A silent war

I’m a GitHub fan (as you can see for yourselves), but I also really like what they do at Atlassian. For years I have used Jira and pushed my colleagues to use it. I use both companies’ tools personally and at work.

Personally I keep some public and private repositories on Github, and I never considered using Bitbucket, Atlassian’s option. Basically because to me Bitbucket was a Mercurial-based repository, and I’m not very fond of that DVCS. As Scott Chacon says, Mercurial feels like a Git Lite.

But it turns out that since late last year BitBucket supports Git, and it has an aggressive campaign that lets you create an account with unlimited public and private repositories plus 5 users for zero dollars (zero, nothing, free).

That is a tempting offer, considering as well that BitBucket is practically a GitHub clone (with all the good, the bad and the ugly that implies).

Atlassian is an Australian company that has had several years of good results. Its first big injection of money came in 2010, when it received 60 million dollars of VC money, and last year it announced its first big investment, in cloud9, a SaaS IDE. Before that it had acquired BitBucket. They have clearly expanded, and the product portfolio is very well integrated.

In May of this year they released Stash, a product for managing Git repositories in enterprise environments (or on your own servers). It’s an elegant solution, very well integrated with Jira. I’ve been looking into it these past few days and I like it quite a bit.

But Stash competes directly with GitHub Enterprise, GitHub’s product aimed at the enterprise market. GitHub Enterprise is licensed by number of users, starting at a cost of 5,000 dollars for 20 users. Stash starts, in its entry-level version, at 10 dollars, and from there jumps to 1,800 dollars for a base of 18 to 25 users. Of course Stash has fewer features than GitHub, but that may well change; they will probably bring in BitBucket features to make this product even more competitive.

On the other hand, GitHub has just received its first round of funding, through the VC firm of Mark Andreseen (the creator of Mosaic, Netscape, Ning, etc.). The VC firm Andreseen-Horowitz has invested 100 million dollars in GitHub!

@Mojombo (Tom Preston-Werner) explained it on his blog:

We loved it when Marc Andreessen proclaimed, “Software is eating the world.”

Marc's venture firm, Andreessen Horowitz, is younger than GitHub. And like GitHub, they're trying to do things differently. They believe in software as the future of everything. They want to help founders build great companies. They clearly have no interest in the status quo of venture capital.

Over the past few months we've gotten to know Marc and one of his partners, Peter Levine, and we really like them. We wish we could hire them both, but they already have jobs. So instead we're going to work with them through their firm.

So that’s where things stand. An inevitable clash is coming. I suspect Atlassian and Github will start running into each other more and more, and Atlassian’s aggressive pricing campaign is an attempt to counter the goodwill GitHub generates, especially among the more hardcore developers.

This will probably be good for us developers, but it also creates several dilemmas. After all, the Atlassian suite is localized (translated) into Spanish (something it would be nice to see in GitHub’s products), the Atlassian product suite is very good, and in enterprise environments they are well regarded and increasingly used. BitBucket’s price is a major deciding factor, especially in our Latin American reality: having a cloud platform to maintain and operate our private source code repositories at zero cost is very attractive.

What’s going to happen? I don’t know. A war may break out, and I hope we developers don’t get hit too hard. After all, these are two companies that have built very good tools for everyone. Let’s hope money doesn’t end up ruining it all. What do you think?