0. come on, we all make something like $80-130/hr.
Are you really going to spend less than 1 hour maintain this sort-of-github instance you have?
I keep a lot of personal/private data in git repos. I'd rather have this data on my own hardware or servers I admin, can audit, can apply unusual SSH security policy to, etc. gitolite and gitlab are great Github replacements for this purpose.
That said, I still use github (or bitbucket, etc.) when I want to share code - it's still the best place to do that.
I just don't need their private service, which appears to be the same case as the author.
If you don't use or like github features, you don't really need to pay for it. Sounds like common wisdom. OP listed points which do not define github. If you want unlimited private repos "in the cloud", just use bitbucket.
Github provides excellent interface and workflow patterns for code collaboration. I don't know, maybe for some it's reasonable to swap patches via mail, but for me hassle of downloading attachments from gmail into the right folder is just not worth it.
Also, laugh all you want, but rendered README.md and having all code at glance are life-savers. It's so much easier to get a hold of what another open source library does, if it has nicely formatted README with examples. Bonus points for gh-pages hosted docs.
Watch out with the sending email directly from an EC2 instance. You don't really have a fixed IP so rDNS isn't going to work very well, and that's still a front-line filter for a lot of big email providers.
I applaud the writer for his approach to making his own hub for his team. However, this is not a real 1-1 swap. In terms of pure functionality this may be an even exchange; his own platform might meet his needs just as well as GitHub. Yet it lacks major benefit - the community/public aspect of that environment. Duplicating that factor would take too much time an effort when you could just pay 7 bucks a month for the same thing.
Sometimes, while its fun to reinvent things, it just makes more sense to use what's there.
I pay because github is a fantastically useful tool. I am willing to pay for quality software. If I wasn't and other people like me weren't willing to pay for software, a lot of us wouldn't have jobs.
summary: paying a vps is cheaper and gives you more than git hub.
in my experience, pros: - full control (he is not using this as he and all other probably commit as user git) - commit hooks
contra: - you take the time to setup, debug, maintain. (track all those pesky security updates) - you have to backup. - people already have their keys setup at github.
also, about the paying for privacy... i have two github accounts. one with my real name another with a pseudonym.
and to conclude, after some time, i just moved all my code to bitbucket. initially because i rather mercurial and they have both. but then because you get a few private repos
Kind of OT: I have just opened a free github account to follow a project. Any tips for a painfully pathetic n00b for learning to use github generally?
How are you only paying $7? The lowest tier I can see is $25/month for 10 private repos.
How does using Amazon's services make you any less of a "product"?
My team uses pull requests extensively. The master branch is considered good, clean, production-ready code. Anything you want to get into production gets there by way of a pull request. Want to add a feature? Fix a bug? Make a branch, do your thing, and create a pull request against master. The rest of the team reviews your code in the pull request; the comments in a pull request are an excellent feature. My job would be ridiculously harder without pull requests.